Louts and trouble-makers

same limited, official information as everyone else. Two weeks after the Gallipoli landing, The Press was convinced that all was well and ‘‘knowing what we do of the men who have gone from New Zealand we have little fear that they will fail, no matter what tests are still in store for them’’.

New Zealanders who stayed behind will wish they were in the thick of it, The Press said.

Two months later, in July 1915, The Press knew there were difficulties at Gallipoli, ‘‘but we feel assured that those difficulties will be overcome’’. Reality had set in by September, though, when ‘‘the horrors of war oppress us sorely, and our hearts are sad at the sufferings of our wounded, and the loss of so many of our bravest and best’’. But still, ‘‘the hearts of New Zealanders will glow with pride’’ when they hear about their bravery.

One thing The Press was never wrong about was communism. Bolshevism, Lenin, Trotsky and the rest – The Press was sniffy from day one. ‘‘Even the peasants are beginning to find out that the Bolshevik Utopia is a fraud,’’ The Press editorialised as early as June 1918. It held that line for another 70 years.

Here we are, for example, in July 1924, delivering an important dose of reality to lazy socialists.

‘‘The socialist is a confirmed dreamer of dreams. Instead of making the best of things as they are here and now, and so preparing the way for better things, he sets his eyes on the faroff mirage, and broods on ways and means by which he may evade the harsher rules of the game of life, and yet reap the full reward.’’

The Press was also right to see Adolf Hitler as dangerous. Hitler was a lesser man than Lenin and Mussolini, the paper wrote in April 1933, ‘‘but because his energy outruns his ideas, because he has destroyed and does not know how to build, he is also more dangerous than either’’. But like many papers in the west in the early days of Nazism, The Press underestimated the threat posed to the Jewish people.

While ‘‘the German Government has beyond doubt been driven to condone antiSemitism’’, The Press thought that ‘‘as Jew-baiting is an expensive pastime and as the Germans are, despite French ideas on the subject, a civilised nation, the Nazis will soon tire of their present diversion’’. Sadly, The Press misread that one.

As the 20th century rolled on, The Press cleaved to a line that could be generally called pro-capital and anti-labour. It was the business owner’s morning paper. Readers could go elsewhere for other perspectives in a healthy marketplace of ideas.

This made 1935 a crucial year.