SIR LINTON ANDREWS accuses me of doing my best to
discredit the Press Council by arguing that 'newspaper proprietors, managers and jour- nalists all want' the existing abuses to continue, and 'have created the Council to deceive the public. Sir Linton must not suppose me to believe—or to have said—that all proprietors and journalists want or did anything of the sort. 'Everybody—journalists, proprietors and mere readers—knows that after five years of the Press Council the Daily Sketch wallows more happily than ever in deeper and dirtier gutters, and that Mr. John Gordon not only insults the Council but prints his insults in the Sunday Express so that they may be enjoyed more widely. Is ,this the self-reform by the press that Sir Linton is so proud of? Would he care to justify that majes- tically smug piece of hypocrisy in his Council's Fifth Annual Report, that 'it is becoming incon- ceivable that any editor or news editor would choose to bring himself and his paper into odium by encouraging outrageous methods of news collection'? Any editor? The truth is that one kind of journalist despises the Press Coun- cil because he can cock a snook at it, and that another kind of journalist despises it because it is useless and because he knows that respectable people and respectable institutions belong to it for—as Sir Linton admits in the last paragraph of his letter—reasons of 'self-defence.' I am glad to see the honest admission by the general secre- tary of the National Union of Journalists that the Council ought to include lay members, and that it is helpless against an 'obstinate and wealthy proprietor,' and I hope Sir Linton Andrews will note—and act upon—the suggestion.
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