The Murdoch Archipelago

by Bruce Page

  All this might have been remedied had not the argument merged into the jostling for Cudlipp’s favour – and succession. Soon it related as much to editorial philosophy and market research as the duelling of Montagues and Capulets. Among the precarious, self-absorbed sub-editorial communities of Old Fleet Street, professional discussion frequently took such a course. Moderating the raw material of human competition is hard for any corporation: IPC, faithful to the anti-ethos of the Stab in the Back, hardly tried, and the Mirrorscope Wars capriciously stalled or wrecked several careers.

  Larry Lamb, the Mirror’s chief sub-editor, was the biggest casualty, and in 1968 he quit to become Manchester editor of the Daily Mail – a bitter return to regional obscurity, after reaching the last few rungs of a national ladder. When Murdoch found him a year later he had, he admitted, a vast chip on his shoulder.

  Born in 1929 to poor parents in a Yorkshire mining town, Lamb was exactly, painfully, a product of his times. Ironically, the man who made a monkey of Mark Abrams was a proof of Abrams’ vision, for in Lamb’s own belief his natural abilities justified aspirations more sophisticated than the popular newspapers of his day. School, which he left at sixteen, did just enough to stir Lamb’s potential, but nothing to certify it. The odds against someone of his origin being educated even close to capacity were crushing by US or Australian standards, and can hardly be grasped in present-day Britain, where a third of students reach university or an equivalent level.

  For people maturing in the 1960s and 1970s, graduate status increasingly was a passport to the journalism Lamb sourly called Unpopular – sourly, because the passport was linked still to narrow economic privilege. In his generation The Times still asked recruits about their private means; even in the next, an Oxbridge degree could lead straight to a Financial Times career after the drafting of a few top-of-the-head words and a chat with Sir Gordon Newton, the editor. His eye for quality was allegedly infallible, but someone like Lamb – who started as a clerk, and struggled for eight years to get any newspaper work – could scarcely be impressed. Ten years’ sweat at the Mirror went into his rise to chief sub. The causes of his fall are obscure, but as later he both expressed loathing for Mirrorscope and claimed to have been one of its inventors, an arbitrary component seems likely.

  Certainly his emotional need for an attack on the Mirror matched Murdoch’s financially urgent requirement. The crew they enlisted in three frantic weeks contained numerous boozy derelicts, but the sober ones generally felt some less furious version of Lamb’s own motivation. Roy Greenslade, one of the youngest members of the first draft, recalled them as ‘exMirror staff frustrated by failing to win promotion … or, like me, wannabes who saw it as a stepping-stone to the Mirror’.

  Of Fleet Street’s existing institutions the Mirror then was pre-eminently the one from which young men and women with few advantages but their talent hoped to profit – those who, in Anthony Delano’s words, wanted from journalism ‘classless acceptance, swift upward mobility – and glamour’. It was known to pay better than the papers demanding social or educational gloss, and to be free of the increasingly arcane obsessions ruling the Express. Though they had no wide professional culture, its aspirants were fiercely professional about (in Greenslade’s words) the ‘rigorous technical expertise’ of the Mirror – which took popular broadsheet style to additional extremes of verbal compression and typographic inflation. The veteran Dick Dinsdale was only half joking when he said the ideal story contained three paragraphs and ‘every paragraph, three sentences. Every sentence, three words. Every word, one syllable.’

  Graphic devices were lavishly applied to such textual pellets: they were italicised, CAPITALISED (along with a font change), emboldened, reversed into or

  – white on black or tone – emphasised with barkers , stars

  and bullets

  , or enclosed in

  , perhaps

  , before being wrapped up with headlines based (if possible) on puns or alliteration. For most talents these procedures, under hot-metal technology, demanded sufficient personal investment to generate a strong craft pride. This often blended into contempt for anyone uninitiated, and resentment of anyone who might doubt their ultimate value. In expert hands, this style could energise the least substantial input. Actually, it made substance almost irrelevant. Hugh Cudlipp himself liked to say, ‘I could produce the paper with just Johnny Johnson and the PA’ – meaning the routine news-agency feed from the Press Association, plus a single staff reporter to cobble up angles (though not even in hyperbole did Cudlipp mean a single sub-editor). But it always stood near the point where technique stops being the servant of content and turns into its master – becoming a complex way of presenting simplicities, not a way of presenting complex things simply. Newspapers are not alone in such failings – the engineer Ettore Bugatti said that many cars expressed ‘the triumph of workmanship over design’ – but newspapers cannot halt production while they rethink. The Mirror’s populist technique imposed a narrow agenda – like the fancy perspective of a Mannerist painting excluding real observation – and trying to reform it on the fly was a confidencesapping process.

