Hack

by Graham Johnson

  But there’s always one. Who wants to hold you back. Force you to follow the same old self-serving agenda. A new hotshot News Editor called Paul Field had been hired in from the Daily Mail the year before. His sidekick Euan Stretch, who’d used to be all right, had turned into an abrasive office arse-kisser.

  Paul Field was one of the new breed of showbiz fanatics. An elite corps of reporters and execs, rapidly coming up through the ranks. Who championed near-saturation celebrity news. Building empires within newspapers based on the magic they could conjure up. Basically out of thin air – literally nothing. Energising impressionable followers with their showbiz expertise. A coup against the old school was underway. To overthrow the greying editors who still valued a version of hard news. Warped, tabloidy and fake though it may have been at the core of their papers.

  But one day fame evangelist Paul Field told me that from now on it was all about Posh and Becks. They would lead the charge on this regime change. I was genuinely astounded. Even a hack like me. Au fait with total bollocks all of my ‘career’. Even me, I couldn’t believe that this bollocks was the new currency. Hard to believe, but true. Even harder to believe considering that his prophesy came true. Today that idea of people like the Beckhams dominating popular culture wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. The idea has since been normalised. But at the time I was genuinely oblivious.

  In order to guard myself against this impending doom, I went in to to see the Editor. Field wanted to mould me into a kind of poor man’s Mazher Mahmood. Turning over quilts off Big Brother for shagging and cocaine. I told Myler it wasn’t really my thing. Myler promoted me to Investigations Editor. So that I didn’t have to deal with any showbiz knob-heads.

  But the writing was on the wall. The knives were out. Externally, I had a veneer of fake toughness. Based on my streety image as an undercover crime investigator. But inside I felt bullied. The silent, mocking intimidation of office politics. Niggling away. Fostering self-doubt. Knocking self-confidence. I got flashbacks of the Beast. A watered-down version of career post-traumatic stress disorder took over. Sparking further spirals into low self-esteem.

  In addition, I couldn’t quite break out into the hard hitter I dreamed of becoming. To find proper targets I tried a different model of news gathering. Relying less on paid tipsters like Paul Samrai. Digging up my own leads. Especially on the burgeoning internet. I did a long-running investigation called the A-to-Z of Nazi Britain. Exposing the hundreds of odd-bod far right cranks. Hanging around under the surface in market towns and around suburbia up and down the land. Extreme right-wing Catholics such as The International Third Position. Front groups such as the Crusaders for the Unborn Child. Fascists who send Christmas cards with pictures of Himmler on. When the paper lost interest, I even went to a secret training camp in Poland off my own bat. Narrowly escaping a good thrashing. After being rumbled round the camp fire for not knowing the words to the Horst Wessel song.

  Depression set in. Started skiving at home. Watching the History Channel. Blagging the Desk that I was on jobs. By sticking my head out of the window. Turning into £50 bloke. Going into Waterstone’s, spending £50 on a CD, a Second World War book and an MOR music mag.

  I got sent to Japan to track down the former wife of Barry George. The man wrongly convicted of killing Jill Dando. On such a sinker that all I could do was lock myself in the hotel room. Reading Albert Speer and Into That Darkness by Gitta Sereny. One day ordinary Germans were helping old ladies across the road. The next they were booting in doors and sending their kids off to the gas chambers. Though much less extreme, I understood the similar effect corporate propaganda had on confused functionaries.

  I gave evidence for Steve at his industrial tribunal. Despite being warned that my salvaged career might go tits-up again. But I may as well not have – Steve never stood a chance. Even the reporters’ gallery was rigged by the News of the World. To suppress reporting of the scandal. Flooded with News International placemen and agency reporters controlled by Kuttner.

  Parts of my evidence were deemed ‘not credible’. Which was true – I blamed everything on Ray. Instead of balancing it out by blaming myself as well. I never coughed to earlier spoofs. I tried to make myself look good. Giving them the babes-in-the-wood routine. To help Steve as well myself. But despite some very embarrassing moments for Rebekah, Steve lost. Losing nearly everything. Including his nerve. They had destroyed a middle-aged man over a daft picture.

