Revealing Comparison

Great Britain, with a population 24 times as great as New Zealand's, has only four times as many daily newspapers.

On those figures, you might expect New Zealand to be able to boast a much richer variety of viewpoints. This is not, in fact, the case.

Restricting our vision to the big-circulation metropolitan dailies, Great Britain has 12, of which five (including the one with the biggest circulation) are either left or liberal; New Zealand has eight, of which only two (both under a single proprietorship, and one rather half-heartedly) have distinguished themselves by stepping out of line over Suez and H-Bomb tests.

Overall, the position is worse. New Zealand has only one Labour daily—a small one on the West Coast, the area which least needs it. The thirty other dailies barrack generally for the National Party.

Great Britain also has a large number of independent weeklies whose comments are far from right—not only Tribune and Reynold's News, but the New Statesman, Spectator, and Observer.

New Zealand has one limp Labour weekly (whose publishers' have so low an opinion of the New Zealand public that they believe a few feeble paragraphs of political matter must be supplemented by pages of salacious and sensational muck). "Here And Now", the sole independent organ and excellent as far as it goes, appears only monthly and appears to be staggering financially.

The press prospect in Britain is thus almost infinitely brighter than in New Zealand. And yet even in Britain the National Union of Journalists (whose studied fairmindedness is shown by the monotonous sharing of their annual prize for Britain's best newspaper between "The Times" and the "Daily Worker") went so far, only a decade ago, as to demand a Royal Commission into the press, with special reference to "the influence of financial and [unclear: advertizing] interests the presentation and suppression of news and the dispersion and suppression of essential facts."

The journalists ought to know what aspects of the business needed investigation. A Labour Government set up the Commission—but in a form well weighted to make its findings comparatively innocuous—and even these were never acted on.

The much gloomier press prospects in New Zealand have never been subjected to a public investigation of any kind.