Roundabout
Who's Yellow?
By KATHARINE WHITEHORN ANYONE who says of a photograph 'I think it's very good of me' is apt to be dashed if someone then says 'It's very pretty but it isn't really you.' The tendency of human beings to think they want the truth and actually to want nothing nothing but the truth, but but the best, is one against which journalists are constantly battering, and nowhere more futilely than in their contacts with responsible and intelligent professional people. Their belief in the freedom of the press in general seems only to be equalled by their determination to set the dogs on any press-man in particular. One knows only too well, of course, why. The keen, inaccurate local paper trainee, thrust into some subject of which he knows nothing, makes excruciating mistakes; gossip columnists by vague association get educational correspondents a bad name; plenty of people have given the press a helping hand only, apparently, to have a rude word stamped indelibly upon it. A good deal of the trouble arises, all the same, from the ignorance that exists outside journalism of the way in which it actually works. People cannot believe that journalists really have to have things in such a hurry; and those who do not write themselves often have no idea what makes a readable article and what doesn't. They do not realise, for example, that if you are putting across a favourable story about something, it cannot be all flat praise; and that the 'colour' that admits that a bath-tap can be tied up with a piece of string or a great reformer scratch his bald pate does not hurt good stories, it merely makes them readable. (An editor of Varsity once asked a don to write a profile of someone, and got a piece which began, 'When her Majesty the Queen was graciously pleased to bestow the appointment of . . .'; hardly a compelling opening.) Another source of misunderstanding concerns personal publicity among ordinary people. Knowing that they themselves would hate the publicity (or in any case feeling that they 'ought to hate it) they assume that working-class people hate it just as much; but they don't. It is a com- mon experience of new reporters to go, dreading every second, to interview someone whose son has gone to prison or whose family are being evicted, to discover that 9n fact the people are glad to sit down and tell it all again—getting it off their chests, having someone listen to their troubles and find them important is rare enough to be anything but objectionable to them. Many responsible people think that one way out of their dilemma with the press is always to ask to see the copy before it is printed. This sounds a good deal more reasonable than it is: quite apart from tir practical drawback that there isn't usually time. People vetting other people's ,articles seem to forget whose signature goes on the article, and try and alter opinions as if they were facts—and this is just as much muzzling as an attempt to sit on the facts. A man who gives an interview and finds his statements used to support a view he dislikes feels cheated— but consider the alternative: that a journalist should interview no one with whom he did not agree. I tried recently to write an article on Michael Young, who insisted on seeing' it: : he not only refused to allow me even so much as to say whether or not he was a family man, but where I had called Dartington Hall an 'unortho- dox establishment' he got me to change it to 'centre of experiment.' One would think someone as liberal and intelligent would be above this sort of thing: for its long-range effects are disastrous. We all ought to check back with people who give us information a great deal more than we do, but it is no incentive to check to know that the whole article may be messed about. There are a hundred reasons that prompt all right-thinking people to hurl intruding journa- lists into the 'street, and I sympathise with about ninety-nine Of them. But for all that, it won't do. This apparently sound attitude promotes exactly those distortions and aggressions that profes- sional people dislike. If responsible people won't talk, there are always plenty of irresponsible people who will; but the headmaster who refuses to see the press at all has no right, to my mind, to complain of the colourful inaccuracies sup- ) plied by a well-oiled school porter. War correspondents remember with gratitude the attitude of , Mountbatten, then not quite an Admiral, who used to tell the press everything, including things which were highly secret, and then tell them what they could not use. In this way he not only ensured that they did not give away secret information by mistake, but, much more important, got the correspondents on his side: if he told them a thing was so, they believed it. But a man who has just been flung down somebody's front steps is not going to pay a whole lot of attention to the opinions and wishes of the man who did the flinging. But there is an even better reason. The man who said that the liberty of the press is the Palladium of all the civil, political and religious rights of an Englishman (Junius) also said that the injustice done to an individual is sometimes of service to the public. The discomfiture of a respected figure is of less importance in the long run than information. Every local scandal that is ever blown open by the press—schools where the children live in the stables, council houses without doors, girls wrongfully admitted to the reformatory—is given its airing against the strenuous opposition of every local dignitary involved; but when there is `no harmful publi- city,' as the phrase is, things can well be infinitely worse. Those who have nothing to hide, as in detec- tive stories, ought to be above refusing to talk to the press. Those who believe in information, in news, in people knowing things—and what professional person does not, in theory?—ought to be as willing to become the news as they are to read it: To my mind, there should be no pro- fessional doorbell in the country that is not marked 'Press.'
Previous page
