The Weather in `The Street'
By BRIAN INGLIS THE fate of the Sunday Dispatch is in a sense even more disturbing than other recent Fleet Street disappearances. The Mail and the Dispatch together ought to have provided that weekday-Sunday complement which, we are so often assured, enables the presses to run at optimum profitability. Yet for all the resources of the old Northcliffe empire the Dispatch has been unable to pay its way. Admittedly it has been suffering from a constitutional weakness arising out of its 'blue,' Pornographer-Royal period. A man who has led a life of debauchery finds, when he tries to pull himself together, that it is not simply his health that has been impaired —former friends mistrust him, and old com- panions in vice find him a bore. So it has been with the Dispatch. Still, it had begun to steady itself; and considering the insatiable demand for Sunday papers, its owners' inability to repair its fortunes suggests that Fleet Street is in an even unhealthier state than has been feared.
Two new surveys of the weather in the Street have appeared in the last few days—H. A. Tay- lor's The British Press (Arthur Barker, 21s.) and Peter Benenson's A Free Press (Fabian pamph- lets, 3s. 6d.); and the more stimulating (and much the shorter) of the two is written by the non- journalist, Mr. Taylor has some pertinent criticisms of the Press Council, but they are at excessive length, and their mildness can be gauged from the fact that the foreword to his book is contributed by Sir Linton Andrews. Mr. Benenson, more perceptive, makes only a passing reference to the Press Council, an institution which is hardly likely to survive (at least in its present form) the report of the Royal Commis- sion on the Press—if the report is acted upon; which, of course, is a heady assumption.
Mr. Benenson is a lawyer; and with the excep- tion of doctors no group more actively resents their profession being examined by an outside critic than journalists. In spite of the fact that he has avoided censoriousness, his criticisms will be keenly scanned fot signs that, lacking the profes- sional background, he does not really understand Fleet Street's problems. A Free Press survives this scrutiny. The author has tried to com- press too much into a pamphlet's dimensions, throwing out ideas in profusion without arguing them through; but they are sensible ideas.
On one issue, however, he does seem to me to have gone sadly astray. He realises that the flow of news out of bureaucracy—using the word not in its wide sense, but simply to cover all branches and offshoots of administration—is constricted. He feels that in a democracy, this is unwise. The stock argument against allowing journalists more scope to find out what is going on in, say, a government department is that journalists are not to be trusted. But surely, he argues:
The best way to raise standards in any pro- fession is to raise its stature; this is particularly true of the journalist's profession. One way of doing this is by giving official recognition to those journalists whose assignment is to work closely with the administrative machiner■ of state.
Mr. Benenson would not have put forward this suggestion if he had worked as a journalist in Fleet Street—or anywhere else. When I first arrived to work on a newspaper I was sent on a round of the various departments to gain ex- perience; ending up as assistant to the man who stood on what was jocularly referred to in the office as 'the last trap-door,' an expression which conveyed the common knowledge that the job tended to be given to somebody who had sunk through all the other available posts either from incompetence or because he suffered from one of journalism's occupational diseases, usually drink.
It came as a surprise to me, on arrival in Fleet Street, to find that the feet on the last trap-door were those of the paper's Diplomatic Correspondent, To readers, 'Diplomatic Corre-
'Heard this rumour that we're being closed down?'
spondent' sounds mildly distinguished, or at least respectable: and so it had once been. Why the decline? The only reasonable explanation is that through the years the Dip, Corr. has allowed his standing to be downgraded by excessive re- liance on, and eventually subservience to, the Foreign Office. There have been exceptions re- cently, but few; most have relied on their official contacts, making little attempt to follow the US example and uncover stories for themselves. And at the same time they have been squeezed out of the Embassy circuit, at least on the popular papers, by the gossip columnists, whose copY from parties is more useful to the paper; it was no coincidence that the first Dip. Corr. I can remember meeting in Fleet Street was also a member of his paper's gossip column team.
The status of other specialist correspondents varies, but it is not high. Readers may share Mr. Benenson's belief that prestige attaches to the position of Lobby Correspondent; in my ex- perience other journalists may envy him for his leisure, but they are rarely impressed by his activity. One leading political correspondent is a man so transparently moronic that it shocks even his colleagues; men not easily shocked. And in general, the nearer journalists are to the source of their material—the further they are 'in' with authorities they are watching—the lower their morale.
One reason is that government departments here regard the press as something to keep news Out of—unlike in the US, where they regard it as something to leak news into. An accredited correspondent in Britain can get by all too easily on what he picks up in the course of routine briefings; and he soon finds it wise to confine himself to passing on such information, rather than in digging out stories which from the Department's viewpoint would be better left unpublished. Inevitably he tends to acquire solidarity with the Department; he knows that they will not let him down if he does not let them down. Again, there are exceptions, but few of them are creditable—most follow the pattern of the reporters in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop—the '1 can reveal' political correspondent, for example, whose stock-in-trade is the invention of a plausible story about what has happened at, say, some private meeting, in the comforting knowledge that long before the story of what really happened is divulged, his version will have been forgotten. The number of correspon- dents who are both respected and feared by the civil servants whose activities they are reporting is depressingly small.
The disappearance of the Dispatch may not be unconnected with this weakness of Fleet Street's. It was too much.in the Beaverbrook shadow; too many of its staff were either former Beaverbrook men, or, worse, hypnotised by Christiansenity. Instead of seizing that readership which was eventually to fall to the Sunday Telegraph, it tried to compete with the Sunday Express—from which to the casual eye it was hardly distinguish- able, though lacking that paper's genius for pre- ,cnting compulsive inside misinformation. Had it tried to do what Mr. Benenson suggests the press should be doing in this country and isn't, it might well have carved out a market for itself; and even if it had failed the experiment would have been worth trying.
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