The lies they write
Patrick Marnham
Lies, Damned Lies and Some Exclusives Henry Porter (Chatto & Windus f9.95)
As I was about to review this book, my eye fell on a caption in the Daily Telegraph of 7 January. 'Christmas is coming — girls in unseasonally festive spirits as they stir the traditional mix in a Derbyshire bakery where the puddings are being made in good time for export.'
One trouble with Mr Porter's book is that it destroys the pleasure of such inno- cent little events. There were the girls, up to their creamy elbows in raisins and sugar, neat caps and pinnies in place, welcoming smiles on all five faces, and I couldn't believe a word of it. Which Derbyshire bakery? Why was the town, at least, not identified? No date, just the word `unsea- sonally', so the picture could have been taken last September. Whole thing was an obvious lie.
Alternatively the story could be correct in every detail. Maybe Monday's Daily Telegraph could carry a picture of a lot of girls in a bakery, working on a January Sunday, to make Christmas puddings for the export trade, but the Daily Telegraph is in no position to complain if one doubts it, and nor is Mr Raphael Dunvant. To quote Mr Porter:
An observant reader of the Daily Telegraph might have noticed the remarkable frequen- cy with which one Raphael Dunvant cropped up in the paper's news pages . . . He came from a military background, owned a modest estate in Gloucestershire, was fiercely patrio- tic and was constantly bemoaning the decline in standards of morality and service in British life . . . On one occasion he launched a furious attack on the designs of Tony Benn and the Labour Party on the acres of the landed gentry. On another he complained of the slack service of the salesgirls in Fortnum and Mason; a sharp slap on the bottom improved their speed and efficiency, he advised. A few months later he was found, sitting under a palm tree four hundred and fifty miles up the Congo . . . (later he molested) a party of boy scouts on a camping trip to Scotland.
So, Porter is telling us, you cannot trust even the paper you can trust. For months or years, a reporter or a sub-editor or the news editor or even the editor or maybe all of them, have been beefing up their stories with entirely fictional mat- erial. Naturally, one finds it impossible to believe that Lord Hartwell would be a party to this state of affairs. Porter uses the story of Raphael Dunvant as an amusing introduction to his argument, which it is. It is the weakness of his book that he does not seem to realise that it is also one of the most serious examples of the dishonesty which he sets out to expose.
To avoid one form of dishonesty, which the author does not cover, I should say that Porter is a friend of mine. I would add, truthfully — though with some reluctance — that this is a good book, very funny at times and worth referring to every time the popular press tries to justify its appalling behaviour by reference to public standards and the need to defend them. It is also a muddled book, with an irritating tendency to underrate its best material. Porter sets out with high purpose. He has listed as many of the lies deliberately printed by Fleet Street in one year as he could find. `When a newspaper lies it exploits its readership in two ways,' he tells us. 'The first is that the reader may fairly expect to get an accurate version of events when he buys a newspaper . . . Second it is fre- quently the case . . . that the public them- selves are the victims of newspaper lies.' He goes on to state that if people knew of the lies printed by Fleet Street they might start demanding a better service: I think that is optimistic.
More important, the author fails to distinguish between various levels of un- truth. Newspaper horoscopes and bingo games are such obvious frauds they are scarcely worth mentioning. Anyone who believes in them deserves what he gets. It is worth recording that 80 per cent of what the popular press prints about the Royal Family is lying nonsense. Porter devotes a lot of space to this; his treatment of James Whitaker, the royal bloodhound, is ex- tremely amusing. But some of the space might have been better devoted to a discussion of how the Royal publicity machine, in its turn, tries to use the press. This brings us to the lies engineered by publicists which are frequently harmless, such as the Derbyshire Christmas pudding factory — perhaps. They are, however, humiliating for the press and demoralising for those who are trying, poor saps, to set the record straight. Too many reporters are happy to cooperate with this sort of lie. Above publicity lies we have the lies of public relations, which is to say black publicity, the sort of lies so elaborate that even honest reporters frequently have no idea that they are being used. The tech- niques employed include smokescreens, red herrings, distracting fairy tales and 'disin- formation', complicated stories which can take months to be revealed as lies. In so far as the press is the victim of PR, the subject lies outside Porter's terms of reference, but there is one area, the parliamentary lobby, where quite lofty journalistic figures line up with tails wagging. Porter takes the view that the parliamentary lobby is essentially an instrument of government propaganda, and provides enough evidence to support it.
Nevertheless, Lies Damned Lies has a basic flaw. Porter is a journalist and seems
unable to examine the position from the point of view of a newspaper reader. So, he fails to make the essential distinction be- tween lies which are detectable and lies which are invisible. That is why he fails to notice the significance of Mr Raphael Dunvant. Dunvant is a comic creation, a little gem, a happy moment. But he is also a deliberate lie in a paper which claims to tell the truth. Therefore Dunvant matters much more than the bluster, bullying and shiftiness in the Sun or the News of the World or the Daily Mail, all of which are thoroughly dealt with in Lies, Damned Lies. People do not buy the Daily Tele- graph to read about Little Noddy. They do it in the possibly mistaken belief that they can thereby discover something of what is going on. We need to know what They are up to. If newspapers stop telling us, we would be better off watching the half- witted rubbish served up on television.
Porter's epigraph for the book is the exhausted old verse by Humbert Wolfe about bribing the British journalist. He should have gone to Chesterton's magnifi- cent 'When I came back to Fleet Street', with its reference to
. . all the truth they talk in hell,
And all the lies they write.
If he had set out to discover what turns honest young men into the drunken, idle lickspittles who slump and stagger all over EC4, he might have given us an even better book. As it is, he has had the courage to stick his neck out but failed to identify those operating the guillotine.
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