ROSC Aibreán 1973

The Press in Wales

le Pól Ó Duibhir
The main daily press serving Wales is an extension of the English press and it is not really interested in Wales as such. The Times has the reputation of reporting fairly and accurately, and it is the most highly thought of. This is so particularly since Trevor Fishlock was appointed Welsh correspondent about three years ago. The Guardian is not always as accurate and the Telegraph is excessively London centred. Its views are exclusively English, and though its reporting is on the whole accurate, the choice of story and the angle taken reflect an English viewpoint.

The regional English language dailies have their basis in the Welsh-speaking areas of Wales; the Liverpool Daily Post in the North and West, and the Western Mail (west of where one wonders?) in the South. This audience is mainly a rural one as the Sun and Mirror take over in the industrial sections of these areas. The only way to explain how these regional papers have remained so insensitive to the real needs of their main audience is that the rural Welsh consumers are conservative and uncritical.

One test of a paper is how it reacts to the argument about the possible self-sufficiency of Wales. The argument appears to be generally well covered by the Welsh language press, while the English language press varies. The Western Mail tries to tone it down and the Liverpool Daily Post is inconsistent and something of an enigma. The British treasury budget, published about 1968 to refute Wales's claim to self-sufficiency, was accepted by the Mail and Post despite its being generally recognised as an attempt to cook the books.

There are about 600,000 Welsh speakers in Wales and the circulation of the Welsh language weeklies is only about 15,000 (there are no dailies in Welsh). However, the figures may be deceptive as this press gets to the most influential Welsh speakers. BARN gets at the language activists, and it ran a successful campaign for bilingual car tax discs. Y FANER started a campaign of not paying TV licences unless more hours were given to Welsh on TV, but this wasn't a success and it was overtaken by the Welsh Language Society's campaign of not paying until there is a separate TV channel for Welsh alone. Y FANER on occasions has had to appeal to its readers for funds to keep going. Plaid Cymru,- the Nationalist Party, publishes two papers, the monthly Ddraig Goch in Welsh, and the former monthly (now weekly) Welsh Nation in English. Y Ddraig Goch reaches only committed Welsh-speaking nationalists and members of Plaid Cymru. It appears somewhat irregularly, thus breaking the cardinal rule of any paper which wishes to keep up its circulation.

I asked Clive Belts, editor of the Welsh Nation, how that paper was bearing up. "Well, it has a circulation of around 5,000 and it gets at English and Welsh-speaking nationalists Who are not necessarily members of Plaid Cymru," he told me. Does it pay its way? "No, it is heavily subsidised by the party. More work needs to be done in selling the paper in order to capture the potential audience which I estimate at around 10,000.

Plaid's local branches are falling down on the job of selling at functions and the like." And does the party dictate its contents? "Not necessarily, the paper has editorial independence within fixed limits. There are really two of these; first, it must remain nationalist, and, second, it must not support violence against the person."

A newcomer on the Welsh scene is the quality English language magazine PLANET, now thirteen issues old. PLANET comes out six times a year and is edited by Ned Thomas, author of The Welsh Extremist, a former civil servant, at present lecturing in English in the university at Aberystwyth. PLANET has not really achieved its original aim of presenting Welsh Wales to the English speaking part of the country. There are, after all, few bookshops in the Rhondda. It is really an English language equivalent of BARN in content and probably overlaps considerably with the BARN readership. It has quite an influence on English speaking nationalists and in fact it appears to be having quite an influence on its own editor who has really only emerged as a Welsh nationalist in the last year. It is mainly read for its political sections, but as the Welsh Arts Council can subsidise the literary content alone there has to be quite an amount of this.