What is that Distant Sound? Some Thoughts on Press Freedom

The Parliamentary tussle about Press regulation seems to me to be a choice between the bad and the worse. All my instincts rebel against any form of press restriction, and I think it has only come about because British newspapers are so much weaker than they used to be, and also because some journalists (by no means all) behaved so badly that they provided their enemies with a pretext (but not a reason) for restrictions.

 

I am quite unsentimental about this. Newspapers, and the people who work for them, often behave indefensibly.  They usually do this because the British Press has always been a highly competitive market, in which editors and their subordinates strive for circulation and the advertisement revenue it brings.  Newspapers are not unique in this. Most commercial enterprises go too far, from time to time. So do all politicians. The problem is that, if you restrict press freedom, then you weaken one of the main forces restraining all the other sorts of wrongdoing. That is why civilised states have tended to concede that it should not be subject to state control.

 

It is also a statement of the obvious to point out that a wealthy person who buys a newspaper can immediately become influential and quite possibly powerful, and that there is no particular justice in this – except that the influence, in the end, depends on the newspaper’s ability to win and keep readers. That is actually a pretty good democratic test, arguably better than the one provided by elections in which the public approve pre-selected candidates for Parliament.

 

So proprietors may not start with any legitimacy, but they can attain it.  In the old days, on top of power and influence, they also used to get peerages.  This is not in fact restricted to Conservatives. I think it was in Francis Williams’s rather good book on the British press ‘Dangerous Estate’ (at least I thought it good when I read it last, 35 or so years ago. Williams was very much of the Attlee left and became a Labour peer himself, as did many Daily Mirror chieftains in the old days) that I read the rhyme, once current in the offices of the old ‘Daily Herald’,  ‘We have no party creed or bias. We want a peerage for Elias’.

 

This referred to Julius Elias, chief of Odhams, who eventually became the First ( and last) Lord Southwood in 1937, and was later made a Viscount and was Labour Chief Whip in the House of Lords. Oddly enough, it was generally thought that the Labour-supporting ‘Herald’ under Odhams ownership, had begun the great circulation wars of the 1920s and 1930s which at one stage turned the ‘Herald’ into the biggest-selling newspaper in the world. I always have to think twice before recalling that the old 'Herald' is in fact the direct ancestor of today's 'Sun' , though there was a strange intervening period - the Cudlipp 'Sun'. This was a paper 'born of the age we live in' carefully designed with market research in mind, modern, responsible, enlightened and a complete and utter flop, which is what allowed Mr Murdoch into Fleet Street. For he bought it and turned it into what it now is. 

 

The Daily Express and the Daily Mail, and later the Daily Mirror, struck back at the Herald with their own relentless campaigns for readership, fiercely fought in an age when there was no competition for advertising from commercial TV, so whoever could win the sales battle could charge tremendous rates. The old Daily Express, under Beaverbrook,  would eventually hit 4 million (it was still at more than two million, and a broadsheet,  when I first worked for it back in January 1977). But by then the big new developments were Rupert Murdoch’s ruthless ‘Sun’, which in my view dragged Fleet Street down, and David English’s reborn ‘Daily Mail’, which in my view was Fleet Street’s answer to the challenge of TV, a newspaper based much more on clever comment, human interest and controversy than on straight news, and the model for all serious dailies and Sundays ever since.  

 

The Daily Mirror, which had been top dog in the 1950s, was driven into endless retreat by ‘The Sun’.  I’ve said here before that Rupert Murdoch’s ‘Sun’ was the real revolution. I occasionally visit the British Library’s newspaper collection (soon to be moved from its old home at Colindale) and it is amazing to see how much more literate and thoughtful the most popular newspapers were in the Age Before Murdoch.  It is also interesting to see how scrappy and thin the old and unpopular broadsheets were, in comparison to their present state, but that is a different story. New technology allowed them to say a lot more, and to say it in much better-designed pages.

 

The old Daily Mirror, in particular, made a tremendous effort to treat its readers as intelligent beings. Competition from The Sun’s Page Three, and from Mr Murdoch’s, ah, unrestrained view of how newspapers should look and feel, soon put an end to that, and I don’t think the Mirror has ever recovered from that. Nor has anyone else. A time traveller from 1965 would register plenty of shocks at the changes in familiar things, but in many ways the alteration in newspapers between then and now is greater than anything else. They still bear the same names and serve the same purpose. But they are all utterly, radically different from their old selves.

