NEWS

A second main activity of a Ministry of Information that is likely to have a serious effect on its relations with the public is its dealings with the subject of news. Just as the history of our Censorship operations during the course of the war is, in the main, a history of the establishment by the Ministry of a genuine independence of operation, so the history of its relationship to news is the history of progressive failure to establish its position and in the end of a virtual fading out of the picture.

The root cause of trouble lay in the fact that the Ministry never succeeded in obtaining any definable functions in the output and handling of official news. It is necessary, first of all, to understand what innovations in the field of official news were represented by the formation of the Ministry of Information with its News Division. Firstly, it provided a central issuing house for all news that originated with Government Departments. By “issuing house” I mean that it provided a single place from which these releases could issue and become available simultaneously for all Press interests, home and overseas, represented in or connected with the Ministry of Information building. The provision of this service was a great benefit to the mechanics of news-gathering throughout the war. It was also an economy for newspaper staffs who had previously had to gather the daily output of official news either from the versions made available to them by the agencies or by sending members of their staffs to cover the different Government Departments and pick up anything that was going in the way of official handouts.

Secondly, the News Division provided a place of resort for all news men, home, Dominion and foreign, where their practical interests would be understood and looked after and they could receive assistance in the solution of the administrative difficulties of war-time. The News Division was also planned to have attached to itself representatives of the public relations or Press sides of all main Government Departments, the idea being that these detachments would not only be 44 - 43 -the channel for arranging their Department's official releases through our machinery but would also be able to provide informative background on their special subjects for all correspondents frequenting the Ministry of Information building. To some extent they did, no doubt, serve this useful purpose: but very soon after the outbreak of war the outside Departments evidently made up their minds that it would suit them better to keep the bulk of their news staffs back at home in their own offices, and the representatives at the Ministry of Information became more and more outlying detachments without full authority. There were qualifications to this. The Foreign Office News Division housed the whole of its staff in the Ministry from the beginning and continued to work in that way until the end of the war. The War Office also concentrated a more effective part of their news machine in the building than other Departments, and Lord Burnham, both before and after he became Director of Public Relations at the War Office, held at the same time the title of Chief Military Adviser to the Ministry of Information. I do not think that as events turned out there was any particular significance in this dual function.

But what is more important is what the creation of the Ministry did not involve. It did not involve any control over the right to originate any part of the flood of news which, as issued by the various Government Departments specially concerned with each subject, made up the output of official news for the day. This meant that the Ministry was not responsible either for the form or for the content or for the timing of the various announcements or handouts that passed through its hands and which it distributed to the Press. Without the power to have an effective voice in such matters the Ministry had no real control of the whole subject of official news. News is a peculiar commodity and I do not know how better to define it than to say that it is the sort of hitherto unpublished information 45 - 44 -on current events that, if available, a newspaper is likely to want to publish in its next issue. It is not, of course, the same thing as information - a much wider category of material which we found many and varied methods of processing, producing and distributing, as by films, books, exhibitions and pamphlets. But, just as news itself is a peculiar commodity, so are the laws that govern its acceptability and value. A communiqué, for instance, about air operations that originated with the Ministry of Information and not with the Air Ministry would have had considerably less authenticity in the eyes of the Press men in the different countries of the world. Secondly, the right to control the form and content of what is officially issued on behalf of a Department carries with it as well the right to provide the background information that should amplify and explain the official statement itself. By pre-war practice a great class of recipients of official background on behalf of the Press are the Lobby Correspondents whose rights of access to and, often, intimate relations with Members of the Government have given them special opportunities of learning in an informal way the political background to important official statements. It was evidently felt by Lobby Correspondents at the beginning of the war that the creation of the Ministry of Information, with its news machine giving an organised method of access for correspondents to Government representatives, constituted a grave threat to their own position. This misgiving was shared, not always silently, by Mr. Steward, the Press Officer attached to No. 10 Downing Street, whose position had naturally brought him into special relations with the Lobby Correspondents. I do not think that they need have been alarmed. However, the right of each Department to afford background guidance to the Press on its own authority and by whatever instruments it chose to use was explicitly affirmed by Mr. Chamberlain in a statement to Parliament in the early months of the war and the fear, apparently held in some Departments, that the existence of the Ministry's News Division would cut them off from everything except formal access to the Press through written handouts was, or should have been, dissipated. Certainly I never observed that any Department during the course of the 46 - 45 -war failed to exercise its right to have ample direct relations with the Press: nor did the Ministry of Information seek to prevent this, except to hold on to its minimum right that all official releases to the Press should be centred through the Ministry's machinery.

