"THE USES OF PUBLICITY."
WE desire to express our strongest sympathy and agreement With the admirable "leader" on "The Uses of Publicity" to be found in Monday's Tinos. A better or sounder piece of journalistic statesmanship has not been published in our generation, and we shall make no apology for following our contemporary's line of argument. The text of the Times article is the
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following naive, yet no doubt perfectly true, passage from Sir Edward Grey's Note in reply to the American Note of December 28th :— " I have given these indications of the policy which wo have followed because I mina help feeling that, if the facts were more fully known as to the efforts which we have made to avoid inflicting any avoidable injury on neutral interests, many of the complaints which have been received by the Administration in Washington, and which led to the protest which your Excellency handed to me on the 29th December, would never have been made."
On this time Times asks some very pertinent questions. Whose business was it to see that the facts should be ." more fully known." and whose fault is it if they have not been so known ? There can, of course, be only one answer to each question. It was the business of the Government to make more fully known the facts which they realized were of such vital import. It is the fault of the Government, and of no one else, that they were not as fully known as they should have been. The Government had ready to their hand the greatest instrument of publicity that the world has ever known—the American Press. That instrument has its faults. It may be too self-confident. It may believe too much in itself and its methods. It may have ion highly developed a sense of the intrinsic virtues of publicity. But be that as it may, no one can complain that it is not a good sounding-board, or that it cannot bring to the ears of the world across the water any state- ment that is entrusted to it. Also it is in its own way essentially impartial. It always prefers if it can to blow on its great brazen trumpet the authentic blast. The great brazen trumpet was at hand. The trumpeters stood ready. At a word they would have sounded their " sonnet"- Yet though the British Government, as we now know, were so anxious to proclaim certain things to the American public, it never occurred to them to let the trumpet speak. Here was our Government's capital error. They did not realize what a great and potent instrument, if properly employed, was to be found in a simple and direct publicity. When the war began the Government knew that they were fighting a mighty and unscrupulous enemy, who would use every conceivable form of human energy in order to conquer and destroy us. That being so, we feel sure that they must have determined that they too would wage war, not merely by land, by sea, and by air, but in every other way which would not disgrace and degrade the users—by commerce, by finance, and by the use of science and of literature. They also— and it was a natural and proper determination—resolved that they would make secrecy one of their helpers and servers in the war. They knew that many military movements, to be successful, must be kept secret, and that in order to maintain this secrecy you must often not merely throw a veil over the great plans and projects of naval and military policy, but over small and trivial details. These may enable a vigilant enemy to read your plates like a book. They knew that, hungry as the British people were for news, they would cheerfully dispense with suck news if it should help to save the life of a single English sailor or soldier, or the life of a soldier or sailor of our allies, let alone the carrying out of great or little schemes of strategy. There was not a newspaper reader, there was not a newspaper writer, there was not en editor or a newspaper proprietor in the country who, if he had been asked at the beginning or at any time during the continuance of the war whether he would prefer the free dissemination of news and greater risks for our armies and those of our allies, or news censored to the bare bone, would not have plumped without hesitation for the most oppressive censorship. No serious man has blamed the Government for adopting the Censorship in principle, or for sternly enforcing secrecy in matters where secrecy was imperative. But what we ask, and what we believe every journalist in the country asks, is why, having adopted the necessary policy of censorship and secrecy, the Government did not also adopt the policy of using publicity as an instrument in the war against Germany. Why did they do the one and leave the other undone ? Because you command silence in certain things there is no reason why you should not use the power of the Press to the full, at home and abroad, in other things. Side by side with the great machine set up by the Govern- ment for the suppression of news should have been -established an equally powerful and carefully planned Bureau for the employment in the national interests of the organ of publicity.
"Do you mean." we can hear a scandalized official at the Foreign Office or the War Office asking, "to suggest that we should follow in the footsteps of the Germans and publish a series of lies, false telegrams, and Machiavellian suggestions for the consumption of American and Con- tinental readers ?" Of course we make no such ridiculous proposal. We are glad to think that, even if we were so lost to shame as to desire it, no British Minister could be found capable of carrying out our wishes. We are well aware of the kind of bungle which a British Reptile Press Bureau would make of its task. Picture for a moment Mr. Runcimen or Mr. Acland trying to follow in Bismarck's footsteps and concocting bogus letters from "a Massachu- setts manufacturer," "a Bulgarian Bishop," "an old
Garibaldian," or "a Wallachian Hospoilar Bishop,"
But why
should it be assumed that a Publicity Bureau of the laud we have suggested, a Publicity Bureau for putting the British case as an advocate would put it at the Great Assize of Civilization, should be solely concerned with lies or half-truths ? The persons entrusted with seeing that the English case was properly put in the American Press and in the Press of neutral Europe would be men as conspicuous for character as for abilities—men who, though keen not to lose a point, could be trusted never to make an untrue statement. The Publicity Bureau would, in fact, have done exactly what Sir Edward Grey says he regrets was not done—namely, have made the facts upon which our case rests more fully known to the world at large. To be specific, we venture to say that if at the beginning of the war our Government had taken the re pie of the United States into their confidence through the medium of the able and clear-sighted men of the world who represent the great American news agencies and the great American papers in London. they would have obtained exactly the results fur which the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs longed, and not unnaturally longed.