  Meanwhile, celebrity culture was mushrooming. Fuelled by a perfect storm of reality TV and a new breed of powerful PRs. Plus the tabloids were gagging for it and there was exponential growth in the women’s mag market. Big Brother, Popstars and Shipwrecked creating more and more celebs by the week. A new generation of agents and pluggers bigging them up on an industrial scale.

  But inside the tent, I could also detect the hidden agenda. Pushing celeb culture even further. I studied the phenomenon carefully. For tabloid editors, showbiz had started out innocently enough. As a relatively plentiful source of cheap stories. Mainly diary-fillers but, critically, low libel risk. Cheap – as in you don’t need to fund a team of six highly paid investigators. To beaver away for weeks on end. To expose wrong-doing in big business. Low legal risk – because if you’re writing a story about Madonna’s favourite colour, she’s not going to sue if you say it’s blue when it’s actually pink. Neither are you going to slag off Madonna for liking pink instead of blue. If you do, you’ll be offside and she’ll never talk to you again.

  But several strategic factors began to make editors lust after showbiz even more. Firstly, advertisers loved celebrity. Not only was it harmless but marketeers liked to have their products associated with famous people. An unforeseen synergy suddenly took place. Between corporate propaganda, celeb culture and tabloids.

  The three sectors fitted well together because they are basically fuelled by the same cardinal passions – fear, greed, grief and lust. Fame is all about status. Many people desire status. Therefore they are attracted to reading about celebrities. In turn, this opening becomes an advertising opportunity. By drawing in showbiz readers who crave status, the admen then sell them products which falsely claim to boost status. Such as big cars, fashionable clothes or beauty products.

  In tabloids, women are also used to sell sex. Sex triggers lust. Which is then in turn satiated by a substitute impulse – consumer desire. By constantly appealing to readers’ pleasure, instead of their minds, the ‘punters’ are manipulated. It’s no accident that almost all newspaper stories focus on emotion instead of reason.

  Showbiz journalism also triumphed because of the PR explosion. The PR industry was basically designed in pre-First World War America to plant corporate propaganda in newspapers. With a view to selling products. Or increasing the power of a new class of industrialists. Propaganda isn’t just about wartime disinformation. In peacetime, propaganda is still the main way that the rich and powerful talk to the people. Tabloid newspapers, most broadsheets and the TV networks are primarily vehicles for propaganda. Regarding content, there is no better form of propaganda than celebrity culture.

  In the 1990s, PR companies like Freud Communications became disproportionately powerful as the gatekeepers to showbiz. In turn, newspaper editors started sucking up to them. Rebekah Brooks pioneered a new model of story-getting. Firstly she would dig the dirt on a celebrity. Then, through her PR mates, she negotiated a softened-up version of the story to get into the paper. In return for a less damaging story, the celebrity had to confess to parts of the story.

  The basic pitch was: ‘We’ll take out the cocaine bit, if you cough to the shagging.’ That kind of thing. The horse-trading lessened the libel risk for Rebekah. The celebs looked slightly less disgraceful. The blackmail model was soon adopted as industry standard. Alongside phone hacking, which conveniently provided the source material for much of this corporate extortion.

  Distraction was the other main reason that showbiz journalism got big. If the peasants were looking thi
s way at Jordan’s big boobs, then a whole load of terrible things could be slid by them without them really knowing. An age-old trick going back to ancient Rome’s ‘bread and circuses’. But today it suited businesses, banks and self-serving parts of the state.

  Even at the coal face, I noticed these things going on. On the face of it these conspiratorial observations are hard to believe. But later I discovered masses of rigorous academic research to back them up. But at the end of the day, my insights weren’t much help. Understanding the daily grind didn’t make it any easier.

  34

  New Editor

  My insecurity led to mistakes on two big investigations in India and Pakistan. Just a few months before 9/11, I got a tip about some out-of-control warlord-types. Trying to sell canisters containing small amounts of nuclear material. In the whacked-out areas of tribal Pakistan. The tipster was a mercenary mate I’d met in Albania. A former Royal Marine turned privateer. Now training up Islamic fighters for money. Mick said that he’d spied the canisters in a chieftain’s outhouse – ex-Russian stock, left over from the first Afghanistan war in the ’80s.