It must, I think, have been his appreciation of the vagueness of the Government's conception as to the Ministry's place with regard to news that led Lord Camrose to advise the Minister in September 1939 that the functions of news issue and censorship should be severed from the Ministry of Information and entrusted to a separate organisation, the Press and Censorship Bureau. This proposal was immediately adopted by the Government and from October 1939 until May 1940 the Ministry, as such, had no responsibilities in respect of either news or of Censorship. No one could misunderstand the purpose or the functions of a Press and Censorship Bureau; it existed to conduct censorship and to issue news and to perform such other benevolent services for the assistance of the Press as circumstances might require. The Minister responsible was the Home Secretary. In May 1940 News and Censorship were restored to the Ministry. The merging of the Press and Censorship Bureau with the Ministry was due, in the main, to the belief of Lord Reith, the second Minister of Information, that the Ministry could take an important and fruitful part in the news side of publicity. Unfortunately we never achieved a structure that enabled us to carry this out. In pursuance of his policy he secured the appointment of two men of unquestioned standing, Admiral Sir Charles Carpendale and Sir William Clark, to represent the Ministry's news policy and requirements in the Air Ministry and Admiralty respectively. Both would have been men of standing in any company, though I do not know that they had any special familiarity with the field of the Press. I do not think that their appointments could be said to have led to any real progress in the Ministry's hopes of commanding or influencing the flow of news, although Admiral Carpendale's exceptional personal qualities made him throughout the war a very effective liaison officer for all sorts of purposes between ourselves and the Air Ministry. I think that Lord Camrose's plan was, strictly 47 - 46 -speaking, the logical and correct one, but its abandonment and the resumption by the Ministry of the work of the Press and Censorship Bureau was a very natural step in view of the Ministry's very considerable interest in news as consumer and distributor for all overseas purposes.

By the second half of 1940 we were beginning to realise that whatever the outside public might think we lacked any assigned functions in the Government scheme for official news. It need not be inferred from that that, at any rate in the opening years, we had no part to play or that our existence was of no service to the public in this field. There were two things that we could do and that we did do to some effect. Firstly, an organisation such as ours that was in constant immediate touch with the home and overseas Press and in urgent need of news of the right kind for the service of overseas publicity was naturally concerned to represent to the other Departments who held the sources of news both the necessity to produce particular information from time to time and kind of news that was most needed. In other words, we were a sort of official pump except that we lacked a handle. Representations of this kind may seem platitudes to-day, since the progress of the war and in some measure our own activities have made Government Departments as a whole as news conscious as the Press itself; but in those early days they were nothing like as highly organised either to assemble and process or to provide news as they have since become and what may seem unnecessary to-day was useful then. Secondly, before Departmental public relations offices had each become a small Ministry of Information on its own we were able to perform the unappreciated service to the originating Departments of giving our suggestions and our comments on the form and content of the news that they issued. The role of the critical friend is not a popular one but there is a technique in these matters, as in all other things, and we were entitled to say that we studied and were vitally interested in the results and to proffer advice and suggestions accordingly. The usefulness of this kind of activity is, in my mind, related to the early years of the war. As the other Departments became more versed in the special requirements of war-time 48 - 47 -publicity and added experts to their staff, it became increasingly difficult for us to think that we had much to contribute to the preparation of their news or that what we did contribute would be particularly welcome. The organ which we used for much of this daily business of news extraction and discussion of news, apart from the communications of the News Division itself, was the Duty Room meeting, a Committee of officers from most Divisions of the Ministry which met twice and, later, once daily and was attended by representatives of the Service Departments and the Foreign Office located in the building. Duty Room meetings continued throughout the war.

