'THE COUNCIL REJECTED the complaint that the article was an
unjustifiable intrusion into the private life of an individual . . . and declared that in its opinion the People had performed a public service.' Perhaps, on the occasion referred to, the People did; but the odour of congratu- latory self-exculpation arising from last week's Press Council report is nauseating. The trouble • is that the Press Council is ordinarily called upon to consider isolated articles or episodes which may or may not be discreditable to the newspaper involved, but which are usually trivial : it does not have to deal with tendencies—with, for example, the type of suggestio falsi at which the Mail is becoming so proficient. On Saturday, for example, the Mail had a headline
U.S. SNEERS AT THE 'CHICKEN' BRITISH
and the article began by saying that the US State Department had expressed dismay at the timid British attitude over high-flying cargo planes to .Berlin. The implication for anybody who did not read further—and how many people did?—was that the abusive epithet was flung from an official, or at least a semi-official, source. Not until much later in the article was the real source revealed : the accusation 'chicken' was levelled not in Washington but in the New York. Daily News, a paper almost as unrepresentative of American thought as the Mail is of English.
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