We shall be asked, no doubt, bow we propose to account for the fact that the Government, who could see this sin p'e fact as well as we could, did not act upon it. " Is it not obvious that there must be some good reason, though not one immediately apparent, why so able a body of men as the present Cabinet should have refrained from doing something which on the face of it they ought to have done. Depend upon it, the Government had good grounds for not acting as you suggest." Our conjectural explanation— for we admit it is purely guesswork—of the Goveru- ment's strange inability to see that, though they had to censor the Press, they could also use the Press as an instrument for fighting at all times and iu all places, is that it was due in the last resort to their extraordinary want of understanding of what newspapers aim at and what is a newspaper man's real busi- ness. As far as we can judge, that business has always remained a mystery to our Government. The Government, we take it, have never understood the meaning of those luciferous words which Delano once used to a politician who took him to task for having published a particular article—" You seem to forget that my business is publicity." By not understanding that this is a newspaper's business, and still more by not understanding what it is that the journalist means by publicity, most of our statesmen are hopelessly at sea in any attempt to deal with the Press. They regard it as a kind of wild beast which in peace time has got to be coaxed and fed with tit-bits, smoothed and caressed, but in moments of danger must be chained up very tightly like the horse and mule, which, if not held by bit and bridle, may " fall upon thee and rend thee." When, then, the war came, they had no clear idea what the function of the Press was, and consequently failed to realize how publicity might be used as an instrument of war, and a very effective instrument indeed for the Powers with the good cause. Remember that a good cause makes fighting with the sword of publicity a very easy job. The trouble about publicity is when your case is rotten, and when you have such skeletons in your cupboard as the murders of the Belgian hostages or the sack of Louvain.
No doubt there was a reason which may conceivably have weighed with the Government, and which we are bound to bring into the account—namely, the fear that if they did make statements to the American Press about the war, they might perhaps say something which might hurt the feelings of our allies, or which they would regard as a betrayal of confidence. And here we desire to say that, though we consider the Government's policy as to publicity to ha fundamentally wrong, we feel great sympathy with them ou this particular point. There is nothing which is more creditable to the present Cabinet than the absolute sincerity, the perfect loyalty, the unclouded sense of honour which they have shown iu all their dealings with the allies. They have been in every way worthy of the British people. An honourable partner is one who, if there is any question between his own interests and feelings and those of his partners, always lets the scale incline to the side of the partners. This the Government have done again and again, and we expect that this instinctive desire to study the feelings of their partners has been a very strong motive in their dealings with the Press, though no doubt it is one very difficult to acknowledge publicly. But if it were—and of course we are only guessing—it is a difficulty which could, we think, have been got over quite easily by a little tact and a little good sense. We are not suggesting that news that our allies might regard as dangerous should have been given to the American correspondents, but only that our case should have been put by our own statesmen and our leading men of letters direct to the American public, and, as the Times most wisely says, the fact recognized that "the American people do not regard Ambassadors as the only channels of communication" between the two countries, and that the Americans are "a newspaper-reading and not a Blue-book-reading community." Further, "there is nothing they appreciate more, or respond to more heartily, than a ready and public frankness in the dis- cussion of diplomatic issues." That is sound sense, well conveyed, and we hope will have its effect. If any one raises the point that if this were done for the American correspondents the same must be done for the Press of the rest of the world, eve demur altogether. We see no difficulty whatever in making a distinction and giving a preference to those who are of our own flesh and blood, who speak our own language, and who, in the case of Canada, supply news to millions of our own fellow- countrymen. We do not suggest that Ministers should have told their secrets to American correspondents, or made them repositories of their policy. All we venture to say is that by recognizing "the uses of publicity" they might have prevented the extraordinary spectacle of our Cabinet deploring the fact that the American people bad not a better knowledge and understanding of the facts upon which our action at sea has been based, while all the time no effort was made to give Americans the information required for such an understanding.
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