  Shacked up in a hotel for two weeks in Islamabad. The bar was Sharia dry. But shadow room service smuggled beers under a dishcloth for cash. Waiting for the call to meet our Mr Big. To turn him over. But on the next shadowy instruction, the go-betweens wanted Mike to go into the mountains first. For a sit-down on the North-West Frontier. Mike got worried. Not wanting to take me. ‘Too moody,’ he said.

  But something didn’t smell quite right anyway. Felt like we were being played. Fitted up for an early morning call maybe. By the ISI, Pakistan’s notoriously shifty spy service. Relishing the coup of rebranding a couple of doughnut journalists as foreign agents. Alternatively, we hypothesised, our own security agencies might have been using us as pawns . In a bid to frame Pakistan for secretly developing the bomb. Or maybe just a straightforward kidnapping by local bandits. Reeling us in with a bogus tip. Who the fuck knows? It was all madness.

  My spider senses were pinging all over the place. Being watched at breakfast and in the street. Panicking, I got up in the middle of the night. To torch a moody passport I’d been keeping on my person, in case of emergencies. The ‘book – a phony EU document from Portugal – was in the name of a non-existent Kosovan asylum-seeker. But with my picture cleverly inserted. Bought illegally as part of a previous sting. But still useful for undercover work. Looked spot-on. But if I got caught with it on this job, trying to buy radioactive material for a dirty bomb in the badlands, I knew it was straight to jail. Don’t even pass go. Set fire to it shadily on the hotel balcony.

  My secret video recording equipment was also ringing alarm bells. Wired into a foam-packed briefcase which looked like a bomb. Took it apart to look less suspicious. Not to mention the Geiger counter which I’d bought for £500 before we left England. Binned.

  Relieved when Mike asked me to go back to London and wait for the call. A few weeks later it came. Disguised as a Taliban, Mike said that he’d got some pictures of the nuclear canisters. But not definitive proof. However, we couldn’t invest any more money or time in it. Using an offer to sell us some material on tape, we managed to crash a reduced-strength story into the paper.

  Headline: ‘How We Bought a Nuclear Bomb for £20,000.’

  Bunged Mike nine grand for his troubles. Spent the week dodging calls from earnest Americans at the International Atomic Energy Agency.

  The next fuck-up came in India. Two weeks exposing child slaves making fireworks near Chennai, formerly Madras, in India. A great story because the company was called Standard Fireworks. Household name on bommie night in Britain. Problem was, it turned out to be a totally separate company from its British namesake. The Indians had simply copied the logo. Luckily, we discovered this fact before publication, saving a huge libel payout.

  Tipster Paul Samrai got a bollocking. I’m not sure what he was up to but I accused him of making the whole thing up. To wangle a free plane ticket off the Sunday Mirror for a family wedding over there. Soon the lawyers banned him from the Sunday Mirror altogether, accusing him of mistranslating a tape in Punjabi, leading to a big court payout on a previous immigration sting.

  Then my ex-girlfriend Angela got killed in a car crash. Miraculously, her new-born baby from her new feller survived. Went to her funeral and got stick off her mates for splitting up with her. But by then, I’d settled down with a Sunday Mirror journalist called Emma Jones. Emma moved into my flat.

  Got voted finalist again, for Reporter of the Year competition. The second time in as many years. The News of the World kept offering me my old job back– five times in total. Each approach, bumping the money up. Then offering me the post of Deputy Features Editor as a sweetener. Kuttner even biked around a contract to the Sunday Mirror offices. Between gritted teeth. To bamboozle me into signing it. When I didn’t, they even used a honey-trap to lure me back. Taking me out to the trendy, star-studded Met Bar in Park Lane. Trying to get one of their tasty reporters to make me roll over. The irony was complex. The seductress was none other than the busty Features reporter who Ray Levine had sprayed on to the side of his motorbike. Whispering in my ear that Ray was history. I was the new golden boy. She told me he had been punished for the Beast – demoted back on to the road as a reporter, before being eased out of the paper altogether. But it was all bollocks and none of it would make me go back.