 

I don’t think this was inevitable. It took Mr Murdoch’s special qualities (a very keen intelligence, combined with a specially Australian scorn for many British institutions and customs, plus an Oxford education and plenty of inside knowledge of the society he was invading, not to mention that bust of Lenin that he kept in his rooms at Worcester College) to bring this about.  I often wonder what would have happened had he never entered the British newspaper market. I also wonder if he could have succeeded if we had not wrecked our state school system, especially by abandoning  proven methods of teaching children to read,  and if we had tried harder than we did to restrain the power of commercial TV, another great force driving down the levels of culture and taste.

 

It was noticeable, when the old ‘News of the World’ closed and they reproduced a lot of the paper’s historic editions, that its transformation into its final incarnation is actually quite recent. Right up until the late 1960s, the old NoW still contained quite a lot of serious, heavyweight news. That was the paper that George Orwell was referring to in his famous words in the essay ‘the Decline of the English Murder’. I doubt if he’d have had much interest in the Murdoch version of the paper.

 

Now, as far back as the 1940s, the British political Left had it in for Fleet Street as a whole because they thought it was keeping them out of power, and restraining them when they won office.  They felt that, despite the Mirror and the Herald, they were outgunned by the ‘Tory Press’, and that this force was uncontrolled and illegitimate.  The complaint about the imbalance was mathematically true, though the imbalance wasn’t that huge when you counted the Mirror and the Herald, and Labour managed to win the 1945 and 1950 elections despite the imbalance. What’s more, unlike the BBC, no newspaper had the power to *make* anyone buy it. If the 'Tory Press’ sold more copies, that was because more people chose to buy them. As for legitimacy, press freedom in a free society can be based only upon commercial success and the independence it brings.  Lord Zinc or Lord Copper may be a billionaire and own a huge office on Feet Street and a printing and distribution network. But if people don’t buy his papers, he is nothing.

 

And commercially viable newspapers will contain a fair amount of show business and salesmanship, which will always be in conflict with responsibility and restraint. The less educated and cultured the population is, the fiercer this struggle will be. The editor’s job is to resolve this conflict into a product that is both attractive and truthful, and which deals properly with the great issues of the day and with the small entertaining things that all people enjoy reading. It’s no good being perfect, if nobody buys it. For it is the crucial fact about newspapers, or was until recently, that people had to volunteer to pay for them with their own money. If the people stop buying, there’s no further argument. This of course does not apply to the BBC. If people stop paying for the licence, they’re taken to court. If they stop watching BBC programems, they still have to pay for them. By the way, it’s worth noting here that many unpopular newspapers are subsidised, either by popular papers or by other successful commercial organisations to which they are linked. It is very rare for an unpopular newspaper to be commercially independent.

 

On the question of newspaper snobbery, I’ve always been very fond of a New Yorker cartoon which shows two men, side by side, holding newspapers appropriate to their class and status. On is a thin, austere gent, clutching a serious , thin, austere paper with such headlines as ‘Federal Reserve intervenes to prop up dollar’ and ‘Supreme Court rules on accountancy fraud’. Next to him is a chubby, disreputable person, who is gripping a garish tabloid plastered with such headlines as ‘Film Star found dead in bathtub’ and ‘Gang massacre in nightclub’. The tall, thin, serious person is peering surreptitiously over the little fat man’s shoulder, neglecting his own more serious pages.

 

The whole nature of the British press is unsatisfactory, when viewed from Utopia, that blood-girt, unreachable isle where I suspect everyone reads the 'Guardian'. But I’ve never seen a better arrangement suggested, and I know of many countries in which the press is enfeebled, corrupted, neutered by privilege, or directly under the thumb of the state. But I can still see why the Left are unhappy. A free press is unlikely to be a left-wing press, whatever happens, just as a major broadcaster, state or private, is unlikely to be conservative – there’s something about the bureaucracy and artiness of broadcasting that attracts the cultural left (the big US networks, privately-owned as they are, are no less left-inclined than the BBC. You could say the same for Hollywood).  Out of this argument came no fewer than three Royal Commissions, from which the idea of a regulatory body repeatedly emerged.And now here it is again.