I have said elsewhere that in the summer of 1941 there was a crisis inside and outside the ministry mainly, but not exclusively, concerned with its news and censorship functions. I think that in form the news side played a larger part than any other. I do not think that we really expected to have our way over this issue. What we wanted was to have our responsibility defined one way or the other so that we should either be given power to amend what we thought was wrong or be absolved from responsibility for what we could not control. What was the purpose of the Ministry of Information being regarded as the Department responsible for official news if the Press Department of each Government Department was solely responsible to its own Minister and we could neither direct what they were to say nor require them to say it? I think that the Foreign Office News Division appeared to us most markedly to diverge from what we thought was right and necessary but the problem was general and could have been applied to most other Departments in turn. Of course the only solution that could have satisfied us was a radical one: it would have involved taking away from each Department and its Minister the right of deciding what should be said officially about its concerns and when and of vesting the ultimate right of decision in the Minister of Information in the name of the Government as a whole. Such a solution is the logical outcome of a system of centralised Government publicity but it was certainly too radical for 1941 or any other year of this war.

When the matter came to a head the War Cabinet decided against us in leaving the responsibility for the issue of news with the Government Department concerned with the content. There were some rhetorical concessions to the Minister of Information's position in the Cabinet Paper which the Prime Minister drew up, in that it was made the duty of each Government Department to keep him fully informed as to the flow of events and the Ministry of Information was allotted duties of “pruning”, amending and supplementing the flow of news which did not have, I think, any close relation to a practical conception of what we could do.

From the time of that decision, which was only to be expected, we made it our policy to withdraw as much as possible from a position in which we were supposed to handle what we could not control. Our Executive Board, which met each Morning with the senior Service Advisers in the Ministry, would get from them a brief background review of the progress of their branch of operations but this was for our own information and had no direct connection with the handling or issue of news. There were, it is true, certain special kinds of official announcements, notably those which came direct from No. 10 Downing Street and those which were concerned with simultaneous State announcements in various countries, that the Ministry of Information treated for convenience as its own direct concern without the intervention of other Government Departments. But, apart from these special cases, we withdrew pretty well into a position in which news flowed from the originating Departments as and when they decided and we made ourselves as efficient a channel as possible for its distribution. Distribution overseas was, of course, our exclusive territory and the development of the services of Overseas General Division and our energetic backing of Reuters’ development and of the B.B.C. Overseas Services gave us plenty to do in this field. Secondly, the common sense of effective utilisation of our official news overseas made it important that our Overseas Divisions should be taken into consultation in advance by the Department intending an important issue in order that our posts abroad could have appropriate 50 - 49 -warning and be in a position to brief their contacts as soon as the news appeared. The art of making these preparations effectively, e.g. in America, was increasingly developed throughout the war. Some Departments who were “overseas minded”, understood naturally what was wanted, some Departments never seemed to understand the point. But in those cases where good work could be done we came back into the news field, as it were, by the back door, by means of the advance consultation and preparation that went on. Lastly, we remained to the end the only central point for handling the practical issues in which various Government Departments and the Press were interested and the presence of a man such as Francis Williams, who had a full working knowledge of newspaper life and good Press contacts, in the key position for this purpose in the Ministry enabled us to act as the natural chairman and co-ordinating authority for numerous practical questions, even when we could not present ourselves as the co-ordinating authority for the substance of what the news was to contain. Instances of this kind of service were all the work that was done under our Chairmanship in preparing for the news and publicity arrangements that S.H.A.E.F. were to conduct after D-day and the interventions that we made from time to time to harmonise the Service Departments’ arrangements on such subjects as accreditation.

