From: Dr Richard Fox. Sir Robert Hall, Marcel, Arnoux, T.
C. F. Stunt, Peter Baker, MC, A., P: Thorn, Pat Sloan, Arnold Beichman, T. O. Kellock, QC, Andrew Faulds, MP, and Eric fleffer, MP, James Morwood, Geofirey Walls, Lawrence D. Hills, Paul Vaughan. Peter Bull.
The Moors Trial and the Press SIR.—How fully should this trial be reported? A few brief points: My letters to the Daily Mail and Guardian (April 20), an editorial in the Lancet (April 30), and features in the Sunday Times (April 24) and Observer (May 1) all suggested that public harm could result from newspaper reporting. A sedative effect on much of the press appears to have resulted. Editors of national papers from left aqd right have written me incredible letters of agree- ment. one, even, thanking me for starting the cam- paign against publicised violence. Only two of the eight Sundays (Telegraph and News of the World) covered the trial this week. But not all have played the trial down, and only the Daily Mirror appears to have joined the above papers in discussing the evidence pro and con sensational reporting. These facts are important to press and public alike, and most of the public have not yet been told them. 'Freedom of the press' can, alas, mean the freedoirl not to print anything uncomfortable to itself. Lack of coherent defence for the status quo has been striking,- the exception being Mr Ludovic Kennedy in your columns (April 22). But his main point, that -`one needs to know the full details of the situation . . .' so that justice can be seen to be done, is fallacious. The full details, millions of words, are never given in the press, and the juicy bits selected may be factually the least important if not misleading. Mr Kennedy presumably does not want the release of evidence like police photographs of dismembered bodies, nor is he likely to want TV cameras in court. So the argument is not all or none in reporting, but where to draw the line. Divorce, adoption, custody, and juvenile proceed- ings are not thought corrupt despite severe press restrictions. Dispassionate appraisal of justice must await the type of informed book on the trial that Mr Kennedy is so good at writing, though the present alleged scramble between six authors to publish first is not likely to be helpful. One problem for a campaigner is that he suddenly finds himself joined by the 'Yogi Bear Must Go movement that wants to ban 90 per cent of tele- vision and censor everything. There probably is too much unnecessary violence in mass media, but-that is not quite the point. There is the factor of 'reality displacement.' The further a violent act is removed from a person, either in time, space or probability, the less its impact (probably) is likely to be. Himmel- weirs research certainly shows that children were more disturbed by violence in a domestic scene recognisably like their own than by obvious fiction j fantasy situations. The BBC, incidentally, has handled the trial in model fashion, without ignoring it or pretending it is not nasty. Until Mrs Mary Whitehouse praises the BBC and condemns parts of, e.g., the Beaver:In:cook press, the moral integrity of her 'cleaning-up' campaign must remain in dounbt. The debate will continue conducted, one hopes, by those anthropologists, social psychologists, animal ethologists, etc., who are best equipped to
an
understd the origins of violence.
RICHARD FOX
Consultant Psychiatrist Severally Hospital, Colchester, Essex
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