At one stage during the Rusbridger era, when it looked as though The Observer might be sacrificed to pay for The Guardian’s over-investment in digital journalism, I received appeals from the Observer journalists to speak up on their behalf. I appeared with Harold Evans on Newsnight on BBC2 to fight for the paper’s survival. It must have been a bizarre programme to watch: an octogenarian in New York and a septuagenarian in Majorca speaking from two large screens.
In Palma, where the time was an hour later than in London, I was being filmed on a bridge at closing time from the local bars, so shadowy drunken figures were staggering around while the TV crew and my wife were desperately trying to keep them away from the cameras. Because of this off-screen distraction I had some difficulty focusing on the questions Kirsty Walk was asking me from London. Thankfully, The Observer was reprieved.
Those of us who love The Observer and have devoted most of our professional lives to it should express profound gratitude to The Guardian and the Scott Trust for keeping the paper alive in what must sometimes have been very difficult times. More than forty years ago, when I was appointed editor, Lord Goodman had warned me that the paper might not last another six months.
Preston remains, even as he approaches his eighties, the shrewdest media analyst. I wrote on the media myself for many years after leaving The Observer, mostly for the Evening Standard and The Independent. I finally gave up when I read a lecture by the new Guardian editor, Katharine Viner, on the digital future facing the press. I could tell it was brilliant, but as I could hardly understand a word of it I decided that the time had come to stop pontificating on the media.
In any event, living in Majorca meant that I was missing all the Fleet Street gossip one used to pick up by meeting friends in the Garrick Club, El Vino’s and on other licensed premises. But I remained in contact with the newspaper world as chairman and later president of the London Press Club and as president of the Media Society. I was also elected chairman of the European Federation of Press Clubs and the World Association of Press Clubs and hosted their meetings in London.
I was elected chairman of the judges for the British Press Awards and for the London Press Club Awards. I still write for newspapers and magazines – a weekly page on any subject I fancy for the Majorca Daily Bulletin, occasional features for The Oldie (which I once edited briefly in 1994 while Richard Ingrams was away writing a book) and for The Observer and the Daily Mail, but more often obituaries for the Daily Telegraph, where I specialise in media figures and old rugby players.
Even though I couldn’t keep up with digital developments, I still maintained an active interest in the ethical issues surrounding newspapers, and actively joined the debate about press regulation. From the time I became an editor over forty years ago I had urged British governments to reach a deal with the press. Essentially the deal consisted of an exchange: better conduct by the newspapers in return for greater access to information.
In Britain, public information had always been regarded as the property of the state, to be divulged when it suited the interests of the ruling party, rather than something that belongs to the people as a basic right to know what is being done or planned in their name and with their money. The Freedom of Information Act has squeezed the orange on specific issues, but the official mind-set on information is still largely unchanged.
Britain is still some way from the ideal set out by James Madison in the United States in 1822, as inscribed over the main entrance to the Library of Congress in Washington:
A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps, both. Knowledge will for ever govern ignorance. And a people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power that knowledge brings.
And has the press met its own side of my proposed bargain by improving its conduct? Yes and no. There is still more harassment and triviality than many people would like, but at least the editors are now held to account by what I regard as a stronger system of self-regulation. Government attempts to force newspapers into a state-backed system are bound to fail.
Although I have been critical of the tabloids – to the extent of once enraging The Sun into running an editorial called ‘Dozy Don’ denouncing me on page two, facing a topless ‘Ship-Shape Tina’ on page three – at the end of the day I have always argued that if the choice lay between a shoddy-but-free press and a state-controlled press, then the free press must prevail.
The recent debate over press regulation got itself into a twist from the beginning because of David Cameron’s weak position as a man who had hired a phone hacker as his director of communications in 10 Downing Street. Phone hacking, in fact, had nothing to do with regulation. It was a criminal offence and a number of journalists, notably Andy Coulson, went to jail for engaging in it.
But Cameron’s enforced silence on this issue was exploited ruthlessly by Labour in the form of Ed Miliband and the ineffable Tom Watson, by Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats, and by a well-organised campaign of newspaper critics called Hacked Off. Cameron was in no position to resist the setting up of the Leveson Inquiry or the crude machinations that followed it. Nor did it help that many MPs, seeking revenge for the newspaper campaign which had exposed their fraudulent expenses claims, were unwilling to defend the press when it came under siege.
Self-regulation, rather than some form of imposed system, has to be the right way, but this can still involve a majority of adjudicators who are completely independent of the press. Having served for six years on the Council of the Advertising Standards Authority and learned to admire the quality of its judgments – and the staff work that lay behind them – I would like to see a similar balance of professional and independent members making the key decisions on complaints.
I also spent six years on the Competition Commission’s newspaper panel, being called in to advise on whether proposed newspaper mergers would threaten freedom of expression. This gave me a rare insight into the finances and operational methods of various kinds of newspapers as they entered the digital age.
