AND ANOTHER THING
A failed attempt at character assassination by our most evil newspaper
PAUL JOHNSON
Probably the most evil institution in Britain today is the News of the World. It specialises in ruining the lives of prominent individuals (and their families) and people in positions of trust by dredging up disgust- ing allegations about them. It pretends to be concerned for the public welfare in pub- lishing such filth. But of course it cares nothing for the public welfare. It is interest- ed only in circulation, advertising revenue and profits for its owner, Rupert Murdoch. It panders to the most depraved tastes of the British reading public by serving up what is in effect pornography in the guise of 'news'. Many years ago, when it still had some claims to be a serious newspaper, I used occasionally to write articles for it on politics and world affairs. In those days it carried quite a lot of such material, and genuine news stories too. But it is now nothing but a gutter-sheet. I do not see how anyone can read it without feeling secretly ashamed, or how anyone can write or work for it without knowing, in their hearts, that they are betraying their profession.
This paper (and others at the cesspit end of the tabloid market) lets it be known that it will pay well for information 'exposing' the prominent. So all kinds of greedy, shifty and grudge-bearing figures get in touch. Very few, I may add, receive the fortunes they expect. Downmarket tabloids are expert at short-changing their informants or indeed shopping them to the police if there has been any law-breaking.
Last year a man went to the News of the World with a story that, as a boy a quarter of a century ago, he had been molested by a Catholic priest, a man now in his mid-sev- enties and in frail health. The paper promptly wired him up with a secret tape recorder and sent him on a carefully briefed 'fishing expedition' to the priest, instructing him to make the accusation in the hope of shocking the victim into some admission. The trick worked to the extent that the tape apparently contained some words which might be construed as an admission of guilt. So, last August, the paper ran the story under the headline: Celebrity Priest Admits: I Was a Pervert'. Everything in this statement is false: he is not a celebrity priest, he is not a pervert and he admitted nothing. But the paper's lawyers no doubt advised that there was enough on the tape to make a libel action unlikely. In any case the victim, like most Catholic priests, is penniless and had no chance of taking on the Murdoch billions. Moreover, his age and physical frailty made the strain of protracted litiga- tion out of the question — as the News of the World was well aware.
So a horrible crime against a good and holy man — the best parish priest I have ever come across — was committed. How can Rupert Murdoch, a man for whom I once had some respect and even affection, permit such things to be done in his name? How can Murdoch's wife, who claims to be a Catholic, suffer her husband thus to stain his soul? What made matters worse in this instance was the behaviour of the Catholic diocesan authorities, who are now quite hysterical about this kind of accusation and overreact in the most brutal manner with- out any regard to justice or the rights of the accused man. So the priest was suspended from his duties without inquiry or a word of explanation to the parish. Their task was made easier by a humbugging article in the Daily Telegraph from Clifford Longley, an oleaginous character who has 'good con- tacts', as they say, at Archbishop's House, Westminster and in many another anony- mous ecclesiastical den.
Other Catholic writers, in their disgust at the News of the World's behaviour, flatly refused to repeat the accusations. Longley not only did so, naming the priest, but sug- gested his punishment: that he should be `moved from his parish and placed with his consent under some formal restriction as to the future scope of his ministry'. He went further and wondered whether this punish- ment 'would be too severe a consequence or not severe enough' (my italics). I have never read such a repellent article in my life. But it did the trick. The shadowy cleri- cal bureaucrats at Westminster felt justified in proceeding in their furtive manner. So a miniature Dreyfus case was born. Happily, unlike the Dreyfus affair, it last- ed only six months. The case against the priest collapsed for lack of evidence. Whether the accuser, who was referred to as 'John', ever surfaced, or whether he got his thirty pieces of silver from the high priests of the News of the World I do not know. But last Sunday the priest was tri- umphantly reinstated in his parish, which had been kept completely in the dark throughout. Cardinal Hume came down himself to make the announcement, the least he could do considering how badly the business had been handled. The Spanish Inquisition in its heyday would have made a fairer job of it.
What are we to do about our gutter press? They now inspire the same feelings of fear and contempt as did the trades unions in the 1970s. The damage they are doing is commensurate. They are corrupt- ing the entire newspaper industry because the habit of publishing or manufacturing filth about the private lives of individuals is spreading upwards from the lowest tabloids to the middle-market ones and even into the quality broadsheets, which now often repeat or elaborate material published by the Sun, Mirror and so on, in the same shameful quest for readers at any cost.
Worst of all, the nation is being corrupt- ed. Thanks to the press — and of course to the activities of such money-grubbers as Britain's pornographer-in-chief, Michael Grade, on Channel 4 — children scarcely in their teens are familiar with every variety of sexual perversion and are encouraged to believe that the people who hold high posi- tions in our country are degenerates and monsters. We are raising a generation which receives virtually no moral education at all in the family or the schools and is sys- tematically contaminated and polluted by the media. These are sins crying to Heaven for vengeance.
Just as we rightly subjected the unions to a new and healthy regime of law in the 1980s, so we must now discipline the media in the 1990s. The public interest demands it and I have no doubt it will come soon, with a law to provide statutory protection for privacy leading the way. The only question is whether we have a sensible and limited change in the law while the Tories still have a majority in the Commons, or a foolish and draconian one from a Labour majority. It begins to look like the second, and it will serve the media right.
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