  Story-wise, I did an investigation headlined ‘Cadbury Dairy Swill’, exposing how the nation’s favourite sweet factory re-melted stale chocolate that had been thrown out for pigswill, deliberately repackaging the out-of-date bars as fresh Dairy Milks. Even though this was a form of corporate corruption, for me it was no more than a consumer story. I’d begun to analyse stories through Noam Chomsky’s ‘propaganda model’ which says that powerful elites tolerate corruption stories in the papers as ‘acceptable dissent’. Even corporations don’t like too much dipping into the till, preferring smooth-running systems because they make more money. All very high-brow for a journeyman hack. But true.

  Then a shock to my own system. In spring 2001, Sunday Mirror Editor Colin Myler suddenly resigned after running a dodgy contempt story. A new editor was appointed immediately – a former Daily Mirror exec called Tina Weaver. On paper I should have got on well with her, having lived with her brother once in Bristol. He was a really nice feller. She owned or partly owned the flat I used to rent. Tina had also come up through the same agency.

  But we didn’t get off on the right foot and then somehow never really hit it off. For me, she was just one of the increasing proportion of posh, privately-educated editors that were coming to dominate the mix in newsrooms. Around 54% of Britain’s top 100 journalists had come from independent schools – which educated just 7% of the population. The research was done by the Sutton Trust in 2006. Today, all three editors of Trinity Mirror’s national titles are public school-educated. The News Desks are pretty much the same. In addition, Trinity Mirror’s graduate training scheme provides a disproportionate number of Oxbridge graduates who can and will work for low wages. One day a sniffy executive told me that he didn’t like Alicante airport because he had to endure ‘too many of our readers there’. How could you write a newspaper for the sheeple – a pretend left-wing one at that – if you’re sat in the VIP lounge whilst they flew cattle-class on Ryan Air? The year-on-year ABC figures reflected the ‘misunderstanding’ between the Mirror and its ‘punters’.

  I realised that the Mirror’s left-wing bias was no more than a sham. The Mirror was no longer there to ‘educate and enlighten’ readers, as prescribed by its distinguished Editor Hugh Cudlipp, but to generate income streams for posh people.

  Tina liked showbiz. But she wasn’t that keen on guns and drugs, child slavery or attacking big corporations. One day I pitched an idea to her in conference.

  ‘Why don’t we turn over all these PR firms,’ I said gullibly, ‘that are controlling everything, all of a sudden? Show them up for being c
orrupt. Get all those 20-grand-a-year Alice-band-birds on tape, snorting their brains out whilst talking up their A-list clientele?’

  Tina snapped back: ‘Why bite the hand that feeds us? I’ve got 96 pages to fill every week and our PR contacts give us stories.’

  ‘Personally,’ I said. ‘Not once have I ever been given a story by a PR. Never.’

  She looked at me as though that was the problem. Like I was a dinosaur who needed to stop fucking about with video bags and villains and start taking out some 22-year-old PR dollies for lunch.

  I reacted by going darker. Reverting to type. Retreating into the underworld. Doing even more guns ’n’ drugs stories. Recruiting even more hardcore contacts. A former Turkish heroin baron. Big drug dealers of every description. Professional fraudsters. Even hitmen. Reactionary behaviour but I remember a study which said that black people saw themselves through white people’s eyes. If she saw me as rogue, scallywag reporter, then that’s what I’d be. Play up to it. A lack of self-confidence. Tired that I’d have to prove myself all over again.

  I’d had a good run of three-and-a-half years. Been around the world, genuinely trying to change things for the better. Once I’d been a very bad reporter. Holding my trade in contempt. Now I’d actually made myself into a good reporter. Better for the fact that I’d learned from my mistakes. But now the problem wasn’t me. I’d have to live with the feeling that my job was under threat.

  Tried to jump ship to BBC’s Panorama and the Observer. But there were no jobs. Even to the Daily Mirror. After 9/11, the Editor Piers Morgan took an unprecedented and extraordinary decision. Astonishingly, he stopped publishing bollocks. Deciding instead to print a serious tabloid. Changed the mast-head to black. Reprioritised showbiz down the list. Rehired John Pilger as a columnist. The result was roasting. A paper full of hard-hitting stories that journalists loved to write.