Sheffield University had approached me while I was at The Observer to advise them on the creation of a new Department of Journalism Studies. I made a number of visits to the city – where I had been trained as a journalist myself thirty years before – to talk about teaching courses and research objectives. Senior members of the university, including the then Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor and the Registrar, also attended a dinner at the newspaper, at which they invited me to become the first head of the new department, with the title of Professor. Initially I declined because I wanted to see The Observer through a difficult period, but when, soon after, the newspaper was sold, I accepted the university’s renewed offer.
Having grown weary of university media departments that produced ill-informed left-wing critiques of ‘the capitalist press’, I wanted a department that really understood the way newspapers worked and the natural tensions that were bound to exist between commercial and editorial needs. I also wanted one that mixed academic study of media history and ethics with basic training in the practice of journalism, such as writing, sub-editing and design. That meant recruiting a staff that contained both academics with a serious interest in the media and former professional journalists. We finally got there, but not without some teething problems in the early years, and Sheffield’s Department of Journalism Studies is now, twenty-three years after its launch, one of the most highly respected in the country.
From my own experience as an editor, I wanted research that measured the performance of newspapers, especially in covering big events. I had been prompted in that direction by a number of major stories The Observer had covered in my time, but one particular event had stuck in my memory and nagged at my conscience. That was the riot of Red Lion Square in London in June 1974, when police and groups of left-wing demonstrators clashed over a rally by the National Front.
Kevin Gately, a twenty-year-old mathematics stud
ent from Warwick University, died from a blow to the head, delivered in circumstances that were never fully established. Although non-political himself, he became the first person to die in a political demonstration in Britain for fifty-five years. He was 6 ft 9 in. tall, prompting speculation that he had been hit by a truncheon from a mounted policeman. This theory was seized on in the next day’s papers, including my own, which all blamed the police for causing the disorder that resulted in the student’s death.
A public inquiry into the rioting, headed by Lord Scarman, thought this ‘unlikely’ but failed to discover firm evidence of how, or from whom, Gately received his fatal wound. The inquiry also revealed for the first time that a group of marchers from the International Marxist Group had attacked the police cordon and had thereby been responsible for setting off the rioting.
When I read the report I was struck by the contrast between the papers’ immediate reporting of the riot and the facts established by Scarman after taking evidence from all parties for over a month. There have been many (and worse) cases of misrepresentation in newspapers in the years since then, but Red Lion Square was the one that made me focus on the problem. I began to wonder how often newspapers got such things wrong. I also developed doubts about the way journalists from various newspapers tended to seek a consensus about what had happened – a consensus which in this case had misled readers and set off a public debate based on a false premise. Above all, I distrusted the sense of omniscience that newspapers conveyed.
It is, of course, impossible for any newspaper, no matter how well resourced, to produce a definitive account of complex events so soon after they have taken place. I thought editors should therefore value the results of an independent review of their papers’ performance if it revealed weaknesses in the way news was collected, assessed or presented – weaknesses that could be corrected for the future. If the right lessons were learned, I thought it should be possible, and highly desirable, for newspapers to edge their way nearer to the truth.
I would like to see an annual audit of press performance – an idea I am happy to credit to my late friend Sir Louis Blom-Cooper QC. Clearly a university would be an appropriate body to conduct such an audit. The difficulty would be getting newspapers to pay for it, or even give evidence, if they thought they might be reprimanded afterwards. I would hope the audit could be conducted in a spirit of seeking enlightenment or learning lessons rather than attaching blame. It would be useful, for example, to see an audited review of the press’s performance in its coverage of the referendum campaign or of Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States. Even if only one or two major stories a year were to be reviewed in this exhaustive way, the results, whether positive or negative in outcome, could only bring benefit to journalists who care about the accuracy of what they report and to those who direct and publish their efforts.
When I look back on the periods I covered as a newspaper editor, I am sometimes shocked or disheartened when the truth that emerges decades later shows how we got things wrong – or missed the big story completely. I have felt this particularly about coverage of governments in the 1970s, a troubled time when nobody seemed to be telling the truth. Reading books about that period by Dominic Sandbrook or Francis Wheen, I discover all sorts of things I didn’t know – and should have known – about what was really going on. The experience can be humbling, and reinforces my view that the posture of omniscience adopted by most newspapers, whether tabloid or not, will be shown in time to be comically absurd.
• • •
Running a newspaper for many years isn’t always good for the soul. An editor is often treated like a god within his office – understandably so, in my opinion, since he (or she) is the person who ends up in court, and sometimes in jail, if the paper gets things badly wrong. But I have to say I found it rather disconcerting to move from a newspaper conference room, where the editor’s decision is final, to a university environment, where everybody wants to go on and on talking. It felt a bit like Wellington’s experience when he moved from the battlefield into Downing Street. ‘I gave the Cabinet their orders, but they insisted on talking about it!’
