The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  Internet ‘fast news’ did not undermine the traditional role of The Times; rather, it re-enforced the necessity of in-depth journalism to offer a more rounded product. Breaking news on the internet or the ‘soundbite’ journalism favoured by the visually dependent medium of television could not compete with the weightier analysis the newspaper provided at its best. Even this was a question of finding a balance. Simon Kelner, who, as editor of the Independent, pioneered the tabloid-sized quality daily (or ‘compact’) and put partisan opinion on its front page, suggested that in the future newspapers would respond to the internet and television twenty-four-hour rolling news challenge by evolving into ‘viewspapers’ instead.46 Newspaper would become, in effect, daily opinion-led magazines. Was this the future of The Times? If so, it would mark the end of its more than two-hundred-year mission to inform. It is hard to imagine its reputation could be other than irrevocably tarnished. In fact, the Kelner prophecy seemed an excessively pessimistic one. When a longer perspective is eventually provided, 9/11 might be seen as a defining moment for quality newspapers. People immediately switched on the television to view the vivid and appalling images and to keep abreast of the breaking news. Yet the next morning and in the days and weeks thereafter, sales of broadsheet newspapers, including The Times, soared. Even when the news was at its most graphic, the print media was still seen to provide what the more visual electronic media could not.

  IV

  Before Murdoch acquired the title, buying The Times was a morning ritual for some who believed it was a badge that could be displayed as evidence of having joined an exclusive club rather than because they thought it was necessarily the best all-round newspaper. After the siege of Wapping, the Independent was portrayed as the new Times – embodying the old paper’s qualities but without the associations of being owned by a Reagan-admiring Australian-American tabloid magnate. ‘It is, are you?’ became the motto on the new badge for those who liked to be thought of as independent-minded people with a newspaper under their arm that proclaimed that very quality. In one sense, by 2002 the Independent had indeed begun to resemble the pre-Murdoch Times. It had a circulation of only a quarter of a million, could not afford to invest as much in journalism as its rivals and – despite its title – was dependent for survival on being bankrolled by a foreign domiciled proprietor. As has been noted, the proportion of ‘A’ grade readers that were attracted suggested that the Independent never quite managed to topple The Times at the upper end of the market. But unquestionably many newspaper purchasers liked the idea of a paper that declared independence from its masthead, even in the days when it was actually in the grip of the Mirror Group. In contrast, a paper owned by Rupert Murdoch was assumed not to be independent. There was a natural self-interest in The Times’s commercial rivals portraying it as the mouthpiece of its owner. By questioning the objectivity of the paper’s judgment, these attacks hit at the heart of its appeal. Every editorial decision, from backing the Conservatives to backing New Labour was, sooner or later, attributed to Murdoch’s hidden hand. Differences of opinion not only between his British newspapers but also with his own supposed opinions were disregarded or overlooked.

  Those at the helm of other News Corp.-owned assets might have had different experiences, but a detailed survey of the first twenty-one years of Murdoch’s ownership of The Times can only conclude that the interesting feature is how little, rather than how much, he has influenced its editorial politics. The one editor who complained about coming under pressure to justify the paper’s opinions was Harold Evans although there was no occasion when a change of line actually ensued. The suggestion that the decision to replace Evans as editor was largely due to political differences is hotly disputed. The issue of The Times’s Chinese coverage and whether there was a conflict of interest with News Corp.’s Far East business aspirations has been examined in Chapter Twelve. There are also a few other scattered complaints: a belief among some that there is a pro-Israeli bias that emanates, however indirectly, from the proprietor’s opinions, or the ordeal of the education correspondent, John Clare, who once had to endure a lengthy monologue in which Murdoch vehemently expounded his own (conflicting) views on the subject.47 Compared to the evidence that the proprietor has not interfered in the paper’s politics, these charges hardly sweep all before them. The ‘Murdoch press’ was not, for instance, delivered on a plate to Tony Blair. According to Murdoch’s recollection of events, he did not even know what party The Times was going to support in the 1997 general election and was surprised to read it had opted to back a specific cause instead. This is also the recollection of the editor at the time. Peter Stothard, indeed, claimed that he had never received a political instruction: ‘In all the time I’ve been writing, I can’t remember ever having heard the words “that’s a great leader” or “that’s a terrible leader”’ from Murdoch. Far from being the recipient of unsolicited comments on the line the paper took, Stothard admitted, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen an email from Rupert.’ Telephone conversations, when they occurred, usually took the form of Murdoch ringing for an informal chat about how everything was going on the paper and what was making the news in Britain. Indeed, by the 1990s, the proprietor’s trips to Wapping were not frequent. New York was his base and the film, television and satellite divisions of his business increasingly occupied his time. It was as likely that Sky’s fortunes would take him to London as any pressing matter with his broadsheets. The Times was one of more than 175 titles he owned in three continents. Even if he was minded to interfere, the sheer scale of his other international commitments restricted his opportunities to do so. Partly because of his expanding interests, the editors of The Times in the 1990s saw or heard much less of their proprietor than did their predecessors in the 1980s.48

