Dirty rotten journalists
Sadistic, debauched and full of hate: Ruth Dudley Edwards on tabloid newspapers and trash TV Ihad a look at my 89-year-old mum’s Sunday People,’ a chap called Fred observed to me on Wednesday last week, ‘and it’s just soft porn. I asked her why she still bought it and she said because she’d always bought it, like she always buys the Mirror and votes Labour. My mum likes her rut.’ I can never hear comments on the state of the gutter press without thinking about my late friend, Hugh Cudlipp, the greatest of all tabloid journalists. But when that same day I heard that Rupert Murdoch was to read the lesson at St Bride’s Church in Fleet Street at a service to mark the departure of Reuters to Canary Wharf, I could hear Cudlipp howling a favourite diatribe from his grave about what happened after 1969, when he disastrously sold the Digger the Sun. ‘It was the dawn of the Dark Ages of tabloid journalism, the decades, still with us, when the proprietors and editors — not all, but most decided that playing a continuing role in public enlightenment was no longer any business of the popular press. Information about foreign affairs was relegated to a three-inch yapping editorial insulting foreigners. It was the age when investigative journalism in the public interest shed its integrity and became intrusive journalism for the prurient, when nothing, however personal, was any longer secret or sacred ... when the daily nipple-count and the sleazy stories about bonking bimbos achieved a dominant influence in the circulation charts.’ Cudlipp might have added that it was also the period of growing disconnection between journalists and their readers. He and his kind had come from the working class, had mums like Fred’s, had done their wartime or National Service and served their time in the provinces. They knew the difference between Runcorn and Reigate and Aberdeen and Aberfan. They went to real places to cover real stories, hobnobbed in their pubs and workplaces with electricians and technicians and van drivers and printers as well as journalists. They believed their average reader to be a decent sort of person who could grasp complicated ideas if they were clearly expressed, and they thought it was their job to appeal to his better rather than baser instincts.
Their successors mainly come from universities and schools of journalism, will have had little or no experience of real live reporting, no enlightened editors to dispatch them around the country to do serious investigations into ghetto life, and will spend most of their journalistic life behind computer screens in tower blocks. The most striking aspect of today’s Mirror and Sun and their Sunday equivalents is how they demonstrate their profound contempt for their readers, whom they clearly view as morons incapable of focusing on anything except footie, booze, celebs, shagging and reality television. Everything can be trivialised: Saturday’s Sun contribution to culture was to judge Beethoven (‘randy bugger’), Mozart (‘windy Wolfgang’) and Tchaikovsky (‘off his nut’) to be ‘the biggest hell-raising “mad fer it” rascals to ever sit at a piano’. When serious issues are addressed, as with Rebekah Wade’s famous News of the World campaign about naming paedophiles, the appeal is to sentiment and bigotry, not to reason.
An hour or so after Murdoch read the lesson at St Bride’s, Archbishop Rowan Williams, whom the Sun thinks ‘hopeless’, gave a typically thoughtful, dense lecture at Lambeth Palace on ‘The Media: Public Interest and Common Good’, in which he spoke of the British journalistic profession as predominantly male, young, white and London-based, largely unaware of the real concerns of most of the community, a tribe handicapped in promoting true communication.
Williams lamented the debasing effect of ‘corrupt speech, inflaming unexamined emotion, reinforcing division, wrapped up in its own performance’. And in a passage that well describes what Cudlipp’s successors go in for, he talked of ‘manipulating fear’ and ‘exhibiting violent conflict between people for entertainment’.
This latter sin is these days a hideous con spiracy between tabloid journalists and their television equivalents. Cambridge-educated Peter Bazalgette brought us the British Big Brother, increasingly sadistic and debauched versions of which provide pages of tabloid copy. TV provides the people; the tabloids urge the mob to hate and despise them. Bernard Crick, George Orwell’s biographer, compared the News-of-the-World-reading mob in the Paulsgrove estate in Portsmouth — who rioted over paedophiles — with the crowds who scream outside the Big Brother studio for people to be evicted. The first is ‘the hate-full mob’ and the second ‘the empty mob’. Both have been incited by journalists. What politician, asked Crick, would now rebuke Murdoch, as Stanley Baldwin rebuked Beaverbrook, for exercising power without responsibility? ‘But Baldwin lived in “elitist” not “populist” days.’ Bazalgette has suggested that — inspired by Big Brother — the media should encourage the young to take an interest in politics by giving less time to policies and more to personalities. Perhaps because he is himself so much a part of the metropolitan elite, he misses the point that contemporary politicians rarely have interesting personalities. Just like the identikit journalists, they’re a tribe largely disconnected from the people they are supposed to understand. The reason John Prescott and Alan Johnson often seem to be the only human beings in the government is that they are not like those massed ranks of colleagues who have been lawyers, academics or career politicians. Prescott has been a chef and a steward; Johnson has been a postman. Both fought their way into politics through the demanding route of trade union politics. And even though Prescott speaks a strange language, he makes people laugh, while Johnson has resolutely refused to adopt NewLabourspeak. But there will be few others coming up that route. The trade unions are effectively dead.
I was no fan of Mao, but when I was a civil servant he inspired me to recommend that all officials and politicians be sent to work in fields or factories every seven years or so. I have become more radical with age. Additionally, I wouldn’t let anyone become an MP without 15 years’ experience in the real world — which would not include either law or academia. And I would close down the schools of journalism and allow no one to work on a London-based paper until they had served ten years in regional offices. Then we might have politicians that people wanted to vote for and journalists who wanted to make people better. Oh, yes, and while I’m at it, I would stop all this nonsense of degrees for nurses and police. We want nurses who just want to look after people and police who just want to protect them.
Only connect.
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