The Press
SIR,- -The accuracy of Christopher Booker's analyst' of the journalism that ended in 1950, as opposol to the journalism that subsists in 1965, is evidenced every evening when the ten o'clock news on the BBC is discussed by commentators who must be carefully labelled as 'Commonwealth correspondent of 0115. or 'military correspondent of that' to explain wh) they are there at all. But take at random such name' of the 'thirties as Garvin, Vernon Bartlett, Wac'! Price, Wickham Steed or Beverley Baxter and reflect whether anyone "(new or cared which kind of mute: spondent of what paper were these men who %%icy, vilified or praised or followed or opposed because they were themselves.
May one, however, suggest that 'whip-cracking proprietors' (and I can testify that both Lord Rather mere and Lord Beaverbrook allowed their writc15, when using their own signatures to express eveR conceivable view, however much it might conflict with their paper's policy) were less responsible than a climate of opinion and the absence of a machine- It should be remembered that before 1940 the handout was ignored, the press conference unknown; the conducting officer uninvented, the press attache, a freak (if, indeed, he existed) and nobody hi°
heard of 'public relations.' All these short cuts and slipshod aids to inertia have combined to kill charac- ter in journalism as much as the stylised sub English, I mean sub's English, imported from America. where it was devised to make the headline intelligible to a Polyglot East Side.
_Besides, there were as many fine men before Northcliffe as there were before Agamemnon. No ,.,WhiP-racking proprietor stood over Russell in the ‘-,rimea or Blowitz at the Congress of Berlin. George .4,141ustus Sala was not noticeably spurred by direc- tivs. Constantin Guys drew his Black Sea battle sketches and Brady photographed his Potomac cam- paign without a proprietor at the other end of a field telephone. nit may be that the individualist who chooses to ; istame the mass media of establishments forgoes the constant company of his colleagues en masse and troubles to surmount that language barrier im- Passable to television, even if the language is Viet- namese. will yet cross some new frontiers without incurring the odium that appeared to crush his call- ing at the time of the Vassal! inquiry.
110/field Broad Oak, Essex
GEORGE EDINGER
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