  What Lamb’s drunks and wannabes turned out, from Day One, was really the Mirror – the only newspaper they knew how to make – stripped of Mirrorscope and all such troublesome experiments. The Mirror’s chief columnist was ‘Cassandra’, actually Bill Connor; Lamb hired Connor’s son to write as ‘Son of Cassandra’. The Live Letters page was recreated as Livelier Letters. The famous strip-character Andy Capp – reputedly, an archetype of the Mirror reader – was cloned by the Sun as Wack, and Garth – not much less famous – became Scarth. ‘FORWARD WITH THE PEOPLE’ – which the Mirror had dropped to seem less partisan – Lamb pinned to the Sun masthead.

  Shame usually inhibits mimicry among journalists, but not among Murdoch’s recruits – because they thought the Mirror belonged rightly to them, and was turning itself into something alien. Murdoch was giving them a chance to recapture it, though most of them probably – Lamb certainly – overestimated the extent to which they would have property in the victory, which very soon appeared spectacular. Sales of the Sun and the Mirror during the 1970s moved in striking counterpoint, as Figure 1 shows. Clearly there is something more to the story, as the Sun’s rise was steeper than the Mirror’s fall. But this was not due to the Sun reaching out to new readers. Between 1970 and 1980 its average sale rose by 2,822,363, very close to the amount by which the other popular dailies collectively declined in the same period, that is 2,825,658. (This includes the loss of the Daily Sketch, which its owners killed in 1970 in order to focus on reorganising their other daily, the Mail.)

  Figure 1

  Nothing occurred like the vast expansion led in previous decades by the Express and then by the Mirror. Figure 2 portrays a market essentially without growth, within which the Sun is substituting itself for the Mirror– and taking over the market-leader position which before had made the Mirror the natural beneficiary of other titles in decline. Then at the end of the period a general downturn commences, with the Mail alone maintaining a rising trend. This was a significant change in the situation of the popular dailies – though the popular Sundays had for some time been established in generic decay, and their combined sale fell 22 per cent between 1970 and 1980 (20,472,622 to 15,779,428).

  During these years the IPC management behaved with staggering commercial folly. The company had undertaken a complex diversification programme, centred on a reverse takeover by its own subsidiary the Reed paper group. Making this agreeable to the City involved ‘sweating the assets’ heavily for revenue. Thus the Mirror’s cover price was kept high, averaging 15 per cent above the Sun’s between 1970 and 1980 – for a paper which usually had less than thirty pages when the Sun was comfortably over thirty. As the advertising quota was also kept high in the Mirror, the Sun’s essentially similar editorial content probably cost its readers about half of what IPC was charging. The group transformed itself into R
eed International during 1970.

  Figure 2

  Derivative as the Sun was, it came with one marketing weapon new to Fleet Street: heavy television promotion, which Murdoch had practised for some time with News Ltd’s Australian papers. Disliking the expense, Reed allowed the Sun to outspend the Mirror on promotion by roughly four to one. This may or may not have moved many readers directly, but the Mirror’s circulation staff had no doubt about its effect on the news-distribution trade. Big-circulation newspapers depend continuously on news-stand display and availability. Murdoch gave the news trade a higher percentage of the Sun’s lower cover price, which anyway made an effective incentive. Newsagents, already anxious about fading popular volumes, were disposed still more towards the Sun by its promotional activity.

  Today’s management theorists would say that IPC/Reed recklessly abandoned brand-maintenance when a major brand was trying to reposition itself radically – and was facing competition from a substantially cheaper imitation. It was commercial self-immolation. For the Mirror to suffer massive damage there was no need for editorial alchemy at the Sun. Plagiarism served perfectly well.

