Reporting 'Mr A'
THE PRESS By DONALD McLACHLAN tures, and yet to achieve a unique effect by direct quotation.
I find that people are puzzled about the limits within which editors decide. Some seem to think there is a law about such cases, making it an offence to quote what is or what might be called pornographic. In fact there is not. It is against the law to quote evidence from divorce cases, although sometimes the judge's summing up— which can be quoted—provides an adequate substitute. But in a criminal case no such re- straint exists, except the ban on publishing names of children who may be defendants or witnesses.
So the daily newspaper falls back on its esti- mate of what the readers will take : that is to say, what most will want to read and what the more sensitive minority will not feel bound to protest about. Thus the Daily Sketch, which reckons to have a large audience of young married women, will decide to leave out the Mr A. case because it would probably offend them. The Daily Mirror's view might be called a more technical one: if the story had been given in the detail and at the length decided on by the Tele- graph it might, within the tabloid of framework have looked like deliberate 'dirt.' This would be bad for the kind of reputation that the paper has been building up in recent years. But if it were sub-edited to suit this reputation it would not be worth publishing. Curiously enough, in the issue of Tuesday which contained nothing of the Mr A. case, there was, on an inside page,. a story which might seem open to similar objections with the headline 'Hedy Lamarr loses bid to ban "dirty" life story,' and on the back a complicated story of how a bikini girl picture appeared on the front page of a parish magazine in Ted- dington. These are, indeed, matters of taste; but on the whole the daily press seems to me to make a better job of them than either BBC television or the film industry. What happens in the mass circulation Sundays is another matter.
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