[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR]
SIR,—OUt of the events of this unpleasant month three minor, but not wholly unimportant, points call for attention. They are all concerned with the presentation of news in this country.
I. On March 4th the United States celebrated the troth anniversary of its first Congress, an occasion on which the three arms of Government held, as they very rarely do, a joint assembly. At a time when democracy needs all the advertise- ment it can get, such an event might seem a heaven-sent opportunity for report and display, even on this side of the Atlantic. Yet so far as I have been able to discover no British newspaper featured the session prominently or gave verbatim reports of the speeches of President Roosevelt and Chief Justice Hughes.
2. As early as March sth reputable American newspapers were announcing the imminence of a German coup in Czecho- Slovakia, yet scarcely any organ of the British Press gave their readers any grounds for questioning the bland optimism of the .Prime Minister's communiqué. Are our news-gathering agencies less efficient, or our editors more " controlled " than
their American counterparts? This is not their first failure to apprise their readers of news that American journalists have printed in full, failures serious enough to warrant the sugges- tion that our Press has ceased to discharge its elementary duty to its readers.
3. The rape of Czecho-Slovakia was a milestone in men's ways of thinking about Nazi-ism and Germany all over the world. It might be supposed that the reaction of the United States—a democracy of 135,000,000 persons upon whose atti- tude our own existence may ultimately depend—would be considered important, even in high Conservative circles. Yet the leading Conservative daily devoted only the following amount of column space (in inches) to despatches on this subject :
Thursday, March 16th.-44. inches.
Friday, March r7th.-74 inches (of which 6 inches were devoted to the Czech Minister's refusal to surrender his Legation).
Saturday, March 18th.-18 inches (of which only half pro- perly related to American opinion).
And in none of these despatches, or elsewhere, was there any report of American opinion outside Washington, or any reprint of the comments of American newspapers. Can English-speaking unity be forged in such flickerings as these?
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