FLEET STREET'S BLACK HOLE

The press:

Paul Johnson attacks the way

industry is reported

I SUPPOSE we have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that our subsidised theatres, especially the Royal Shakespeare and the National, exist hminly to give second-rate playwrights expensive opportunities to peddle left-wing propaganda — one good reason for starving such places of money. If only these solemn dogmatists had a little more talent! Oh, for a Hugo, a Malraux, even a Sartre! There is no institution in Britain today more vulnerable to attack than Fleet Street. It is inefficient, coward- ly, corrupt and contemptible. Yet the anti-press play Pravda at the National seems to have missed the real targets. The trouble with our national newspapers is not a man like Rupert Murdoch, at whom the National's shafts are aimed. As a matter of fact Murdoch has not only saved the Times from almost certain extinction; he has greatly improved it. The trouble lies in the journalists: in their false values, their lack of education, their appalling disregard for accuracy and their sheep-like propensity to move in flocks instead of thinking for themselves. Come to think of it, they have a lot in common with our left-wing play- wrights, being indistinguishable and pre- dictable.

As it happens, the National's attack crn Fleet Street is also ill-timed, since the press has just scored a notable victory, in the best traditions of journalism, by forcing that vast and sinister union, the Transport and General Workers, to hold a fresh election for its General Secretary. At the press conference where the union's bosses conceded defeat, a snarling Moss Evans blamed it all on the newspapers. Well: he was quite right for once. Without the persistence of certain papers, the faking and forging and fiddling of this scandalous election would never have been exposed, and the grumbles of many individual mem- bers, who knew they were being cheated, would have been brushed aside. It is reminiscent of the exposure of the then Communist-controlled ETU by my friends Woodrow Wyatt and John Freeman.

In the case of the TGWU scandal the credit is widely spread, though I think the chief honours should go to Frank Chapple, who now writes a column in the Daily Mail, and the Observer. The Observer was particularly effective and I rejoice to see this great newspaper getting its teeth into a real story and worrying it to death, instead of wasting time and money on phoneys like the Belgrano and the Oman affair.

What is significant about the exposure of the TGWU's election habits, however, is that the industrial correspondents, the journalists whose particular job it is to follow the report on trade union matters, seem to have played little part in getting the story moving, at least in the early stages. Just as, in the bad old days, the diplomatic correspondents had to keep on good terms with the Foreign Office, their primary source of news, so the industrial correspondents are heavily dependent on one source of information — the official union machines — and are correspondingly docile and afraid to bite the hand that feeds them copy. There are some notable excep- tions, but equally there are one or two who live in the pockets of the union bosses. An industrial correspondent who took part in a systematic campaign to expose abuses in a union would quickly find himself frozen out by his sources. Union bosses regard any criticism as malicious and motivated by anti-union hostility and they tend to be vindictive towards reporters they regard as enemies.

The blame for this unhappy state of affairs lies partly with Fleet Street itself and its curious structure. To begin with, the industrial correspondents are mis- named. They do not deal with industry but almost exclusively with trade union matters (some are more accurately called 'labour correspondents'). Indeed, if they did deal with industry as a whole, they would be much more effective because, with a wider spectrum of matters to report, they would be less dependent on union souces for their livelihood. Unfortunately, coverage of in- dustry as such comes under 'business', and that is a matter for the City pages. The

cleavage between the City pages and the general news pages on a British paper is absolute. They are as separate as the sports pages; more so, in fact, because the City staff usually have offices actually in the City, rather than Fleet Street.

This is another anomaly and means that in newspapers, as in Britain generally, far too much attention is paid to financial matters and far too little to industry. It is one reason why we have done so badly as a manufacturing nation in recent decades. In America the average citizen knows far more about his country's industrial and business affairs than his counterpart here.

The Wall Street Journal is easily the biggest newspaper in the US, selling over two

million daily. The same is broadly true of Australia and South Africa, where news- papers provide much more extensive and effective coverage of industry and all busi- ness matters. In Britain, by contrast, while purely City affairs are usually well chewed over, industry itself tends to fall into a journalistic black hole except when there are strikes, when the so-called industrial correspondents take over and often report them from a union viewpoint.

What I would like to see is a leading newspaper make a complete break with the past and set up an Industry Unit. It would be run by an experienced senior reporter and consist of a staff of five or six. Each would be a specialist in particular areas of industry and one or more would specialise in the unions; but all would be general business reporters too. The mandate for the team would be to cover industry in all its aspects, including labout relations; the same people who attend the TUC and

union conferences would cover the CBI and other business gatherings, and a mem-

ber of the team would be as familiar with boardrooms as with union HQs. Such an arrangement would reduce the leverage union officials have over 'industrial' cover-

' age and would enable developments in manufacturing to be much more effectivelY

reported. Not least, it would improve Fleet Street's handling of strikes by entrusting coverage to men and women familiar with both sides and with the needs of industry as a whole.