WHEN A READER CANCELS
The press: Paul Johnson on the dilemmas of editors who shock readers
NEWSPAPER editors are not normally people who command much sympathy from me. But there is one topic on which I feel for them. How and where do they draw the line on publishing material, espe- cially photographs, which in one way or another shocks readers? In this as in other respects the Permissive Society has intro- duced not so much freedom as confusion. Take nudity, for instance. Once there were clear, if unofficial rules. No general pub- lication could show a woman's nipples except in the case of 'natives' doing tribal dances. In the soft porn trade, complete nudity was allowable but if pubic hair was displayed the police would prosecute. What is the position now? Nobody seems to know. I understand that, for the porn mags, the police will act only if an erect 'They say drink ruins your sex life, thank goodness.' male penis is shown. But for general publications all depends on the whim of the proprietor. Captain Maxwell does not like Page Three nudes. Rupert Murdoch does. So that is what readers get or not. It is all very like the religious settlement in the Holy Roman Empire: cuius regio, eius religio.
Clare Short's private Bill, which passed its first hurdle by a vote .of 163 to 48, and may do much better than the wiseacres think, would ban Page Three nudity altogether. But this would merely add to the confusion since the motives behind the Bill are not dislike of obscenity but opposi- tion to female exploitation. Many of the 163 who voted for it support the Permissive Society. They have no objection to obscen- ity as such. They are anti-Clause 29 types who are happy to see local councils spend- ing ratepayers' money to promote homosexuality. They would regard attempts to stop the BBC showing sex- scenes, provided they were 'artistic', as unacceptable censorship. To them, Mr Whitehouse is the enemy. They certainly hold no brief for traditional morality as such. Clare Short herself is strongly in favour of the right of women to have their unborn babies aborted. Her supporters object not so much to the nudes as to the notion of men enjoying looking at them. In effect, the Bill would ban not nude ladies as such, merely popular ones.
That does not make much sense, except to a certain well-defined, left-wing puritan who objects to people enjoying anything. But then few of our attitudes towards visual shock make much sense. I found myself spending a long time examining the photographs, published prominently in the Sunday Times, of the IRA mob attacking the car to get at the two British soldiers inside. I found it shocking and deeply disturbing to look at the faces of men not just bent on murder but within a few minutes of actually carrying one out. The
faces of the soldiers, as they looked through the car windows at their would-be assassins, not having yet grasped the appalling things that would happen to them within seconds, were even more haunting. Seeing these photographs together almost made one a spectator of the killings them- selves. I cannot get them out of my mind. In a way, I wish I had not seen them. Yet I have no doubt that it was right to publish them: taken in conjunction with the televi- sion footage, nothing has done more to expose the true nature of the IRA or of the damage it is doing to Ireland.
Yet oddly enough it was not these photographs to which most people ob- jected. The Sunday Telegraph ran into a storm of protest for publishing a picture of the body of one of the dead soldiers. It was certainly gruesome, and it filled one with horror at the people who could do such things. But when I saw it, it did not occur to me that there was much room for argument about whether to publish it or not: obviously it had to be published as an essential part of covering the story, just like the attack on the car. It was telling you something no words could possibly convey with equal force. When I first looked at the picture, I never imagined that readers would object to it. In fact they did so, in large numbers and with great vehemence. When I next saw the paper's editor, Peregrine Worsthorne, he was visibly shaken by the force of the storm he had aroused — and he is not a man who normally shrinks from controversy.
Who is to say what will shock? This week's issue of the same paper carried an excellent article by Celia Haddon on the appalling cruelties the British inflict on animals. It was illustrated by three photo- graphs, two of them very shocking indeed. One showed a hen which appeared to have lost all its feathers as a result of being kept in a battery. The second showed a pit bull terrier part of whose jaw had been torn away during a staged dog-fight. I thought the battery hen photo was a marginal case because it was not really clear what had happened to the poor creature, and in any case it is notoriously difficult to identify with hens. But I hated the photograph of the bull terrier and wished the newspaper had not printed it. I do not want that particular image in my mind, where it will certainly stick • for some time. But I may well be alone in thinking this. Most animal lovers may feel that, if you are going to publish an eloquent exposure of what animals have to endure in this country, it is right or even essential to reinforce the words with the most striking photographs available. And I have to admit that the photograph of the terrier brought home to me the sheer evil of commercial dog- fighting in a way the article itself could not. But I still wish I had not looked at the Sunday Telegraph and seen that picture. Is my attitude illogical? I think it probably is. But then, as every editoi- can tell you, logic does not come into the response of readers to pictures.
Last week I had a letter from a very indignant Spectator reader. He had, he said, been horribly shocked by the obscen- ity of the journal's cover two weeks ago. So shocked, indeed, that he had cancelled his subscription. He was now writing to me to beg me, as someone anxious to uphold journalistic standards, to join him in pro- test and cease writing for the paper. I was dumbfounded by this letter. .I had no recollection of the cover whatever. After some rummaging around, I found 'the offending issue. True, it did show an anatomical cross-section of a cloacal kind, though rendered harmless, I would have thought, by metaphor. I would never have imagined it outraging an old reader to the point of forcing him to abandon the paper altogether. I had not even noticed it myself, any more than I notice the nudes when I flip through the Sun or the News of the World: they are wallpaper. It is dis- maying to find that my' views, and the angry reader's, as to what is now accept- able are so far apatt. It is one instance of the confusion of values which the permis- sive age has created, and of the difficulty editors now find in trying to Do the Right Thing.
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