  So far from fresh thinking, Murdoch and Lamb simply stepped back in time to make a newspaper as narrowly predictable as the traditional Mirror. There is a sentimental legend of its wit and vitality but it is not one which can survive scrutiny of Stick It Up Your Punter or a visit to the newspaper section of the British Library. Lamb himself, after parting with Murdoch, presented a less gungho retrospect than News Corporation’s barkers and apologists have done: he estimated that he would have had more fun in broadsheet journalism. (Not implausibly, he might have been the man to fix Mirrorscope.)

  To be sure, the Sun was denounced for innovations, but mostly they related to sexual convention. From November 1970 the first right-hand page presented a female nude; when added to a menu of Susann-style serialisations and recycled sex manuals (The Sensuous Woman, and so on) Lamb’s Page Three Girl attracted many accusations of pornography. Certainly bare flesh and pounding blood were displayed and described with an extravagance new then to British dailies, but the realities of pubic hair (and indeed of orgasm) remained far too misty for real pornographers. The Sun went obsessively, but not deeply, into sex because it was a paper with a tiny editorial range, and no other subject can be revisited as often.

  Essentially, Murdoch and Lamb emulated Bartholomew’s tactics. But they were not extending a market – rather, they were competing for part of a saturated one – so the social dynamics and the consequences were both very different. The Mirror audience had been recruited from people who had not before used daily newspapers, so severe was their educational poverty (which is not to say their civil qualities were lacking). It is hard to believe that anything more demanding could have served them as a vehicle of entertainment and of elementary – but sceptical – news coverage of their rulers’ activities.

  However, by the time Murdoch’s Sun rose an educational revolution was under way in Britain – far from a clean sweep of the injustices visited on Lamb’s contemporaries, but still profound. In 1970 a third of school leavers had a C-grade or better in English, nearly a quarter had the same in mathematics, and they were participants in a rising trend. Modest enough in absolute terms, these grades require a capacity to analyse or create structured text and to manage the four arithmetic operations – abilities disseminated to some extent among those with lower grades and even with none.

  Serious controversy exists over international comparison, and the rate of educational expansion. Less seriously, there are arguments about value, which in extreme forms assert either that this revolution has not occurred, or that it has degraded culture by having occurred (notions worth testing when ‘dumbing down’ debates enter the Newscorp story). But neither these controversies nor inconsistencies in the data obscure the gross pattern. By 1974, decisive progress had been made towards the present-day case, one in which 85 per cent of the population are educated to standards of literacy and numeracy which scarcely applied to 10 per cent when Britain’s unique popular press was created.

  At this point – and when it was already clear that nobody had to buy newspapers for elementary news – Murdoch and Lamb launched a paper which, as most journalists saw it, sharply reduced any demand made on readers’ minds. Arthur Christiansen’s son Michael became editor of the Mirror in 1970, and stated that view baldly: ‘From the popular newspapers’ point of view I think that Murdoch’s arrival in Fleet Street was the worst thing that could have happened … The clock of journalistic standards has been put back ten to fifteen years.’

  Lamb was enraged, particularly as Christiansen seemed to imply that the Sun was peddling gross erotica. Even if true, the charge would hardly have been one for the Mirror to prosecute. But Lamb did not try seriously to defend the Sun as a good newspaper for its time in any terms that journalists could engage with. Rather, he denied, and with moralistic zeal, that they had any business offering opinions on its qualities. The proper, objective test of a newspaper’s quality, he said fervently to his staff – and to an appreciative Murdoch – was ‘the number of people who bought it’.

  And indeed that number is critical. Though literary theory may allow for the neglected masterpiece, newspapers are about circulation. But the complexity (Lamb must have known) is that the current sale of a newspaper doesn’t predict its sale in a year’s time (or in a decade’s time) much better than stock-market prices predict the future – though circulations are at least less volatile than shares. Indeed, they are inflexible as a rule in the short term, and the Sun’s instantaneous break into the Mirror’s sale was evidence of something entirely unusual – of substitution, in fact, not editorial competition. Any opinion of a newspaper’s quality – whether that of a journalist or not – is of course subjective. But so is circulation: the figures collect numerous subjective preferences – like other records of economic choice – and imagining that they impart their own objective character to the material they summarise is a crude fallacy.

