The Old Bailey and the Press
AMONTH ago a woman of complete unimportance, but endowed with a little meretricious notoriety as the daughter of a titled father, was arrested and charged with murder. Some kind of brawl had taken place at four in the morning at the woman's flat between herself and the man whose mistress she was ; a revolver belonging to her went off in the struggle, and the man was killed.
Tried at the Old Bailey on a charge of murder, or alternatively of manslaughter, she was proved not guilty on either count and discharged. Leaving the Court in a state of collapse, she had sufficiently recovered the next day (a Friday) to be photographed repeatedly, cigarette in mouth, at the wheel of her limousine, on the way to her hairdresser's, and to spend part of that day and the next (presumably) in dragging her emotions back to life, and committing them to paper for the benefit of the readers of a widely circulated Sunday journal, where they appeared side by side with the first instalment of the autobiography of her dead lover.
Of this woman's " life-story " as told by herself little need be said here. The less said about it anywhere the better. It is unadulterated literary exhibitionism from beginning to end. Every sentiment any person of normal decency would consider sacred and enshrouded with the reticence it demands is ignored and paraded with every elaboration of naïveté and ostentatious self-pity, to keep the Sunday paper-reading public sufficiently supplied with " human documents." The woman and the man she lived with were described by the judge, in singularly inadequate language, as leading rather useless lives. There is some worth in most human beings, but nothing in fact came to light at the trial to indicate that the writer of " My Life-Story " (" I write in tears " is the opening sentence) has anything better in her to make a life-story of than the miserable stuff she has set her name to would suggest. What her real emotions are she only knows. It may be simply incompetence that gives her memoirs the impression of utter falsity and artificiality throughout. On a reading of the evidence at the Old Bailey it may be possible to feel sympathy for the woman who sat for those three days in the dock. On a reading of these memoirs no decent person could experience anything but a sense of inexpressible disgust. For a woman to expose herself physically naked would be far less repellent than a deliberate parade of the secrets of what she would no doubt call her soul.
That, of course, does not end the matter. The " Story of my Life" is no spontaneous self-revelation. It is a piece of calculated exploitation by newspaper proprietors who have nothing to learn from any man in the art of giving the public what the public may be supposed to want. And there is all too much reason to believe their judgement sound. It would be strange if the appetite of a public that has had every sordid detail of the Old Bailey trial served up to it verbatim for three successive days were not by this time well whetted. It is there that the real problem arises. How are cases of this kind to be treated by the Press ? Is any restriction, such as now applies to the reporting of divorce eases, practicable or desirable ? Practicable in the narrow sense, of course, it is. It would be possible enough to confine the reports to counsel's opening and closing speeches, the Judge's summing up and the final verdict. But such a limitation could never be seriously contemplated. We are entitled to claim that we have the most just and the most efficient legal system in the world, particularly on the criminal side, and publicity is the breath of life to "it. It would never be tolerated that in a murder trial, of all trials, any part of the proceedings should be withheld from the public gaze. Establish a censorship, or partial censorship there, and false rumours would spring to life like a field of mushrooms. It is well for the jury to know that the gaze of the public is on them as they consider their verdict ; well even for the judge to realize that his summing-up is being listened to by the world. What is called trial by newspaper has been ended once for all in this country by the rigour of the law on con- tempt of court, and accurate and restrained newspaper reporting is the best of all guarantees (super-imposed, of course, on many others) that justice will in fact be done in the place where justice is dispensed.
The evil—and it is a grave one—to-day is that the reporting is not restrained. So far from that there is now added to the verbatim reporter the descriptive writer, whose business it is to portray every flickering change of the prisoner's countenance, to count her tears, if it happens to be a women in the dock, to describe her collapses and semi-collapses, to convey the timbre of her tones, to mirror every manifestation of emotion by her relatives. Restraint, of course, is possible. No paper.in the country prints the evidence in cases of criminal assault. But restraint does not pay, and competition between daily papers is desperately keen. If the public wants details of murder trials, particularly when they touch the fringes of "Society,"no paper, except one or two of special standing, can afford to disappoint it. The result is profoundly to be deplored, for it is idle to contend that the mind is unaffected by what it feeds on. Lust for mere sensation is a sign of degeneracy in any society, and the lure of the Old Bailey last week, both to those who gained access by luck or favour and to those who tried and failed, was an unedifying spectacle.
There is no question here of puritanism or cen- soriousness. It matters ultimately to everyone that the citizens of the country we live in should, in the broadest sense, seek earnestly the best things and cultivate increasingly a taste responsive to what makes life worth while, not to what makes it mean and squalid. The sordid sides of life cannot be concealed. A genera- tion ignorant of facts will be incapable of facing facts. But there is all the difference in the world between a plain record framed in the service of objective truth and the deliberate stirring up of mud to be displayed spadeful by spadeful lest any drop or gobbet of it should be overlooked. To be spared the descriptive writer and left to content ourselves with the pedestrian reporter would be something as a first step. The second, never more important than to-day, would be an agreement by the newspapers to let the protagonists in a cause celebre relapse forthwith into whatever degree of obscurity the Court proceedings had dragged them from. As things are, it is a question of what papers can get to them first and bid highest for their story, in order to give the public what the public wants, and what the public is thereby made to want more avidly and in larger measure and in more gratifying detail when the next trial comes. Such penalties does a literate nation pay for its literacy, and the way to better things is hard to see. The remedy, no doubt, is the education of the public taste. But who is to educate it ? And what means' are there equal in potency with the agencies which in certain directions—fortunately in certain directions only—are demoralizing it now ?
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