A Spectator's Notebook 'IF THE PRESS COUNCIL Is the fake
that Pharos's Fleet Street friends imagine,' Sir Linton Andrews asks in our correspondence columns, 'why do the London newspaper proprietors and London journalists through their organisations continue to finance it?' Sir Linton must be remarkably naive if he has never heard the answer : that they continue to support it because they fear that if it did not exist some organisation much more dangerous to them might be set up in its place. The present Council is suspect because it consists mainly of men who have a financial interest in the press they are supposed to be supervising; and it has no powers except to rebuke. Its use of these powers (I can assure Sir Linton) causes only ridicule in the newspaper offices rebuked; and I have yet to meet anybody outside the profession who has much confidence in it. This is not to say that the Council has brought no benefits. It has enabled individuals to air their grievances against the press and to have them examined. I imagine, too, that the attendant publicity (rather than the Council's strictures) following cases in which journalists have behaved disreputably acts as some deterrent. But it has never lived up to its promises; and its failure to do so is reflected, I believe, in public hostility to the press which has been so obvious (and not only in the correspond- ence columns of The Times) in recent months.
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