Article January 9, 1965 Issue

Signs of the Times

William J. Haley

The Times

Sir William J. Haley, Editor The Times, London in an address to the British Oxygen Group of Companies

Men and women, and young people and children, are all too often led to believe in nothing, to respect nothing, to be ashamed to deem anything fine, and to hold nothing sacred.

Books, newspapers, broadcasting, television, all were meant to be great educational influences. They have all paid lip-service to education. They were expected to level the intellectual and aesthetic inequalities in society. ... They have levelled downwards, not upwards. Thus it is that we have had television programmes that have seemed near-blasphemous, books that are pornographic, newspapers that are, as Sir Richard Livingstone once described them, "A chaos of values." And we have had these things because modern methods of communication demand acceptance by the greatest attractable audience.

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