Journalistic Responsibility

Extract

Recent protests against the publication of ‘obnoxious matter’ in the pages of certain newspapers have done little more than echo what the General Council of the Press had already said on this subject. At one of its earliest meetings— last October—the Council declared itself to be ‘deeply concerned by the unwholesome exploitation of sex by certain newspapers and periodicals’, and placed on record its view that ‘such treatment is calculated to injure public morals’ and is contrary, to the standards of journalism which the Council is duty-bound to maintain.

Strong words! But verbal condemnation by itself is insufficient. The Press Council is a voluntary body representing newspaper proprietors, editors and working journalists. It has no statutory powers. Its apparent inability to do anything effective to improve matters raises anew, for the individual pressman, the whole question of journalistic responsibility.

Strangely enough, the Royal Commission on the Press (1947-49) had little to say on this subject of the unwholesome exploitation of sex, being concerned rather with cases of alleged political bias and of inaccurate reporting. What it did say, however, was often sound, and should be recalled. Sensationalism, for instance, it described as ‘partly an extreme manifestation of the peculiar values reflected in the popular newspapers, partly a desire to provide the excitement which the reader is believed, and has beat taught, to expect’. And this, as one witness expressed it, is done by publishing prominent and detailed reports of crime, of lie relations between the sexes, and of extraordinary or scandalous behaviour, which ‘minister... to the imaginative gratification of the reader’.