Word: britain
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Winston Churchill seemed about to take a flyer. For the first time, he registered racing colors with Britain's Jockey Club-the required preliminary to racing one's own horses. The Churchill colors: chocolate, with pink sleeves...
...Apologies. Like the U.S. Commission on Freedom of the Press (TIME, March 31, 1947), the 17-member Royal Commission was mainly composed of nonjournalists; it was headed by Sir David Ross, provost (now emeritus) of Oxford's Oriel College and a distinguished Aristotelian scholar. As Britain's press lords paraded before the commission, they made no apologies...
Labor's truculent Health Minister Aneurin Bevan had called British news papers "the most prostituted press in the world." The National Union of Journalists (which the weekly Economist labeled "the fifth column of the fourth estate") had been even more specific. It charged Britain's Tory press lords with operating monopolies, kowtowing to advertisers, distorting and withholding the news, and blacklisting (i.e., refusing to mention) political and personal enemies. To investigate charges of this kind, and perhaps to lay the groundwork for regulation of the press, the House of Commons voted to set up a Royal Commission...
Last week, after two years of hearings and deliberation, the commission planted a bombshell in the laps of its Labor patrons. To the shocked surprise of left-wing politicians and press, its 3&2-page report was a sweeping vindication of the private ownership of Britain's newspapers...
Lord Kemsley, owner of Britain's biggest newspaper chain (22 papers), testified: "The notion that I sit at my desk examining every piece of news as it comes in and saying 'publish this' or 'don't publish that' ... is too fantastic . . . [But] of course I am consulted and give decisions." Lord Beaverbrook, a lusty battler for free enterprise and Empire first, snapped: "I run my papers [Daily Express, Evening Standard] purely for the purpose of making propaganda ... On the few occasions when [my editors] have had different views on an Empire matter to myself...