THE BATTLE FOR GOOD JOURNALISM

Peregrine Worsthorne on the chance for Fleet Street

to return to high quality writing after the battle of Wapping has been won

UNTIL recently there seemed no hope for very high quality journalism in this coun- !rY. There may not be much hope now. But 1f Mr Murdoch can consolidate his victory M the battle of Wapping — most emphati- cally not won on the playing fields of Eton there will be some hope. For at least the ccluamercial pressures forcing papers to go down market in pursuit of higher circula- tions will have been reduced. By breaking the Power of the print L iolons Mr Murdoch's "ews International can new produce newspapers at a fraction of their for- !tier cost. This means that In theory the Times could new return to its erstwhile very low circulation of genuine top readers say 300,000 — and still rake money. There is no eager any pressing need, therefore, for bingo or for P,,,iUlistine editors of the Times and Sunday Times and if Mr Murdoch con- to make use of de circulation-building ovices, this will be by cultural choice, or econo- tIlle greed, rather than ecenomic necessity. Realistically seaking, t"°wever, it is propbably unreasonable, not ay unfair, to expect Mr Murdoch to make use of the opportunities for higher ittc'arnalism which his defeat of the unions the made possible. After all, his battle with the unions is still not entirely over, even if the outcome is not in doubt. What is more, and editors and senior staff of the Times orlircil Sunday Times were chosen with the ill" Fleet Street conditions in mind rather writers; the new; as fighters rather than wwt:Iters; as doers rather than thinkers. To the battle of Wapping Mr Murdoch needed editors of, shall we say, a certain krynd; to exploit it in the way I am suggest- g' he will need editors of a very different quickly, which will not be easy to acquire rc,kIY, even if he wanted to, which is self most unlikely.

So the probability must be that the

Times and Sunday Times will use their new bravely won freedom from trade union restraint to attract more readers rather than make do with fewer. All the talk is of a cut in the cover prices, with a view to hitting the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs. Such tactics, of course, are perfectly legiti- mate. But what they suggest for the im- mediate future is an almighty battle for the middle-brow section of the newspaper- reading public or such parts of it as are conservative-minded, leaving the Guar- dian with a virtual monopoly of the middle- brow progressive readership. In theory, again, the Guardian could use the new opportunities to make do with fewer read- ers by putting into reverse its recent circulation-building efforts, all designed to attract the half-educated polytechnocracy. But the Guardian, too, has built up a staff, many of whose members are skilled only in writing soft-Marxist pap, and will not easily be able to turn itself back into being acceptable once again to such remnants of the well-educated liberal mind as still survive.

Into this gap at the top, created by the intellectual vulgarisation of both the Times and the Guardian, a new newspaper hopes to spring very shortly. It will be called the Independent. Such a newspaper venture would have been unthinkable until recent- ly. It has been made thinkable by the new possibility of making profits with a low circulation. Two questions immediately arise: (1) Are there enough journalists around in Britain today to staff a genuinely high quality newspaper? and (2) Are there enough readers who want such a product? I have already expressed some doubts about the supply of suitable journalists, in a recent Spectator Diary; doubts which the editors of the new Independent, Andreas Whittam Smith, Matthew Symonds and Stephen Glover — all for- mer Telegraph men — tell me are not borne out by their recruiting experi- ence. I hope their confi- dence proves justified. On the question of a mar- ket for high quality jour- nalism, however, even they are not entirely san- guine. There are certainly some readers who resent the junk journalism sides of the present Times and Guardian. But are there 300,000 of them? On the European continent, not- ably in France, Germany and Switzerland, there is a market for high quality journal- ism. But here, such has been the failure of our educational system that there may not be.

These are deep waters. Certainly Bri- tain's educated class is less interested today in public, particularly international affairs,

than was the case when I first became a journalist on the. Times in the late 1940s.

My first job as a sub-editor then was to check the spelling of the names of the newly appointed Sudanese Cabinet. This one story took me hours of research in the

Times library. In spite of my best efforts, a tiny error appeared, provoking floods of scornful corrections from readers who were Middle East experts. Working on the Times in those days one was conscious of a formidably erudite and literate readership in all areas. Another sub-editing job of mine was on the Court and Social Page where the tiniest error in somebody's title would provoke fury in the shires.

Nowadays errors of fact, great and small, appear in the Times all the time, without anybody seeming to get very angry. Why should a newspaper bother to go to the expense of geting things right, and inculcating accuracy in its writers and subs, if the reader does not care? As for the leading articles, enormous trouble was taken in the old days in their preparation and writing, with every nuance weighed, almost as if they were state documents. In a sense this is what they were, since they were read throughout the chancelleries of Europe (and did their authors not know it?) as reflecting the opinions of the ruling class of a great empire.

Not any longer having a great empire to rule, or even a great nation to govern, Britain's political class nowadays seems more keen to be entertained than in- formed, except possibly in City affairs and sport where the demand for accurate in- formation and authoritative comment would seem to be greater than before. Given such a demand, quality newspapers do respond. Their City and sport pages are now much the most serious parts of the paper, attracting the best journalistic ta- lent. It could be just a coincidence that the authoritativeness of other parts of high quality journalism has declined so much. But I fear part of the explanation must be that Britain's educated class nowadays takes money and sport more seriously than it takes politics, diplomacy or culture.

