Devlin's law
THE PRESS DONALD McLACHLAN
If you opened a book and found its chapter headings to include such phrases as Right to Privacy, Treatment of Sex, Sensationalism and Distortion, The Royal Family, Persons Who Should Not be Named, you might conclude that this was an .unusually journalistic volume. In a sense you would be right, 'for they are • taken from Mr H. Philip Levy's book on the -Press Council, which is being published next week by Macmillan with the sumidit of a party at the Stationers' Hall. It relates factually and concisely the main issues that have come before the Press Council in its fourteen years of life (it first Met on 21 July 1953) as a result of the public's complaints and allegations. That nearly 500 pages were required to get, the record
straight shows how busy the council has been. especially in the three years since it included lay members and appointed as chairman Lord Devlin, who has become the presiding spirit of the national press.
This compilation of cases and decisions should be of great value to any editor, national or local. Indeed, it could become the keeper of his conscience. For hitherto he has had to rely on his memory, on library cuttings or on the advice of the indefatigable Colonel Clissett (secretary of the Press Council) to recall what is, for example, the agreement of 1956 on relations between newspapers on the one hand and hospitals and doctors on the other.
Nothing, except perhaps alleged intrusions into privacy, had caused more trouble to news editors and reporters than the getting and using of information about newsworthy patients and about casualties in an accident or incident, until the Press Council brought both parties together and persuaded the hospitals that 'an experienced and responsible officer' should be available at all times to answer newspaper in- quiries. People still recall with indignation what happened at the Royal Free Hospital in 1961 when Aneurin Bevan was gravely ill there. Mr
Levy's account shows both-sides of the picture, pointing out that the 1956 agreement had not
been fully carried out by the hospital and that allegations of attempts to get into Mr Bevan's room had not been borne out by the evidence. This feature of the council's work—that it gives opinions not only on what the public objects to but also on what the press Is entitled to print is to remain in any real sense free —has gradually brought proprietors, managers and editors to accept its authority. Mr Levy devotes a chapter to describing how it has opposed attempts at exclusion or censorship: for example, by local authorities, by magis- trates at committal proceedings and, after the Moors Murder trial, by the Attorney-General, who said he hoped Fleet Street would 'put its house in order and cease the practice of paying witnesses for information in advance of or during the trial.
Yet it took the press, in all conscience, long enough to accept this limited measige of responsible self-government. From the Royal
Commission of 1947, under Sir David Ross, through the Shawcross Report of 1962, the atti-
tude towards it was grudging and suspicious. At the Daily Telegraph in the early 'fifties we used to say: 'Why should we be judged by a committee on which sits a representative of the News of the Woild with standards different from ours?' And the Mirror of those days, if I remember rightly, was somewhat scornful of the men in the rather sordid little office in Ludgate Hill. Now feeling has changed and the Daily Mirror—that is to say, Mr King's International Publishing Corporation—is sup- porting the publication of the volume and authorised its legal adviser to compile the work over two years.
Most newspapermen will turn first to the index, like looking into one's own dossier. I found that newspapers I was working for had been censured or supported on such matters as • .thumbnail theatre reviews, publishing George Blake's marriage certificate, hymns ,in school, a picture of the hanging of a Turkish prime minister, and alleged malpractices at Woolwich Arsenal—and in each case a tit”, star tWitched; The index shows twenty cases for The Times, seventeen for the Daily Tele- igraph, tWenty for the Daily Mirror, twenty- nine for the Daily Mail and fifty-three for the Daily Express. This might be regarded as a league table of good behaviour, but it is in fact not so. Complaints are often rejected by the council; the fact that a complaint is made may be a tribute to the initiative of the news- paper; readers of an avowedly sensational or prurient newspaper are less likely to complain to the council than those of a more serious journal. Sometimes no complaint is made about questionable behaviour, which explains perhaps the absence of any mention of the purchase of Vassall's letters by the Sunday Pictorial.
It will be interesting to see next week whether the dailies play this volume down, on the grounds that it is a Mirror venture; whether they will address their readers on the subject of their own record as it emerges from the book. No one, I understand, tried for the serial rights, although I would say that three rattling good instalments could be made of the most controversial cases of the last ten years. It is still not too late.
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