'Freedom of the Press': it's not for the workers

Workers Press no. 655, 6 January 1972 · scan page 4

Title, by-line and extent checked against the scan: page 4, by-line 'BY DAVID MAUDE' (split as 'BY DAVID' and read as a headline); re-sorted 17 Oct 2026 after reading the scan. The text is still machine-read, in the order the machine read the columns; for anything you quote, read the scan.

TODAY'S PROGRAMMES 3.00 4.40 LEFT-WING journalists are 'a threat to be watched', thinks 'Evening Standard' editor Charles Wintour.

He said so in a piece carried in Monday's 'UK Press Gazette', but written-so we're told in the first paragraph-on Boxing Day *after the usual excess of gourmandizing'.

Wintour was certainly sufferMAUDE ing , from • something when he penned it; this pillar of the Beaverbrook press seems to have a nasty attack of Reds-under-thebed syndrome.

And it is somehow appropriate that his article should appear the same day as press reports of the now-released War Cabinet papers.

For the papers prove that during the 1930-1945 'war to defend democracy', the Churchill govCharles Wintour ernment considered imposing total press censorship. Lord Beaverbrook, Wintour's former employer, was up to his neck in this plan as Minister for Aircraft Production.

Not exactly the best week, you may think, , for Wintour to go sounding off about 'threats to editorial freedom' and 'the dangers to a free press' from inside the industry.

Our man's main target is those who call for any kind of workers' control of the media.

He hints darkly that the leaders of the movement are politically 'all far to the left', drawing precisely the sort of conclusion his paper's frightened middle-class readers love to shudder over:

"They [the "left'] are not interested in supporting freedom of expression as we have it today.' He goes on to make clear precisely what kind of freedom of expression he means.

In December 1970, journalists at 'Standard' condemned printworkers there for trying to get a vicious • Jak cartoon— against the power men's workto-rule-withdrawn.

Wintour recalls this inglorious incident to attack journalists at the 'Scottish Daily Express' some of whom, he alleges, abetted printers in a stoppage against a similarly anti-working-class cartoon by Cummings.

So 'editorial freedom', Beaverbrook-style, means freedom to print as much reactionary comment as your readers will buy without interference from the péople you're attacking-the men and women who produce your profits. this flood of Chinese goods— made possible by the lifting of the 20-year ban on Chinese imports in June.