Press T Gang

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Whether Basnett's accusation of a meeting between Thatcher and assorted Fleet 'Street editors to discuss coverage of May 14 is correct, is unlikely to be confirmed in the pages of the papers they edit.

Certainly there was a subdued air about the denials, and the Basnett allegation was reportedly common currency in Westminster before he made it.

But the question of a formal meeting is itself only the outward and visible sign of the relationship. between the government and the press.

This has been most clearly shown (May 14 apart) in the coverage of the Carter/Thatcher campaign to organise a boycott of the Olympic games.

Before the British Olympic Committee decided to defy the boycott campaign, a crescendo of headlines and editorials proclaimed the evils of attending.

The 1980 Olympics in Moscow were compared to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin (a pity however that the press failed to leaf back through its own files to discover the complete absence of a campaign to boycott the Berlin Olympics, intended by Hitler to demonstrate Aryan supremacy in sport-an aim with which Fleet Street editors were not notably out of sympathy).

The press campaign over Moscow was never long absent from its pages.

News that the tiniest satellite of US imperialism had decided not to attend was accorded front page treatment.

It burst out in full flower when the West German Olympic Committee, to the outrage of West German athletes, voted to join the boycott, and it received a fresh lease of life last week when Thatcher denounced Britain's athletes as competing for tarnished gold.

Whether it has been necessary to vet the headlines with Thatcher or not, Fleet Street has been sensitive to every last whim of government propaganda.

At the same time suggestions by sections of the international Olympics movement that the games should be denationalised by banning national flags and anthems have received no support at all from Fleet Street -despite the editorials which state that their fear is of the Soviet Union making political capital out of the Olympics.

That is because they want the nationalism (cultivated in sport and transferred to foreign policy) and the 'political capital' to continue as a feature of the Olympics-so long as it is not one of the workers' states that benefits.

So while sports writers are kept busy with football against Argentina and rugby in South Africa, the foreign editors have junked their Keep politics out of sport' liberalism in favour of outrageous attacks on the Soviet Union.

In the Daily Mail this has produced the odd spectaciewhich, after some hesitation, the paper has portrayed as a virtue-of the political pages raging in favour of a boycott and the sports writers campaigning against one.

The boycott has failed. Of major sporting nations only the United States, West Germany, Japan and Canada have joined the boycott (and W. Germany's vote could yet be overturned):

More nations will send teams to Moscow than sent them to Montreal, including as a final humiliation for " Carter, | A piece conceding that the' Soviet Union had scored a big propaganda victory has appeared in the Mail-not quite on page one however.

But the Daily Mirror like troops staying in the jungle after the war is over, has continued to back Thatcher's contention that the golds will be "tarnished"

Mirror reporters too, however, will go to Moscow.

After all, there may yet be some jingoistic phrases to be coined from a 'British' victory.