Mirror to Nature
By GERARD FAY WHICH daily paper had the snappiest snippets from the Kinsey Report: and which invented the daily aphrodisiac, Jane ? Which paper first printed Mrs. Simpson's name and picture and took her lover's side in the abdication row ? Which paper thought of " Whose finger on the trigger ? " and paid £1,250 for it in an out-of-court settlement of Churchill's libel action ? And which paper came near to being suppressed by " the well-known chief censor and public turnkey ' Herbert Morrison, with the full support of Ernest Bevin and Clement Attlee acting on the instructions of Winston Churchill ? Why, the Daily Mirror, which has found it so profitable to go " Forward with the People " and has had no difficulty in forgiving the Labour Party for the sins of its leaders in the wartime National Government I The Daily Mirror began as a morning paper for gentlewomen, written by ladies. It boasted that ' information on society functions will be provided by the people concerned, not merely professional reporters." Every reader of a local weekly knows what happens when this is done. It makes a phrase like " The bride's mother wore . . ." seem brave and fresh. So a new Mirror editor had to be found and the ladies had to be sacked. Hamilton Fyfe was the man and to him . . . fell the distasteful task of sacking the women, and the rape of the Sabines wasn't in it. "They begged to be allowed to stay," he recalled. " They left little presents on my desk. They waylaid me tearfully in the corridors. It was a horrid experience, like drowning kittens."
So the Mirror became the first picture paper and was caught up in the financial jugglings of Rothermere and the Berrys. It was also involved in the bitter Beaverbrook-Rothermere campaign against Baldwin which inspired honest Stanley to spit out " What they aim at is power, and power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot through the ages " —and, Mr. Cudlipp comments without, apparently, his tongue in his cheek : " So far as the Daily Mirror at that time was concerned, the charge was instified."
But the paper lived for thirty years before it became what we know today, and between 1927 and 1935 it distributed over £2,000,000 to the shareholders in bonuses. It was hardly a financial failure, then, when Harry Guy Bartholomew, who had been with it almost from the beginning, was given control in 1934, took over with a circulation of less than three-quarters of a million and began to drive it up towards five million, a number it is likely to reach one of these days. How did he do it ? By " shocking 'em and socking 'cm."
First eye-opener (Cudlipp writes) was the transformation of the news pages. Sledge-hammer headlines appeardd on the front page in black type one inch deep, a signal that all could see of the excitement to come. Human interest was at a premium, and that meant sex and crime.
Having backed the wrong horse in the abdication crisis, the Mirror then picked a winner with its anti-appeasement line. This brought clashes with The Times and Geraldine House accused Printing House Square of having a fifth column, of pursuing a policy " that has put heart into every reader who has the Fascist and, the anti-democratic cause at heart." The sin and the shame of the Dawson days are supposed to be • Publish and be Damned ! The Astonishing Story of the Daily Mirror. By Hugh Cudlipp. (Andrew Dakers Ltd., 12s. 6d.) forgotten but could there be any connection between The Time? cold, brief obituary of Silvester Bolam and the contemptuous treatment it had from the Mirror in 1939 ? It was odd and prophetic that the Mirror should refer to " The Times fifth column " for in 1941 there were ill-concealed hints from the Government that the Mirror itself was conducting a fifth- column operation.
" Much the most effective way In which to conduct a Fifth Column movement at the present time " Churchill wrote to Cecil Harmsworth King in 1941 " would be the method followed by the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Pictorial. Lip service would no doubt be paid to the Prime Minister, whose position at the moment may be difficult to undermine. A perfervid zeal for intensification of the war effort would be used as a cloak behind which to insult and discredit one Minister after another. Every grievance would be exploited to the full, especially those grievances which led to class dissension. . . . Thus large numbers of readers would be brought into a state of despondency and resent- ment, of bitterness and scorn, which at the proper moment, when perhaps some disaster had occurred or prolonged tribulation had wearied the national spirit, could be suddenly switched over into naked defeatism, and a demand for a negotiated peace."
This was laying it on with a trowel and King argued that the Mirror was warmly loyal—especially to the future. Churchill was unbending and in the end King wrote 6'. . we now have your point of view clearly before us. The staff have had their instructions and you may have already noticed a marked change of tone. If in future you have any fault to find with our contribution to the nation's war effort, I hope you will let us know at once."
But appeasement did not end there. Cassandra, who worried the Government most of all, went on giving his own special point of view until he went for a soldier. In no time at all he was running an army newspaper. This is the newspaper which believes it was a decisive influence in the general election of 1945—a Labour David which stood against the combined Goliath of the Tory papers, when the Daily Herald seemed mute. McCallum and Readman in The British General Election of 1945 refer to the Express and the Mirror as " the two most widely read papers during the election . . . the papers which may claim to have had the most extensive influence by reason of their huge circulations."
The claim has often been made, but has it ever been sub- stantiated ? Was not the election of 1945 a great lesson in the helplessness of the popular press in the face of a public which knows what it wants ? Did the Mirror propel the band-wagon or merely jump on behind and give a shove now and then ?
I cannot feel that the Mirror is justified in its pretensions to political influence—a passing influence at the polls, perhaps (but by no means as certainly as Mr. Cudlipp seems to think). After• that very little—and of course democracy is not just a matter of counting heads. In the self-praise printed by the Daily Mirror there is a jarring Messianic note. Take this, for example: We believe in ordinary people. We rejoice in the good humour, the fine spirit and the success with which the British people are tackling the problems of modern life.
Social evils exist: the Mirror exposes them . . . and so on—the hand of the promotion department guiding the pen of an advertising copy-writer. When the news- paperman pops up, the result is quite different—this, for instance, by Silvester Bolam, the editor who went to prison for six months for contempt of court over the 1-1,.:(1 case: " The Mirror" . . . he wrote in February " is a sensational newspaper. We make no apology for that. We believe in the sensational presentation of news and views. . . . We shall go on being sensational to the best of our ability."
That was honest enough.
But I do not hold it against Cudlipp that he takes so seriously the " astonishing story of the Daily Mirror." After all he is the editorial director of the Mirror and of its companion the Sunday Pictorial.
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