'WHY ARE WE TOLD all these lies?' demanded the representative
of Associated Press at one juncture; 'I repeat, lies!' To which the Daily Express reporter added: 'Give us the facts or send your fifty thousand information officers home to England.' Mishandling of news and wrong decisions by people in authority were constantly alleged; attempted explanations were not accepted; indeed at one point the Daily Te,egraph correspondent arose to close the win- dows `so that the hot air from outside can be kept from coming in and the hot air talked by the officials could be kept from going out.'
This report of a press conference is from the Times of Cyprus; and even when every allowance is made for that newspaper's opinions, it remains obvious that the authorities on the island are still keeping up their campaign of evasion and decep- tion. They are trying to maintain the pretence that military operations on the island have ceased; in fact they continue, under the guise of 'training,' and in case their real nature should be published, correspondents have been stopped from going to the 'training' areas. The authorities also delay dealing with their questions until the answers are no longer news. But I am amused to find the representative of the Beaverbrook press com- plaining of this treatment; I wonder just how much of the real news of what is happening in Cyprus would be printed, if he found it and sent it back to the Daily Express? IT LS CUSTOMARY in valedictory notices either to speak well of the departing or to hold one's peace; perhaps that is the reason why little has been said about Sir Kenneth Clark on his retire- ment from being Chairman of the Independent Television Authority. For Sir Kenneth's many abilities and accomplishments I have the highest admiration; but in this last capacity he was a mitigated disaster—the mitigation being that it is just possible to think of other equally distin- guished men who would have interfered more and accomplished less. In his farewell speech he boasted of commercial television's record in the one department where it can claim to have made some impact: in plays. It was unfortunate that, the previous evening, commercial television should have shown what it really can do, when it tries, by squeezing Anna Christie (including the tacked-on happy ending) into less than an hour, and travestying it in the process (how H. M. Tennent could have lent their name to the produc- tion defeats me). I see that, not so long ago, American television managed to compress Caval- cade into thirty minutes; that is the way things will go here if the Authority does not begin to do the job it was set up to do.
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