London
Letter
Dear Editors,
London NW 8
April 15, 1941
As
you see by the above date, I only received your letter a month
after it was sent, so there is not much hope of my getting a reply to you
by April 20th. I expect this will reach you before June, however. I will
try to make some sort of answer to all your questions, but I should go
over the allotted space if I answered them all in full, so I will concentrate
on the ones I know most about. You don't mention anything in my pre–
vious letter having been blacked out by the censor, so I presume I can
speak fairly freely.*
1.
What is the level and tone of the popular press these days? How
much real information about the war effort comes out? How fully are
strikes and labor troubles reported? Debates in Parliament? How domi–
nant is the propaganda note? Is this propaganda mostly anti-Hun and
jingoistic flag-waving as in the last war, or is it more anti-fascist? What
about the radio? Cinema?
The tone of the popular press has improved out of recognition during
the last year. This is especially notable in the
Daily Mirror
and
Sunday
Pictorial
("tabloid" papers of vast circulation, read largely by the army),
and the Beaverbrook papers, the
Daily Express, Sunday Express
and
Evening Standard.
Except for the
Daily Mail
and certain Sunday papers
these
used to be the most lowbrow section of the press, but they have all
grown politically serious, while preserving their "stunt" make-up, with
screaming headlines, etc. All of them print articles which would have
been considered hopelessly above their readers' heads a couple of years
ago, and the
Mirror
and the
Standard
are noticeably "left." The
Standard
is
the least important of Beaverbrook's three papers, and he has apparently
taken his eye off it and left its direction almost entirely to young journal–
ists
of leftwing views who are allowed to say what they like so long as they
don't attack the boss directly. Nearly the whole of the press is now "left"
compared with what it wns before Dunkirk-even the
Times
mumbles
about the need for centralised ownership and greater social equality-and
to find any straightforward expression of reactionary opinions, i.e. reac–
tionary in the old pre-Fascist sense, you now have to go to obscure weekly
and monthly papers, mostly Catholic papers: There is an element of eye–
wash in all this, but it is partly due to the fact that the decline in the
trade in consumption goods has robbed the advertisers of much of their
power over editorial policy. Ultimately this will bankrupt the newspapers
and compel the State to take them over, but at the moment they are in an
*Neither
in
this nor in Mr. Orwell's last letter did the British censor make any
deletions.-Eo.
315