Television, too, I think, has contributed to accustoming the educated public to lower standards in reportage and commen- tary. All sections of the public now look at television news and television public affairs programmes, like Panorama or Weekend World. But because even the highest-brow television programme has more than a million or so viewers, its demands on the intelligence are pretty limited, judged by the highest standards of a bygone age. Watching Brian Walden discussing liberty and equality with Neil Kinnock on Weekend World two Sundays ago, I was struck by the incredibly banal quality of the questions and answers. A sixth-form dis- cussion in a good school would have been more intellectually demanding. Yet these programmes, of which Weekend World is among the best, are regularly viewed by educated people who thereby become used to having politics discussed in a sub-puerile manner. Politicians, academics and jour- nalists who perform on these programmes also get used to mouthing gross oversimpli- fications which they would not think of uttering off the screen.

Before the war, highly educated people were scarcely plugged into middle-brow intellectual life at any point. They lived an intellectual life at their own level. In the television age, however, all brows share the same culture to an extent that would have amazed earlier generations and I am convinced that this development has had lasting effects on quality journalism. For if people have heard the news oversimplified in the evening on News at Ten, and heard it discussed later in fifth-form terms on Newsnight, they will not have been got into mental training for an authoritative, long article, which makes no concessions to the weak-minded, in the next day's quality newspaper.

0 bviously they will want something a bit fuller and deeper than was available on the telly. But not all that deeper or fuller, and certainly not as full and deep, and as devoid of pictures, as the readers of, say, Le Monde, are prepared to accept. If British telly was as bad as continental telly, or American telly, then the educated clas- ses might not look at it at all. Unfortunate- ly, however, British telly is comparatively good; good enough, that is, to take the edge off the educated public's appetite for high-class journalism. It also arouses an expectation for drama which infects print journalism disastrously. Reporters feel they too have to introduce their story with a verbal equivalent of that stirring music which precedes all telly newscasts, and punctuate their story with lots of verbal colour. In the old days, such practices were confined to the popular press; today they are to be found just as much in the quality press, since telly-viewing has made even educated people simple-minded.

One could go on. Perhaps truly high quality journalism depends on the exist- ence of a leisured class with time on its hands. A reader strap-hanging on the underground on his way to work is obviously going to want a somewhat dif- ferent product from a reader perusing his paper over a leisurely breakfast in a stately home. Unlike the latter, who has time to appreciate length and depth, the former must make do with summaries, bare out- lines. (Except possibly on Sundays.) All these reasons, and many others, are grounds for pessimism about the prospects for higher journalism. Or are they merely (I ask myself) a species of special pleading; the rationalisation by journalists of my generation of the sense of defeatism and fatalism engendered by the pre-Murdoch economics of Fleet Street? So much less frustrating to convince oneself that no market existed for high-class journalism than to have to admit that it was only trade union bloody-mindedness which prevented one from trying to meet it.

Andreas Whittam Smith, and his col- leagues, being far younger, are clearly much less infected by these counsels of despair, and even I am beginning to feel that Wapping Ho, the land is bright. Miracles do happen in the newspaper business; sudden changes of fortune which transform prospects out of all recognition. After all, I never thought any proprietor would make me editor. Having proved unduly pessimistic on that score, I am inclined to think that anything is now possible in the new climate — even the return of high quality journalism. In fact, warming to the theme, let me say what I mean by high quality journalism in contemporary circumstances. It can never return to the pompous patterns of old, since the British political class no longer needs to take itself, or the world, quite as seriously as it did. Why nowadays should anybody, apart from a few Foreign Office officials, know the names of the Sudanese cabinet, except for the purposes of winnng Mastermind? One of the consolations of not being an imperial power is that our communal attention can be given to a different order of serious matters. Let us try to imagine a new daily paper edited by some latter-day Dr Johnson. It would be highly intelligent but also commonsensical; authoritative as well as readable; high" principled without being in the least mora- listic. Readers would look to it for the truth, not through the devious and intellec- tually corrupt methods of investigative reporting but through the editorial applica- tion of sound judgment, deep historical knowledge and passionate integrity. There would be plenty of idiosyncratic opinion and shafts of dazzling originality. Nothing would be excluded on principle except ignorance, vulgarity and malice, i.e. most gossip columns. Such specifications are not utopian. If Ferdie Mount was made editor, I suspect the Times would fulfil them pretty quickly. It was he, for example, who punctuated all the Westland guff about the iniquity of leaking a Law Officer's letter by a fey' telling historical examples of how modern the taboo against this practice is. Again and again he clears the air of cant instead of polluting it even further, as so many other columnists are prone to do, using conventional wisdom to disguise their ignorance. The snag, of course, is that until recently managements demanded more from ail' tors than the gifts described above. Editors were required, understandably enough given the pressures of the market place, to double circulations; to grapple with the, unions and much else besides. The idea 01 a writing and thinking editor, who conceit" trated on the quality of his paper's prose and the accuracy of its news became anachronistic. Possibly it will remain sO• The dream that Mr Murdoch's Wapping victory has made small circulation high , quality papers economic again may prove a mirage. One has seen no sign of compara- ble victories in the US having had these kinds of beneficial consequences so far: Butone never nows. When Cecil Kirie took the Daily Mirror up market in th! 1960s, he left a lot of dissatisfied morons at the bottom, thereby allowing Mr Murdoch . to undercut the Mirror with the Sun. N°v".. Mr Murdoch has taken the Times down market, leaving a lot of dissatisfied man: darin readers at the top. Who will fill this new gap at the top, that is the big question' the answer to which need no longer cost anything like the proverbial $64 million.