When all has been said, the Ministry of Information still retained in the official world the status of the Government Department that was in general “responsible for” the Press. If this had only meant the more or less routine sponsorship of Press men going overseas, emergency releases from the armed Forces, special building or machinery licences etc., it would not have meant anything particularly significant. But it seemed to mean more than that and involve the assumption that if the Press generally or some particular paper was taking the wrong tone (in the Governmental or Departmental view) about some matter of greater or less public importance the Ministry was there to set it right. After 1941 we never accepted this view in any general sense. It is quite an unreal one. In a country which maintains a free Press erroneous views, even mischievously erroneous views, are part of the working texture, and official dislike of them gets no one anywhere, I sometimes suspected that His Majesty's Government regarded 51 - 50 -Press freedom as an excellent thing just so long as it involved no difference of opinion with the Government. And after all, truth has many facets: more, certainly, than the official version of events normally allows for. At any rate I think that our experience satisfied us of this much, that there is no utility in an official machine for the purpose of advocating to the Press the Government's attitude or points of view on current topics of the day. On the contrary, Press sensitiveness being acute in this field, such an organisation will do more harm than good. Of course, an individual may achieve occasionally what an organisation must fail to do regularly. The Minister of Information in a war-time all party Government speaks to the Press personally with great authority and if he is popular in those circles he may wield wide and positive influence on Press policy. Perhaps Mr. Bracken did, but I am not sure that he would have claimed this. Officially he always disclaimed the power to do so. The contacts that he maintained were in the main with the governing proprietors or the working journalists. Unlike Mr. Duff Cooper, he refrained from much contact with the editorial body. Certainly, such influence as is exerted in this way must be exerted by the Minister himself, and cannot be exercised through a Departmental organisation whose officials can hardly be expected to respond continuously to the impulsive conviction that the views of the Government on a particular topic are the only possible ones for a sensible man to entertain.

Putting aside personal influence, there remains a useful field of work in seeing that the Press are at any rate put in a position to arrive at a satisfactory judgment on matters about which the Government is concerned. In other words, somebody ought to be vigilant to see that the publishable facts are made available and the background sympathetically filled in. But that is, or should be, the major preoccupation of the public relations branches of the other Departments. What more had the Ministry of Information to offer, if they failed? The facts were theirs and the background was theirs. Too often I used to feel that we were asked to intervene in the hope that we would secure by incantations what others had failed to achieve by reason. But we had no spells except our own belief that the Press were entitled to receive the best statement of the Government's case that could be made available and then to be left alone 52 - 51 -to make up their own minds what response to make to it, and the confidence of the Press that if the Ministry did ask anything of them, it was not in order to “put something over them” but because we believed in it ourselves.

To correspond to this policy we evolved two general methods of confidential communication to the Press, outside censorship instructions (which we treated as mandatory) and such general explanatory and persuasive work as could be carried out through the stimulation or arrangement of Press conferences, occasional editorial meetings etc. Firstly, we circulated to the whole Press through the medium of the Censorship a document known as Private and Confidential Letter, which asked for non-publication of some item or subject of news on grounds of public advantage which were briefly recited in the Letter, We were conscious that these requests were not in most cases strictly censorship matters which we would have treated as falling within our ordinary Censorship authority: but their negative aspect and the obvious good sense of most of them rendered them free of offence. They were a tempting piece of machinery for other Departments, since the Press were very faithful in observing them, not without occasional protests when they scented abuse, and we had to reject far more applications than we accepted for their issue. But, in our view at any rate, their effectiveness rested on the confidence of the recipients that we would not abuse their goodwill, and we had to make it our policy only to use such letters sparingly and, even then, only in cases where we were ourselves satisfied by the other Department as to the importance and fairness of the request. One of the most doubtful cases where a Private and Confidential Letter was ever invoked was in the reiterated requests to the Press not to publish the texts of our leaflets dropped over Germany: in point of fact we were so doubtful of the rightness of this that we used the expedient, never otherwise employed, of circulating the request over the signature of the Foreign Secretary, instead of adopting it ourselves. Secondly, we used a device of circulating a short explanatory memo of unpublishable facts at the time when some specially equivocal piece of news was released or was about to break. These memos were also circulated through Censorship machinery but bore the prefix “For guidance only. Not for publication.” Normally they asked for no special result, contenting themselves with giving the salient facts from 53 - 52 -which it was hoped that a particular line of treatment would result. Sometimes they invited editors to consider favourably a suggested line. Here again, their effectiveness depended upon their occasional use and the candour with which they were employed. My impression is that, though useful, they were far from universally effective. Since they were designed to lead to positive, not negative, results this was only to be expected.