Do you believe in Fleet Street?

TV Refle LONDON WEEKEI January Reviewed WHEN I was a child, they took me to see Peter Pan as a Christmas treat. I recall being terribly embarrassed when somebody asked us: 'Do you believe in fairies? If you do, clap your hands.' Apparently, it was all to do with fairies dropping down dead if we expressed our disbelief. Guiltily, we clapped.

We are reminded of this by the annual review of the world's press issued by Mr Ernest Meyer, director of the Zurich International Press Institute.

Press freedom is in danger, says Mr Meyer. Not, as you might have thought, because a handful of millionaires control all the main papers, but because of the 'credibility gap' between the mass media and the public.

Fellows like Spiro Agnew (are there any?) have engendered distrust of the press.

If this disenchantment continues-and it is not within the power of the press itself to halt it, but rather in the quality of public leadership in the democracies-then the erosion of the foundations of the free world will begin?

But there are even greater dangers.

"The virus industrial Franco as 'the leader of our cause'. His friend Sir Wilson, MP, is quoted a year earlier as saying:

I hope to God Franco wins in Spain, and the sooner the better.' (He was already famous for his 1936 statement: I have met Hitler repeatedly. I believe him to be a great instrument for peace in the world.')

Lord Redesdale, Oswald Mosley's father-in-law, declared to another meeting of the Friends of National Spain :

'General Franco is leading a England hold dear, that we Why should we drag up these memories of Sir Alec's old friends and relations? Because their admiration for Franco's battle to crush the Spanish workers tells us what their successors of 1971 29999°9 in Britain' is worrying Mr Meyer sick. Worst of all was the 'extraordinary action' of the printworkers on the London 'Evening Standard', interfering with the right of the press barons to lie about strikers.

So, unless you want to undermine the foundations of the free world, from Formosa to Portugal, you must not only let Fleet St churn out any old stuff the newspaper owners want. You also have to believe everything they print.

Every time you refuse to believe a Tory paper, a Fleet St editor has a coronary. You brutel Tory minister Home and it is very difficult to get them Prancà.:" • I want Spain under In view of Douglas Home's 'confidence' in Franco's humanitarianism, another quotation is of interest. In February 1939, had treachery of Stalinism delivered the workers of Barcelona into Franco's hands. When his army marched into the city, a massacre of workers' leaders began.

The Chamberlain government, having done all it could to help him win, decided to send Franco a message asking him to 'abstain from acts of vengeance'.

In the Tory circles in which which Home's father moved, this restraint on the murder of militant workers was unacceptablé. The Earl of Glasgow put down a motion in the House of Lords stating that the message was 'unnecessary and not in the interests of the British Empire'.

The parallel with Enoch