I found faculty meetings especially trying. There was usually a simple decision to make – whether or not to promote someone to senior lecturer, for example – and the answer was nearly always clear from the paperwork provided in advance of the meeting. Yet people would rabbit on – often past the time for me to catch my train to London – because they liked the sound of their own voices. Like academics, journalists are also articulate folk, but in their case I could shut them up – very often a stare would be enough.
• • •
The internet revolution has brought about the greatest changes in journalism, both positive and negative, since Rupert Murdoch challenged the power of the print unions in the mid-1980s. The surviving regional newspapers, having seen swathes of their classified advertising move online, have cut their staffing to the bone, with groups using reporters to write for several papers at once. It seems incredible that when I joined the Sheffield Telegraph in 1961, there were seventeen general reporters signing in every day on the news desk – about twice the number I had available at The Observer when I became editor fourteen years later.
One of my persistent arguments over many decades is that journalism will survive – and for the sake of an informed democracy has to survive, especially in these days of ‘fake news’ – in whatever technical form it appears. For no matter what is wrong with a society – whether it be corrupt businessmen, corrupt politicians or even corrupt judges – if the press is free, the facts cannot be concealed for ever. While that is true, everything else is somehow correctable.
That high claim for the press may seem hard to justify in the face of some of our trade’s more extravagant confections. As a character says in Tom Stoppard’s play Night and Day: ‘I’m with you on the free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand.’
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn evidently shared that low opinion of the press. When I was introduced to him as a journalist on his first visit to London after his expulsion from the Soviet Union, he just glowered at me, said nothing and turned his back. Yet the reason his publisher had invited me to meet him was because I had serialised several of his books.
In his Harvard address, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist claimed that ‘hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anything else this disease is reflected in the press.’ Hastiness has to be conceded. It is the business and function of journalism to bring the news to people as fast as possible, and some errors are an unavoidable part of that process.
Superficiality, however, Solzhenitsyn’s other charge, the press can do something about. The really significant shifts in our rapidly changing world are not on the surface. They are not physically there to be photographed or filmed. The printed word – the medium of our poets, novelists and philosophers – is still the best equipped to chart those hidden currents beneath the surface of contemporary life.
John Maynard Keynes put it like this:
The events of the coming years will not be shaped by deliberate acts of statesmen, but by the hidden currents flowing continually beneath the surface of political history, of which no one can predict the outcome. In one way only can we influence those hidden currents, by setting in motion those forces of instruction and imagination which change opinion, the assertion of truth, the unveiling of illusion, the dissipation of hate, the enlargement and instruction of men’s hearts and minds.
‘The unveiling of illusion, the dissipation of hate, the enlargement and instruction of men’s hearts and minds.’ That is a tall order for a newspaper, which is mainly concerned with the rapid recording of current events before they pass into oblivion. But it expresses in an ideal form what a newspaper should aspire to achieve if it is to deserve to be more than the lining of a sock drawer or wrapping for fish and chips.
It requires what David Astor once described as ‘a w
hiff of old-fashioned idealism’. Or, as an old editor once told a budding reporter: ‘A newspaper needs a lot of young fools, foolish enthusiasm and foolish ideals.’
• • •
As every year goes by, however, newspapers as we have known them seem less and less likely to survive. Some papers will continue to be printed on paper, but with dwindling circulations and with little chance of making a profit on their own. I thought it was a significant moment when my friend Brian MacArthur, a highly experienced newspaper man and one of the best-informed media commentators, gave up reading newsprint last year and now acquires all his information online.
I have to read some papers online – The Guardian and The Observer don’t send hard copies abroad, and the papers that do, some of them printed in Madrid, charge about a fiver for a much-reduced edition. But I still enjoy the tactile feel of a newspaper that you can carry around, much as Len Hutton enjoyed the feel of a cricket bat even in his old age or Yehudi Menuhin the touch of a violin. I also remain a keen student of the layout and typography of news and features, which is something you miss online.
I can’t help reflecting that during my active newspaper career, for the three decades from 1960 to the early 1990s, we had the best of it. It was not just that newspapers really mattered then, but that working for them was a daily pleasure, with ample expenses to fund pleasant and sometimes riotous living. The days of sandwich lunches at the desk were just coming in as I left. I used to rage at reporters to go out and discover what was happening in the world outside.
• • •
I was privileged to work with some of the most talented journalists of the post-war period. I could perhaps have made more use of my position to get to know more politicians. But I took the view, rightly or wrongly, that the best use of an editor’s time is talking to his journalists and reading their copy. Maybe that’s a matter of horses and courses.
Shouting in the Street Page 40