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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria University College, Wellington N.Z. Vol. 20, No. 5. May 2, 1957
Facts Suppressed
Facts Suppressed
Similarly in industrial disputes (notably in 1951) and referenda (especially that on C.M.T. in 1949), the same discrimination is habitually practised in favour of the employers, militarism, and the right, against labour, anti-militarism, and the left.
How about suppression? Proof positive is difficult to come by, but it is often obvious that some piece of information must have been within the knowledge of the paper and yet was never printed.
We have on our files, however, a clipping from the Evening Post of three years ago—issue of 30 April 1954, main local news page—with an item headed "Labour Scene in Australia". It reports a press conference given by a visiting Australian trade union functionary, Mr. R. A. King. The matter in the article is broadly "moderate" Labour, proarbitration, anti-militant, anti-communist.
"Mr. King suggested that the Petrov case had been staged specially to strengthen the hand of the Government in the forthcoming elections. 'The Prime Minister said, when announcing the Petrov disclosures, that he had known that spying had been going on,' he said. 'If that was so, it is surprising that he didn't try to stop it earlier instead of leaving the disclosures till the eve of, an election'."
This paragraph is scored through with a heavily pencilled cross. The rest of what Mr. King said fitted in with the Evening Post's picture of the world. This paragraph didn't—so the readers were not allowed to sec it.
Anyone working on a newspaper could give daily examples of this sort of thing.
On the other hand, reactionary assaults on any aspect of the welfare state built up by past Liberal and Labour administrations, is assured of an inflated headline a showcase position, and a welter of laudatory comAttacks on school-leaving age, old-age benefit legislation, milk in schools, the 40-hour week, and general wage orders, provide recent examples. The same goes for any demented cry for judicial flogging or a get-tough policy with teddy-boys.
Some comments at the Maori Women's Welfare League conference last month demonstrated the unpleasant racist taint in New Zealand's press—especially in court reports. While some serious pressmen are active in a contrary direction, this undertone points up n nasty aspect of our press's rightism which hit its nadir in the "four Maori Kings" propaganda of 1956-59 when Labour held the House by a majority of four. Continual representation of Maoris as criminals and halfwits must have the effect of discounting their political responsibility, and is a step in the Jim Crow or Apartheid direction.
But the press's racism is not limited to Maoris. "Italian Fined £250 for Bookmaking" shrieked the main local headline in the Evening Post on 15 April. (In fact, nothing in the article suggests that the convicted man was bom anywhere but in Wellington.)