  This was not just Stothard’s experience. Simon Jenkins recalled that Murdoch was ‘scrupulous’ about not breaking his guarantees on editorial independence. ‘I didn’t have one discussion with Rupert on editorial policy,’ Jenkins maintained. Yet this is not to say the proprietor exercised benign neglect. He remained a nuts and bolts newspaperman, easily annoyed by a bad picture headline or squashed ‘basement’ article layout. He never forgot the lessons taught him as a young trainee on the Daily Express’s backbench by Edward Pickering. While Murdoch left his Times editors to get on with their political postures, Jenkins discovered, ‘He was obsessive about where the pictures were going and where the money was going and this and that was going.’ On occasions when he did come over to The Times, he had the unnerving habit of leafing through the morning’s paper while mumbling dismissive observations about how poorly it was laid out or the priority given to different articles. ‘In many ways,’ conceded Jenkins, ‘that’s more demoralizing than having someone telling you whether you’ve got to be pro or anti abortion.’49

  Successful partnerships between editor and proprietor depended upon a mutual understanding of what was to be rendered unto Caesar. The proprietor had to keep out of the politics of the paper and (despite his inclinations to be a chief sub) the daily decisions that were matters of editorial judgment. In turn, the editor had to recognize that major strategic decisions with budget implications had to be agreed with the proprietor. There was nothing exceptional in this division of powers. It was in areas of grand strategy that Murdoch made his personal mark on the paper, deciding whether it could afford to undercut its rivals in cover price, invest in more business pages to take on the FT or change the number of sections in which it was printed. It was at this level that he intervened. Given his enthusiastic endorsement of investing in more sports pages, it might be contested that Murdoch’s influence was as much manifested in expanding the paper’s coverage of the Euro ‘96 football championship as its opposition to the euro currency.

  Murdoch was not interested in owning The Times as a ticket into the British Establishment and nor was it deployed effectively as his prime weapon in exerting political power. As far as he perceived it, Margaret Thatcher cared much more about
where the massed battalions of the Sun were going to attack.50 During the government of her successor, The Times did little to endear itself to those in power, yet nor did it align itself with the official Opposition either. It could not even quite bring itself to endorse the party that was obviously going to win the 1997 general election by a landslide majority. If the paper’s wires were pulled to a particular and cynical strategy, it was hard to comprehend what the agenda was. Rather, Murdoch’s motivating interest in The Times seemed to relate more clearly to its central place in the history and development of his first and greatest hobby – newspapers. It was the paper from whose offices his father had once worked, the paper whose life had been saved in 1908 by Sir Keith Murdoch’s friend and patron, Lord Northcliffe. In Britain, at least, the populist Northcliffe is the press baron with whom Keith Rupert Murdoch has been most frequently compared.

  Murdoch made his name as an owner of tabloids who then bought his way into broadsheets. Nicholas Coleridge has suggested, ‘had he acquired his papers in a different order – if The Times, the South China Morning Post and The Australian had come first – and he’d only then moved on to buy the tabloids, the world’s perception of him would be substantially different … But that is an idle scenario, since in the Murdoch empire it has always been the profits of the tabloids that have funded the loftier acquisitions.’51 Of course, his purchase of The Times was not conceived in a fit of sentimentality alone. It came as part of a package that included the highly profitable Sunday Times. Furthermore, The Times was, and remained, the company’s flagship newspaper and, as such, added value – however indirectly – to the international prestige of News Corporation. Reflecting in June 2002 on the growth of News Corp. from an Australian newspaper group to a global media organization, its president, Peter Chernin, stated his belief that acquiring The Times in 1981 ‘was the real transforming purchase of the company’.52 Yet it was never just another deal. Murdoch enjoyed a challenge. Earlier that same month, he had been asked in an interview what he thought would be his lasting contribution as a patron of the popular arts. Without pausing for thought, he answered, ‘Saving The Times.’53

  V

  Was The Times still an influential newspaper in the manner in which it could make that boast earlier in the twentieth century? It was the experience of Les Hinton, executive chairman of News International from 1995, that politicians tended to approach him more frequently about what the Sun was writing about them, while bankers and lawyers were far more likely to want to discuss something published in The Times.54 The Sun unquestionably had the weight of numbers on its side and that was no small matter in a democracy. The great strength of The Times was not just in its news reporting (other papers were also good at that) but also in the quality of its ‘specialist’ writers. Frances Gibbs as legal correspondent, Michael Evans as defence correspondent and Ruth Gledhill as religion correspondent not only reported news, they wrote from the perspective of deep knowledge of their subject and personal acquaintance with those who were at its forefront. The possession of such expertise was central to the paper’s ability to convey authority.

