Mind-moulding, Throat-cutting

With his heavy Scotch brows knit in a worried frown, James Ramsay MacDonald, onetime Prime Minister (Jan.-Nov. 1924), proposed, last week, legal protection for the British public against the mind-moulding power of the British newspaper trusts. "An alarming situation is developing!" rapped Scot MacDonald, and many listened because he leads the second largest British parliamentary party: Labor. What had ruffled Laborite MacDonald, it shortly appeared, was the formation last week of a new news trust: "Northcliffe Newspapers, Ltd."

Harold Sidney Harmsworth, Viscount Rothermere, brother and successor to the late famed Lord Northcliffe, heads the new group. He announced, last week, that it will exploit the news service of his Daily Mail and the picture service of his Daily Mirror by enlarging both to serve a to-be-founded chain of afternoon papers in Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Newcastle, Glasgow. Thus Lord Rothermere proclaims that he will enter cutthroat competition with the numerous afternoon newspapers already owned in the provinces by the famed Berry brothers (TIME, Dec. 13, 1926).

"Sir William Berry and his brother," said Lord "Rothermere suavely, last week, "will I am sure . . . welcome experienced and powerful competition in the industry to which they have devoted their energy."

Inevitably the first result of such "experienced and powerful" throat-cutting between two major groups will be a slaughter of the independent provincial evening newspapers. It was this which James Ramsay MacDonald called, last week, "an alarming situation."

Naturally observers sought for a "real reason" behind Laborite MacDonald's righteous wrath. They found it in an editorial in the Laborite Daily Herald which observed: "The "greater portion of the readers of the evening papers are members of the working class, and if the Rothermere scheme is successful, the new papers will add to the copious stream of misrepresentation of the Labor movement which issues daily from the capitalist newspapers."

Well might Scot MacDonald cry out last week against mind-moulding and throat-cutting which is sure to weaken the Labor party.