BRITAIN'S PRESS SWING LEFT
Cranston, Maurice
Britain's Press Swings Left By MAURICE CRANSTON London WHEN I told some American friends that the British press was divided roughly 50-50 between pro-Churchill and pro-Opposition during the...
...Broadly speaking, there are two reasons: first, the general shift to the Left in public opinion, second, changes of management and editorial control of newspapers...
...The Herald-sells more than two million copies daily...
...A Tory M.P...
...It sells about a million and a half...
...Now the Mirror is one of the most powerful voices for Socialism {Mr...
...Britain reads the London papers...
...THE most important managerial developments concern the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail...
...Journalists themselves are mostly leftist, as witness the application of the National Union of Journalists to the Trades Union Congress early in the war, and the present merger arrangements between this left-wing NUJ and the hitherto right-wing Institute of Journalists...
...The Conservative Party now has only one "yes" paper, the Daily Telegraph, which is a cross between the "old-fashioned" Times and the modern penny press in make-up and price (costing 1% pence), and sells about three-quarters of a million copies a day...
...It is there that the wartime swing to the Left has made its mark...
...Sunday papers are still mostly right-wing, except for Lady Astor's Observer, which has mysteriously gone radical...
...It plugs Beaverbrook's own line all the time (Empire Free Trade particularly), whether the official Tories like it or not...
...Both belong to Lord Kemsley...
...THE Labor Party has a loyal "yes" paper in the Daily Herald, in which 51 per cent of the shares belong to the Trade Union Congress, and 49 per cent to the Fleet Street Labor peer, Lord Southwood...
...For unlike other countries, we have only a few newspapers, and they have a nationwide circulation, ranging from above 3,000,000 (the Daily Express) to less than 200,000 (the Daily Worker...
...Comparable with the Daily Mail's change from extreme to moderate Tory is the shift of the Times from the uncritical to the critical Independent...
...But it is in the daily press that politics matter...
...has called it the "three-penny Daily Worker...
...Such a state of affairs would have been unthinkable in 1939...
...The Mirror was once anti-Soviet even in its celebrated comic strips, and the Mail was once pro-Fascist to the point of supporting Sir Oswald Moseley...
...Bitter enemy of Socialism and professed friend of the small business man, the Express is a doubtful ally of the Tory Party...
...Britain's Press Swings Left By MAURICE CRANSTON London WHEN I told some American friends that the British press was divided roughly 50-50 between pro-Churchill and pro-Opposition during the general elections here, they were astonished...
...My American friends were eager to know what had altered this line-up...
...The provincial press, apart from the Manchester Guardian and one or two Scottish papers, does not count for much...
...Bevin is its hero), and the Mail is mildly "progressive" Tory...
...Our one surviving Liberal paper in London, the News Chronicle, is now so sympathetic to Labor as to be almost as Socialist as an out-and-out Labor journal...
...The importance of even one or two newspapers in Britain cannot be over-emphasized...
...It is to my mind the most sober and reliable of London papers...
...Before the war Tory influences controlled the bulk of Britain's national newspapers...
...Its lady-like sister paper, the Daily Sketch, is not very politically minded, but turns up true-blue when occasion demands...
...Both were once the organs of the most hysterical anti-Red propaganda to be found in this or any other country...
...But the most important propaganda sheet of the Right is Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express, set up along American lines, and selling a world's record of well over three million copies a day...
...Should this merger materialize, the entire profession of journalism will be associated, though indirectly, with the Labor Party...
Vol. 9 • September 1945 • No. 36
