Notebook
Our leading article this week will, I hope, help to persuade conservatives that freedom of information is a cause worth supporting,The danger is that they may be discouraged from attacking the Government's Protection of Information Bill because its most vociferous opponents are on the left. There are few who would wish to find themselves in the same camp as Mr Benn, particularly in view of his other barmy ideas on press reform. A couple of months ago, something called the Campaign for Press Freedom was launched. It is sponsored not only by Mr Benn but by an array of displeasing left-wing politicians, trade unionists and academics, as well as — unfortunately — by a number of reputable journalists such as Mr Neal Ascherson, Mr Keith Waterhouse, and Mr John Torode. It gave birth to a pamphlet entitled Towards Press Freedom which I have been studying. This amazing document sets out proposals for reforming the press which it hopes will be earnestly debated over the next few years. The temptation to quote from it at random and out of context is, I am afraid, irresistible. There is, for example, a chapter on Reform of the Press Council, which is a body now composed of 18 representatives of the newspaper industry and 18 'lay' members. 'The lay members are meant to be a cross-section of society,' says the pamphlet. 'Yet all are White, middle-class and middle-aged. It is a cross-section of society which has no blacks, no students, no train-drivers or miners, no single-parents'. It is apparently only by the inclusion of such worthy figures on the Press Council that newspaper proprietors will finally be exposed to criticism of 'the worst features of British journalism', which include, among other things, 'the continuing trivialisation of personal relationships and the glamorising of crime'. What fun this makes journalism sound. The day on which I am forbidden to trivialise personal relationships is the day on which I will retire. This same chapter includes the following great libertarian cry: 'Is it not time for the journalists, other newspaper workers and the concerned public to consider seriously the need to call in the power of parliament to redress the immense power of the media?'
One of the main complaints of these freedom campaigners is that the existing press is insufficiently accessible to minority groups. The solution? 'Newspapers could be obliged to set aside a minimum amount of Space in each issue, say a tabloid page, for outside contributions . Different groups in the community women's groups, trades councils, tenants' associations. playgroup organisations — could be approached to contribute articles or sets of articles.' The prototype of the ideal newspaper editor begins to emerge — a pathetic, nail-biting figure at the mercy of hysterical playgroup organisations. He would be at the mercy, too, of an 'editorial committee'.
There is, of course, no objection to people running newspapers in this fashion if they happen to feel like it. But they would be up against the near-certainty that almost nobody woult1 want to buy them. So how could they — rejecting, as they would, the support of a rich proprietor — manage to survive? The answer is an elaborate system of loans and subsidies financed partly by the taxpayer and partly by stealing advertising revenue from successful newspapers and giving it to unsuccessful ones. Mr Harold Evans, the editor of the Sunday Times, has described how the impoverishment of the few remaining prosperous newspapers would inhibit the freedom of the press by limiting its power of disclosure, the main responsibility of any newspaper. 'The liberty of the press in this country would be struck its most catastrophic blow ever . if we were reduced to thousands of opinion pamphlets and robbed of the ability of the press to probe, to inquire, to persist, to withstand expensive legal assaults, to send correspondents to dangerous and expensive parts of the world, to recruit and train the best possible candidates.' But perhaps the most ironic of all the left-wing proposals is that for a 'National Printing Corporation' — 'a competitive public sector in the printing industry which would make full use of the new technology'. It is the refusal of the trade unions to make anything approaching full use of the new technology which is, as everybody knows, rapidly bringing Fleet Street to its knees.
I do not defend the actions of the BBC Panorama team who filmed IRA gunmen patrolling the village of Carrickmore. In the light of the political storm created by the BBC's television interview with one of the alleged murderers of Airey Neave, they clearly should have been a little more prudent. But at the same time, I cannot help sympathising with them. Television is in many respects a very artificial medium. Anybody who has worked for television news, as I have briefly, knows that great pressure is always put on television reporters to obtain good film. This is seen, rightly, as the medium's distinguishing advantage over the press. But the understandable preference of television producers for action film over 'talking heads' has had a corrupting influence. I can remember when I worked in a very modest role for ITN being asked to do two filmed stories which, in normal circumstances, would not have yielded anything filmable. One was on a prostitutes' strike in Paris. Where on earth does one film a prostitute who has withdrawn her labour? The other was on kidnappings in Italy. The latter story, which was received with some approval by my employers, included two staged episodes. One showed security men — private ones hired by rich industrialists to protect them against kidnappers — practising their marksmanship with revolvers in an underground firing range in Turin. Another showed armed carabinieri stopping and searching cars on the outskirts of Rome. Both episodes were staged specially for me, though both were also representative of things that were regularly taking place in the ordinary course of events.
Popular hatred of the Americans in Iran has a history going back well beyond the restoration of the Shah by the CIA in 1953. As long ago as 1924, the American viceconsul in Teheran, Mr Robert W. Imbue, was murdered by a mob in the streets of the capital while he was trying to photograph a religious ceremony. His death was related to the granting of an oil concession in northern Persia to the Sinclair Consolidated Oil Corporation, which subsequently decided to pull out. The present situation is very frightening, because an immensely powerful nation which has lately lost confidence in its own power is being obliged to look on helplessly at the humiliation of its diplomats in Teheran. There is nothing it can do to help them, and there is no reason to believe that the Ayatollah Khomeini would be the least bit concerned if they should happen to suffer the fate of Mr Imbrie. He is old and mad and most probably indifferent to the consequences which their deaths might produce for Iran. Those consequences could he awesome. For some time there has been support in Washington among the political hawks for a gigantic Suez-type adventure in the Middle Fast, aimed at securing America's oil supplies. With Iranian oil imports to the United States already banned, the energy shortage is going to get worse, the American people are going to get angry, and a weak American president seeking re-election is going to want to look tough. Just imagine the effect in these circumstances of a massacre in the Teheran embassy.
Alexander Chancellor
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