ANOTHER VOICE
Why journalists have become better dressed but too big for their boots
CHARLES MOORE
When I joined the Daily Telegraph in 1979, it was a rule imposed by the then pro- prietor, Lord Hartwell, that we were not allowed to write about other newspapers. At the Daily Telegraph of Conrad Black, we still try to apply something of the spirit of this rule, which is that there is no sense in giving publicity to one's rivals and that incestuous journalism is uninteresting for the readers. But if we applied the letter of the rule, we should not have all that much left in the paper, because virtually every story nowadays seems to involve newspa- pers.
The Sunday Times is the most obvious example. It regards the Sunday Times as the most important story of our era. In its lead- ing article about its own serialisation of the Goebbels diaries on 12 July (a 'scoop which left our rivals gasping'), it referred to 'The Sunday Times' on nine occasions, as if it needed the constant repetition to reassure itself that it existed. It was responding to the Independent, which had decided that the Goebbels story was a front-page lead on the grounds that the Sunday Times was employing the semi-Nazi David Irving to edit the diaries.
The story about the difficulties of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales was also, in essence, a story about newspapers. After all, the allegations about the marriage in Mr Andrew Morton's book were not exactly news, since they mostly referred to events long past or were com- ments rather than hard facts. The story lay in the fact that the Sunday Times chose to serialise the book, and that its editor chose to defend not only the serialisation but also all the allegations in the book (the author kept silent) as if it had been written by his own staff. Then the story became, accord- ing to taste, crusading editor versus snob- bish establishment cover-up, or, egotistical circulation-chasing oaf versus ordinary human decency.
Even stories that do not start as newspa- per stories quickly become them. This hap- pened during the election when Labour's misrepresentation of the 'Jennifer's ear' saga was forgotten in the row about the Tories directing the aggrieved party to the Daily Express. It happened with the tale of Virginia Bottomley's teenage premarital pregnancy, when the Sun attacked the Inde- pendent for running it.
The David Mellor story is really a press story too. It is about the methods of news- papers — bugging, or paying people who have bugged — and about the relationships between politicians and newspapers; and probably the main reason why it saw the light is the conflict between press and gov- ernment about the possible introduction of a privacy law.
Nor is it only stories in which newspapers discuss newspapers. It is also comment. It is now permissible for a columnist in one paper to devote his column to attacking a columnist in another one. It is encouraged, where until surprisingly recently it was actually forbidden, for a newspaper's jour- nalists to go on television and radio. When it isn't Mr Mellor on Desert Island Discs it is Sir Peregrine Worsthorne. Newspapers are awash with bylines and decked out with photographs of journalists (18 in last week's Sunday Times). If restaurants or clubs are fashionable, it tends to be because they are the haunts of the media. We have stopped being men in squashy hats and old raincoats drinking beer, partly because so many of our number are now women, and so that option is not available. We dress Netter and are more suave. We act as if we were the most interesting show in town.
Very arrogant and reprehensible, no doubt, but the awful thought occurs that perhaps we are the most interesting show in town. Who else is? Not the politicians, who have contracted out most of the running of the country to foreign powers, thus indicat- ing their own unimportance. Not the mili- tary who, however admirable, do not have much fighting to do. Certainly not the bish- ops. Not the City, which is humbled. Not the universities, who have retreated into specialism and jargon. Not our great administrators, because they have nothing great to administer. Not the aristocracy, because it is on the defensive. Not our sportsmen, because, except for Nigel Mansell, they do not seem to win anything. The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, and all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave seem to have met the inevitable hour, and Grub Street has filled the vacuum.
'They say the way to a girl's heart is through her stomach.' This is partly a legacy of Lady Thatcher, because her trade union reforms made us all rich. They enabled new papers, like the Independent, to start, and old ones, like the Daily Telegraph, to make money. When Lord Deedes became editor of the Daily Telegraph in 1974, he tells me, he was paid £11,000 a year. At that time, the Prime Minister was paid £20,000. Today, the Prime Minister is paid £76,234. I would not have the impertinence to ask our current editor what his salary is, but he is undoubt- edly better off than Mr Major (although there is no Telegraph equivalent of Che- quers). A shift in money usually represents a shift in power. And now that we have the unions sorted out, we find ourselves very powerful. British papers benefit from a unique system of national distribution which gives us large circulation and great influence. Rupert Murdoch could buy a hundred titles in the United States, where almost all papers depend on one city, and still not achieve the national presence that he achieves with five here.
So we have got too big for our boots and now, because of recession, the shoe leather is beginning to pinch. Everyone's advertis- ing revenue, and almost everyone's circula- tion, have dropped. As a result, there are more spoilers, more about Nazis and the royal family and sex, more claim and counter-claim about how bad the others are, more hysterical trumpeting of one's own achievements. This leads to ludicrous pomposity, witness a series of letters issued on Sunday by the People listing 'serious and substantial inaccuracies' in other papers' reporting of how it had done its reporting on Mr Mellor (e.g. in a letter to the editor of the Sunday Times: '8. At no time did Ray Levine pose as a Private Investigator'). It is rather as if Al Capone had protested at reports that the St Valentine's Day mas- sacre was carried out with revolvers rather than sub-machine-guns.
It is fun to be part of all this. There prob- ably has never been a better time to be a British journalist than the last five years, but one cannot help feeling nervous. The public must hate us so much. At present, one detects only a sullen resentment, but perhaps this is midsummer 1789. How much longer before the tumbrils start rolling? Thank goodness I work in the Isle of Dogs, much too far from London to be in danger of the mob. It will storm Wap- ping first.
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