The press and the state

EDITORIALS by Robert Lowe in The Times on February 6 and 7, 1852, as reproduced in Wickhan Steeds The Press.

Taking up Lord Derbys proposition that a Press which aspires to share the influence of statesmen must also share in the responsibilities of statesmen, he wrote in The Times of February 6, 1852:

If the first of these propositions be established, the second follows as a matter of course; and we, of all men, are the least disposed to lower the proper functions or to deny the responsibilities and the power we may derive from the confidence of the public. But, be that power more or less, we cannot admit that its purpose is to share the labours of statesmanship, or that it is bound by the same limitations, the same duties, the same liabilities as that of the Ministers of the Crown. The purposes and duties of the two powers are constantly separate, generally independent, sometimes diametrically opposite. The dignity and the freedom of the Press are trammelled from the moment it accepts an ancillary position. To perform its duties with entire independence, and consequently with the utmost public advantage, the Press can enter into no close or binding alliances with the statesmen of the day, nor can it surrender its permanent interests to the convenience of the ephemeral power of any Government.

The first duty of the Press is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the events of the time, and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation. The statesman collects his information secretly and by secret means; he keeps back even the current intelligence of the day with ludicrous precautions, until diplomacy is beaten in the race with publicity. The Press lives by disclosures; whatever passes into its keeping becomes a part of the knowledge and the history of our times; it is daily and forever appealing to the enlightened force of public opinion anticipating if possible the march of events standing upon the breach between the present and the future, and extending its survey to the horizon of the world.

The statesmans duty is precisely the reverse. He cautiously guards from the public eye the information by which his actions and opinions are regulated; he reserves his judgment of passing events till the latest moment, and then he records it in obscure or conventional language; he strictly confines himself, if he be wise, to the practical interests of his own country, or to those turning immediately upon it; he hazards no rash surmises as to the future; and he concentrates in his own transactions all that power which the Press seeks to diffuse over the world. The duty of the one is to speak; of the other to be silent. The one explains itself in discussion; the other tends to action. The one deals mainly with rights and interests; the other with opinions and sentiments; the former is necessarily reserved, the latter essentially free.

It follows, therefore, from this contrast that the responsibilities of the two powers are as much at variance as their duties. For us, with whom publicity and truth are the air and light of existence, there can be no greater disgrace than to recoil from the frank and accurate disclosure of facts as they are. We are bound to tell the truth as we find it, without fear of consequences to lend no convenient shelter to acts of injustice and oppression, but to consign them at once to the judgment of the world. If the public writer shares in any degree the influence of the statesman, he shares at least few of those personal objects which constitute so large a part of ordinary statesmanship.

... Even the triumph of his opinions is not accompanied by the applause of a party or the success of a struggle for patronage and power. Those opinions which he has defined, and, so to speak, created, slip from him in the moment of their triumph, and take their stand among established truths. The responsibility he really shares is more nearly akin to that of the economist or the lawyer whose province is not to frame a system of convenient application to the exigencies of the day but to investigate truth and to apply it on fixed principles to the affairs of the world.

The responsibility we acknowledge has therefore little in common with that of statesmen, for it is estimated by a totally different standard of rectitude and duty. The Press owes its first duty to the national interests which it represents, but nothing is indifferent to it which affects the cause of civilisation throughout the world. The Press of England, standing as it now does, alone in the enjoyment of entire freedom, would grievously neglect its exalted privileges if it failed to recollect how much is due to the common interest of Europe. It may suit the purposes of statesmen to veil the statue of Liberty, and to mutter some formulary of disingenuous acquiescence in foreign wrongs, dictated by their fears rather than by their convictions; but we prefer to await for our justification the day when the entombed and oppressed liberties of Europe shall once more start into life and array themselves under the standard to which we cling. For to what, after all, are the statesmen of England to look for strength and national power, if injuries and offences rise against us, but to the enlightened resolution of the people of England to uphold the principles on which our own polity and independence are founded?

* * *On February 7, 1852, The Times wrote:

The ends which a really patriotic and enlightened journal should have in view are, we conceive, absolutely identical with the ends of an enlightened and patriotic Minister, but the means by which the journal and the Minister work out these ends, and the conditions under which they work, are essentially and widely different. The statesman in opposition must speak as one prepared to take office; the statesman in office must speak as one prepared to act. A pledge or a despatch with them is something more than an argument or an essay it is a measure. Undertaking not so much the investigation of political problems as the conduct of political affairs, they are necessarily not so much seekers after truth as expediency. The Press, on the other hand, has no practical function; it works out the ends it has in view by argument and discussion alone, and, being perfectly unconnected with administrative or executive duties, may and must roam at free will over topics which men of political action dare not touch. Government must treat other Governments with external respect, however black their origin or foul their deeds; but happily the Press is under no such trammels, and, while diplomatists are exchanging courtesies, can unmask the mean heart that beats beneath a star, or point out the bloodstains on the hand which grasps a sceptre. The duty of the journalist is the same as that of the historian to seek out truth, above all things, and to present to his readers not such things as statecraft would wish them to know but the truth as near as he can attain it. To require, then, the journalist and the statesman to conform to the same rules is to mix up things essentially different, and is as unsound in theory as unheard-of in practice. The Press does not, as Lord Derby says, aspire to exercise the influence of statesmen, but its own, and reserves that respect which Lord Derby is content to profess for a sanguinary and unscrupulous despotism for something more respectable than absolute power and brute force. Yet, in discussing French politics, we have never assumed a tone so offensive as that which the Earl of Derby has introduced into his homily. We have never said that for the last 60 years the Government of France has been a succession of usurpations of one kind or another, and then contradicted ourselves and libelled our neighbours by stating that these usurpations were, one and all, the deliberate choice of the nation or, still worse, that the extraordinary powers of the French President have been conferred upon him by the almost unanimous expression of the public opinion of France.

Such statements are indeed insulting to French honour and nationality. Those who make them and believe them treat the gallant French nation as a race of slaves, barely competent for the choice of the tyrant who is to trample upon them.