 

I still recall my long-ago (36 years, to be precise) brush with the Press Council, as the first of these bodies was known.  Thanks mainly to the work of a diligent freelance reporter, I had uncovered some misdeeds in a local education authority ( I was then a junior education reporter). The authority objected. The Daily Express at that time was boycotting the Press Council ( I cannot recall why,  but the episode was quite separate from the current behaviour of the paper that now bears the same name) so I did not defend myself, and ended up being officially reprimanded for ‘obtaining a document by subterfuge’, which I had rather thought was my job. Actually, it was the freelance who had obtained it, but it seemed that the gentlemanly thing to do was to take the rap quietly. I thought then that it was silly, and have thought so ever since. But I have since learned to live with the existence of a code of practice, and a body to enforce it. It’s not that I object to its aims, which are laudable. It’s just that I instinctively recoil from the regulation of free institutions, especially where freedom of speech is involved.  A former employer once asked me to sign a document which obliged me (among other things) to refrain from sexism in future. I simply refused, and nothing happened,  because it was unenforceable in those days. But you can easily see which way this could go, once it is established in law. Look at the law-backed Equality and Diversity codes which surround anyone in the public sector.

 

I later reluctantly accepted that, since the regulator was there, I might as well make use of it when it suited me and asked the Press Complaints Commission to help me resolve a dispute with the Huffington Post and its writer Mehdi Hasan.  Mr Hasan (as I have described here) had published words he alleged I had spoken to him, in quotation marks as if they were a direct verbatim account backed by shorthand notes or a recording. As it turned out, Mr Hasan had no such notes or recording, and so the Huffington Post agreed (after much correspondence) to remove the quotation marks. This minor triumph would probably not have been possible without the PCC and I am grateful to its officials for their patient diplomacy.  It was important to me in a separate dispute with the BBC, which of course is not properly subject to any independent regulator.  But would I still rather live in a world without press regulation? Yes, I would. What about the BBC? I think its licence-fee and its effective monopoly put it in a different position. I'd like to devise a body to regulate it, and oversee its impartiality commitment,  but I'm not sure I'd want it to be statutory even so.

 

But whatever wording Parliament accepts for a new Press regulator, it seems clear to me that we are on the path (the good old Primrose Path to the Eternal Bonfire, always soft and welcoming at first, always turning out nasty and frightening when it is too late to climb back down, the sort of path any mountain rambler will have encountered at least once, and been wary of ever since) towards ever-greater regulation of newspapers. As I think has been pointed out by many,  the whole Leveson affair is an illogical response to phone-hacking and the other misdeeds of my trade, almost all of which can be dealt with through the courts already.

 

It will not benefit the victims of these wrongs, if the press is weakened. It won’t even benefit honest legislators, who will find that, in a country with a feeble Fleet Street, their role will also be diminished. Acting in the names of the Dowlers, the McCanns and Christopher Jefferies, others have got what they have long wanted. Those journalists who gave them the opportunity, by behaving stupidly and irresponsibly, have much to answer for . But those who are taking advantage of this by seeking press restraint have a much greater responsibility. They chose to pursue their sectional and personal interests, and ignored the interests of the country as a whole.

 

Now, I may be wrong (I sometimes am) about what is going to happen next. The new regulatory body may work in a civilised and responsible fashion, restraining bad behaviour while leaving the papers to carry on with their proper job of exposing wrongdoing and stimulating national debate on the great issues that the powerful are always trying to smuggle past us in disguise. Pressure groups, lobbies and Politicians may not take advantage of this small opening in the wall which once defended newspapers from state interference. They may not, over time, seek by small and subtle steps to tighten and increase their powers. The new restraints may not limit the capacity of newspapers to fight for circulation in a tough market. The papers may survive and prosper as powerful independent institutions able to stand up for themselves. The BBC (whose immense bias to the Left cancels out any press bias the other way, and then some)  may finally devise a system of regulation in which it is not Judge and Jury in its own cause.

 

All these things may come to pass, but wait! What is that distant noise? Why, it is the sound of massed squadrons of bright puce pigs roaring overhead in battle order.