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The bygone golden age of the press is a myth

IN the sport of press-bashing, dog does not eat dog. But as I have been devouring dachshunds all my life, on this occasion I come not to bury Fido but to praise him. The cliche is that newspapers are so rotten and in decline that they merit no defence against the internet barbarians at their gates. So claim recent diatribes from journalists John Lloyd, Alastair Campbell and Nick Davies. They are all talking rubbish.

Davies says that newspapers are now owned by giant corporations out to make money and that this makes journalists tell lies, of which his researchers have found many. Campbell regards the press as slimy and mendacious towards the Labour government, unlike when he worked as a journalist and it was slimy and mendacious towards the Conservative government. Lloyd, the media’s Savonarola, bewails the press as incorrigibly popular and “startlingly intrusive and scornful of politics”.

After a week in which the press, and the press alone, revealed the MPs’ expenses racket, the prison bugging scandal and the antics of the London Development Agency, I wonder what sort of press these gentlemen prefer. But I think I know. It is that of the golden age when they were starting out in the profession and all was well in the world.

Editors of most serious newspapers get regular letters complaining of declining standards and dumbing down. The letters hark back to a time when news was impartial, editorials independent, opinions judicious, and the world taken seriously.

In response, I used to get dusty back numbers from the archives to read from those glory days, say in the 1950s and 1960s. They were dreadful. Newspapers were brief, humourless, reverential of authority and composed of Hansard (official report of parliamentary proceedings), publicity handouts, court reports and agency copy. Wars were reported from “our” side. A political story was simply taken from a secret “lobby” briefing. Foreign news was rarely more than one broadsheet page.

As for much-vaunted investigative journalism, there was none (outside the News of the World). In the late 1960s, there began the Sunday Times’s exposures on the Russian spy Kim Philby, thalidomide and air crashes, made possible by that paper’s huge profits (and a good editor). Davies eulogises the then owner, Lord Thomson, as interested only in money (a quality he disparages in others). Yet Thomson bought the Times not to make money but to lose it in return for the prestige of ownership. He devastated it by going for circulation, sparking a round-robin letter of protest and mass staff resignations. There was no golden age.

No topic is so surrounded by fiction as newspaper ownership. When researching a book on the subject (The Market for Glory, 1986), I concluded that nobody seriously buys or runs a paper to make money but rather to spend it, usually on an effervescent mix of status, nobility and political and social access. Papers are like racehorses. If they make money, which few do, that is merely a bonus.

Rupert Murdoch did not buy the Times or, more recently, the Wall Street Journal to make money but for pride in ownership. When the American Robert Anderson bought the UK Sunday Observer, he was driven straight to Downing Street to receive the prime minister’s thanks.

When Victor (soon Lord) Matthews bought the Express group, his first question was: when do I get on BBC radio’s Any Questions? Conrad Black bought the Telegraph for pleasure and prestige. As Elias Southwood’s Daily Herald staff used to sing: “We have no party, creed or bias. / We want a peerage for Elias.”

What is extraordinary is that, given the haphazard ownership of the press over the decades, the U.K. market has been so stable (still nine titles) and the product probably better and certainly bolder.

A quarter century ago, exposing MPs would have had journalists condemned at the bar of the House. Revealing Tony Blair’s abuse of intelligence would have led to “Spycatcher” trials. The scandal of military supplies in Afghanistan would have been buried by legal injunction.

I cannot see how corporate ownership has been “a disaster” for journalism, as Davies and other claim, when pagination has tripled since the Wapping revolution of the 1980s (deplored by our golden-age theorists) which broke the power of the print unions and left Britain five serious dailies where before there were four. Without it most titles would have closed, as in union-dominated America.

Given slightly lower staff numbers, Davies equates the resulting higher productivity with lower quality, ignoring the fact that most of the extra space is filled by freelancers.

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