  And journalists have, finally, no other business but estimating their product’s future value from present-day evidence. Circulation is an input, but a treacherous one, because the feedback it gives from editorial development is heavily lagged. Transient effects are quite frequent, as when heavily promoted serials ‘put on’ thousands of sales, but anyone analysing audited averages must be struck by the rarity of identifiable short-term impact. This insensitivity is easy to understand: readers, though quite as subjective, are far more laid back about newspapers than the people producing them.

  Creative responses to ambiguous data, drawn from assorted social and technical sources, require collective thought and argument in any business. Though fond myths exist of the mastermind flying solo by gut, most creative editors – Ben Bradlee, Harry Evans, Charles Wintour – have been essentially collegiate, if sometimes imperial in style. But Rupert Murdoch’s distaste for the collegiate runs deeper than style. Reports of him both as a charmer and as a bully refer to situations which are one on one (or hierarchical), and the evidence is that any rare editorial gathering with frank and level exchanges renders him confused or impatient. The copycat approach to producing the Sun was able to avoid anything like that.

  What Christiansen tried to say was that Murdoch was taking market share by means which would erode the overall market. At the time his prophecy was dismissed as the product of self-interest. But from our longer perspective we can see the decay beginning in Figure 1 and Figure 2 the Abrams effect, as it were, kicking in at the border of the 1980s (though with many complications still to come). There were Cassandras less compromised than Christiansen, but they were ignored as thoroughly. Murdoch never supposed the tabloid style might grow sterile, or the Sun itself suffer destructive competition.

  Christiansen should have blamed his own corporate colleagues no less than Murdoch – and probably did. Having compounded commercial negligence by complacency near to arrogance, they switched after roughly three years to da
rk despair about editorial development. Mirrorscope foundered by 1973; whether any of a rapid succession of editors might have solved the problem it represented cannot now be known, as none had backing enough for a serious try. The Mirror of the 1970s turned by degrees into an imitation of an imitation of itself – extreme humiliation, though worse lay in store.

  Lamb’s defeat of his old colleagues was complete in 1978 when the Sun overtook the Mirror – and, as his obituarists later observed, it had a meaning broader than personal revenge. ‘Larry Lamb,’ said the Independent, ‘achieved more than any other journalist of his generation … he was the paramount influence on the course the British popular press has taken … Those who think tabloid standards have fallen precipitately … hold him largely to blame.’ Curiously, no memorialist placed any blame for fallen tabloid sales on Lamb, though by the time of his death in May 2000 the facts were quite conspicuous.

  Murdoch’s success has been in more than one case the obverse of others’ dereliction. But gaining market-domination in British popular newspapers was the decisive instance. Once it was established, he was close to fireproof financially. By the mid-1970s, Lamb estimated, News International (the old NOTWO) was producing annual net revenue at a rate equal to £125 million in today’s values. It was at this time (1976) that Bruce D. Henderson of the Boston Consulting Group produced his famous anatomy of the ‘cash cow’ which every major corporation indispensably needs to ‘pay the corporate overhead … pay the corporate interest charges and justify the debt capacity for the whole company’. News International ranks as an outstanding specimen – ruthlessly acquired, and ever since fiercely defended by any weapons Murdoch and his team find themselves able to manage.

  For some inhabitants of Fleet Street its swift rise gave special pungency to schadenfreude generated by the Mirror’s fall – they could gladly reaffirm the famous axiom about never losing money ‘by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people’. Fleet Street happened about then to be rich in contrary evidence. The Daily Sketch (seen expiring in Figure 2) underestimated intelligence valiantly while losing heroic sums; more recently, billions have been lost estimating that people will buy anything a dotcom offers. However, the old saw survives on giving comfort rather than truth: anyone knows that seeking the reader’s intelligence is arduous, but easier ways, if given specious respectability, may qualify as the path of duty. Its author was H. L. Mencken, who never detected popular intelligence, or (as he said) reason to change his mind on any substantial matter.