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THE NATION TODAY Suitable for the upper forms in Secondary schools this new series is designed to make students think about the issues which affect us today, and the people and machinery which make and carry out decisions. The author has accomplished a rare feat in combining an abundance of facts with a highly readable style. But this is not all for he goes on to make the reader think about the social and world problems connected with the subject under discus sion. The books are therefore both well informed and stimulating. Government and politics, Britain's place in the world, and the gathering and dissem ination of news are the subjects covered in the first three volumes. THE NATION TODAY News & Views The Nation Today NEWS & VIEWS GOVERNMENT & POLITICS BRITAIN IN THE WORLD THE NATION TODAY News& Views P. J. SIDEY PALGRAVE MACMILLAN ST MAR TIN'S PRESS New York 1966 Copyright © P. J. Sidey 1966 MACMILLAN AND COMPANY LIMITED Little Essex Street London WC2 a/sQ Bombay Calcutta Madras Melbourne THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED 70 Bond Street Toronto 2 ST MARTIN'S PRESS INC 175 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10010 ISBN 978-1-349-00645-8 ISBN 978-1-349-00643-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-00643-4 Contents 1 Read all about it 1 2 The grass roots 9 3 The news agencies 13 4 The big newspapers 19 5 Soup and printers' ink 27 6 Enquiry into the Press 34 7 The microphone 44 8 The small screen 50 9 The bookmen 69 10 For your information 76 Glossary 82 Index 85 1 Read all about it Go into a Fleet Street newsroom and tap out 'ABC' on the radio tele printer; before you reach 'B' the 'A' may be read in Singapore. The President of the United States makes a statement in front of TV cameras as an Earth satellite is wheeling over the Atlantic; before he has finished say ing 'Good afternoon • someone in Bradford is telling his wife that the President looks worn out today. A hundred and fifty years ago it took four days for the news of the victory at Waterloo to reach London, and the stage coach carrying the news arrived at Berwick, posthom blowing and passengers cheering wildly, only after travelling for a night and a day at a mad speed. In theory, with the breath-taking swiftness of modem communications, we should be able to find out what is happening anywhere in the world with no trouble at all. In fact, it is not so easy. Many parts ofthe world are still remote, even though physically close at hand. All day planes fly over the Pyrenees between France and Spain; but if one crashes it may take a 20-hour search to find it. Radio stations beam programmes to and from 1 Rwanda, in Central Africa, but thousands of tribesmen were massacred by their neighbours there in 1964 and it was weeks before the rest of the world knew. Why care? Even in places where communications are excellent the news is some· times suppressed, truth twisted, lies manufactured and millions of people misled. Does it matter much? What if we are not told the truth about some tyranny somewhere? Why should we care? People have been asking 'Am I my brother's keeper?' for a long time. But apart from a general feeling that it is intolerable to be fooled, there are a few hard-headed reasons why truth is better than fiction. Every part of the world is tangled up with every other part these days. Countries bolster each other with aid, with pacts, with alliances. They can drag each other down, too, in many ways. If one country goes to war to defend another, it will want to know the cause is just, or at any rate that the cause is in its own interest. Most people would agree that if they are going to risk being incinerated in a nuclear war they have a right to know the real truth about the cause of the conflict and not accept any hocus-pocus put out by one of the govern· ments involved~ and there is plenty of hocus-pocus about. Take a border incident on the frontier between Brownland and Grey land. Brownland's version: 'Ten Greys crossed our frontier, firing at peasants ploughing the land. Brown soldiers returned the fire, hitting two Greys. The Greys fled back across the border, carrying the wounded men with them. A Protest Note has been lodged.' Grey's version: 'A gang of Browns crossed our frontier opening fire on a frontier post and killing two of our soldiers. Even though vastly outnumbered the Grey soldiers fought off the aggressors who took to their heels, running like cowards back to Brownland. A Protest Note has been lodged.' Who knows? Who is telling the truth? Did Brownland attack? Did Greyland? Was it a private vengeance raid? Or did one of the governments organise it tQ provoke the other and so involve a third country - Britain, maybe? Or perhaps they wanted an incident so as to excuse a massacre within their 2 own borders. There are dozens of possible answers to the question: 'What really happened?' Maybe it does not matter if the answer is never known. But incidents like that have caused many wars. It is now possible that one could snowball into trouble that could destroy the world. So finding out the truth, the news, can be the most important thing in the world. Millions of people watch television and sec the news that has broken only an hour or two earlier; on the radio they hear reporters describing a shooting incident on the other side of the world while the guns are still firing; and at breakfast-time they read in the newspapers accounts of a political crisis that had not started when they fell asleep. How is the news gathered with such bewildering speed and such breath taking accuracy? And how does really big news break? By tradition, men in shirtsleeves and green eye-shades are supposed to shout: 'Hold the front page I I've got a scoop I' Alas, it does not happen like that, and nowadays most scoops last only a matter of minutes. This is because the rival news agencies - Reuters, The Associated Press and United Press, for instance - soon catch up on each other in gathering international news, and the giant newspapers do not let a competitor have a story on his own for longer than one edition. What goes in one newspaper and not in another is now more often simply the choice of the editorial staff. Out of hundreds of thousands of words that cascade into their offices every day they must choose the news that they think is the most important and discard the rest. The person who buys the newspaper shows by his custom which newspaper staff he thinks has made the wisest choice. The principal sources of international news all over the world are the great news agencies. They provide the bread-and-butter of the world's newspaper, radio and television coverage. Let us watch, for instance, what happens when a really big story breaks unexpectedly in-shall we say?-Ruritania. Crisis in Ruritville In the early hours of the morning, tanks rumble through the streets of Ruritville, the capital of Ruritania. There are army guards at the doors of the government ministries. No official will answer telephone enquiries or issue statements. The local radio station is playing non-stop martial music. Luckily, in Ruritville there are part-time correspondents-called 3
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