  In contrast, the importance of the leading article has declined markedly since the 1950s when a Times editorial really was judged according to its contribution to the thinking of those who ran the country. That it should count for less before the bar of world opinion half a century later is hardly surprising. Having declined as a world power, the British view counted for less and thus, consequently, so did the pronouncements of its most famous newspaper. And within Britain, the growing plurality of published and broadcast opinion naturally diminished the claim of any one voice to speak with overweening authority. This increasing plurality of opinion also undermined the status of the leading article within The Times itself. In the 1950s, the paper published news reports and leading articles, but not much independent comment. The growth of the columnist – of which Bernard Levin, Matthew Parris and Simon Jenkins shone brightly in the paper’s constellation – significantly broadened the forum for debate. Surmounting this, the often daily political editor’s briefing by Peter Riddell, foreign editor’s briefing by Bronwen Maddox and business editor’s briefing by Patience Wheatcroft created additional poles for authoritative comment. Taken collectively, they reduced the leading column to the ruminations that come out of a process of consensus decision making. This was not of itself a detraction. It made the leaders special and distinct from the personal perspectives of the star columnists.

  The academic attainments and intellectual breadth of the principal leader writers of the past twenty years – Owen Hickey, Peter Stothard, Rosemary Righter and Tim Hames – hardly suggested the fine art had passed into the hands of crude hacks. Were these cultivated minds wasting their erudition on leading articles that only they and those they hoped to impress actually read? On a day-to-day basis, a Times leader rarely made the ‘political weather’ among those for whom it was primarily aimed – the top policy and opinion formers in the country. Yet where The Times stood on major issues at key moments still ensured it was an important barometer of informed opinion. Perhaps this was because the paper’s politics were less predictably partisan than those of the Telegraph, the Guardian or (increasingly) the Independent while, if voting for Neil Kinnock was any judge, the editorial line in the FT appeared to have little impact in swaying informed opinion. During the 1990s no other broadsheet’s leading articles could be seen to have consistently carried more weight than those of The Times.

  One assumption remains. It is that in the late 1960s and 1970s The Times was a liberal Conservative newspaper propped up by an indulgent proprietor, Lord Thomson, and that thereafter it was a more strident newspaper forced into an excessively commercial approach by the rapacious bottom-line capitalism of its owner, Rupert Murdoch. In fact, much changed so that much could stay the same. After twenty-one years of ownership, Murdoch had become almost as indulgent as the traditional proprietors he was supposed to have replaced. He had pumped millions of pounds, with surprisingly mild complaint, into a newspaper that still failed to make great profits for his company. Even the paper’s political outlook had changed less than might be imagined. In backing first Margaret Thatcher and, after about 2000, Tony Blair, it was performing its traditional twentieth-century function as a moderating rather than an instinctively hostile counsel to the government of the day. The period of the Major Government, which it attacked from a principled but non-party perspective, was the break from habit in this respect. Like Rees-Mogg personally, it had become disillusioned with the cause of European federalism (although not the notion of a European family of nations) and remained sympathetic to an Israeli state that continued to find itself surrounded by Middle Eastern enemies. In general tone, The Times of 2002 resembled closely the paper Rees-Mogg and the Thomson family handed over to News International in 1981: a liberal Conservative newspaper still, generally free market in outlook and intolerant of those who pandered to gut prejudices whether from left or right. Indeed, its endorsement of Labour in the 2001 general election called into question whether it was even light blue. Like the new Establishment and the pages of the FT, it contained shades of soft fuchsia. In this, the paper was a product of its times.

  What, therefore, would a historian in fifty or a hundred years time deduce from the changing pattern of The Times’s interests and obsessions between 1981 and 2002? A declining interest in the proceedings of parliamentary government would be obvious, although not of executive authority. A broadening in artistic and cultural perspectives would be a growth area, not least the seriousness with which middlebrow or popular forms of entertainment and expression were increasingly accorded attention. There would be much more evidence that women played a larger part in writing and reading the paper. Continuity would be found in the editorialising of the leader page, the columnists and the preoccupations of letter writers. The business pages would also contain much that was familiar, although better written and with more imaginative graphics. The phenomenal growth of inte
rest in sport – and in particular the doings on and off the football pitch – would be of particular note. The historian would be struck not only by a less cluttered layout, with wider margins of space and bigger headlines but also by how much more visual it had become in its presentation. High-resolution photographs that might stretch across a third of a page had replaced grainy images ranging in size from the postage stamp to a small postcard. The newspaper had responded to the visual power of its deadliest rival, television. These changes would be even more apparent if a historian compared The Times of 2002 with that of the inter-war or early post-war years. There would be difficulty in locating writers in the old paper capable of blending satire and penetrating insight with the literary brio of Matthew Parris. Nor would a mid-century equivalent of Simon Barnes be easily identified in the sports section. The inter-war business pages would certainly not be read for pleasure. The cryptic crossword would be just as vexing.