MEDIA STUDIES
Once, we looked to the Times to deal with this problem. Now it's part of it
STEPHEN GLOVER
Iwas determined not to write about Polly Toynbee. The mere mention of her name had begun to induce dread. I sympathised with bemused readers who regarded the many articles about her affair as proof of journalistic self-absorption, even vanity. But then there were further developments, and as I look back at the whole saga I see that this is a story which tells us a lot not only about journalists but also about some of our newspapers.
The list of dramatis personae is long. There is Polly Toynbee herself, a well- known liberal journalist who writes columns for the Independent, where she has championed the right of divorce. She is a widow who has been having an affair with a married man. There is Andrew Marr, her editor, who in the issue of Thursday 6 June ran on the front page of his paper a piece by Miss Toynbee which accused the Daily Mail of intruding into her private life. There is Paul Dacre, the Mail's slightly scary editor, who met this charge by argu- ing that Miss Toynbee's private conduct could be written about because she is famous and has controversial views (i.e., ones he doesn't like) about divorce. There is Karen Walker, wife of Miss Toynbee's lover, who wrote a long piece in Mr Dacre's newspaper putting her side of the story. There is Peter Stothard, editor of the Times, who reprinted this piece the follow- ing day. And there are various other minor players, principally newspaper columnists, few of whom have supported Miss Toyn- bee.
When I wrote about Mr Dacre last week, he had not yet published Mrs Walker's retaliation against Miss Toynbee. I gather that executives at the Mail think that this piece, with its allegations of a barrage of faxes and letters from Miss Toynbee, was a decisive blow. But why? There are two sides to every marriage break-up. The defence of Miss Toynbee is not that she behaved virtuously in this affair. I am sure she didn't. It is that the Mail should not have got a reporter to nose about her pri- vate life when nothing she was doing was at odds with anything she had written. Mrs Walker's 2,000-word blockbuster was con- fused and rambling and shed no light upon the human heart. Mr Dacre did her no favour by running it.
And yet, without defending him, one can understand why he published it: because he is engaged in a battle with Miss Toynbee. I can conceive of no possible justification for my old friend Peter Stothard, who repro- duced the same piece in the Times. I am told that he had had qualms about jumping on the tabloid bandwagon but that he was partly persuaded to do so by his right-hand woman, Christina Appleyard, a former Mail executive. Readers may think it silly of me to be surprised, since it should be clear that the Times has long since been corrupted. And yet it is because the paper still retains some residue of its former standards, and because I know Mr Stothard to be a pretty serious person, that I go on hoping it will not run tawdry pieces about people's pri- vate lives.
This is not the end of the story so far as the Times is concerned. Several friends of Miss Toynbee's who are authentic repre- sentatives of the 'great and the good' wrote a letter to Mr Stothard on 13 June com- plaining about the publication of Mrs Walker's piece. 'It offends decent standards of journalism', they wrote, 'to see a public interest in what is so plainly only a private matter.' They were informed by the Times's letters editor that their letter would not be used but they nonetheless sent a new ver- sion, which at the time of writing has not been printed (it appears in this week's Spectator letters pages). A reasonable per- son would conclude that up to this point it has been Mr Stothard's intention not to publish this letter.
This is not the first occasion on which he has avoided running a letter which might cause his newspaper public embarrassment. Some time ago William Rees-Mogg made an uncustomary statistical error in a col- umn which had the effect of greatly exag- gerating the performance of the British economy since 1979. Professor Wynne Godley wrote a letter of correction to the editor of the Times which did not see the light of day. The Toynbee case is more grave, for it concerns a matter of taste rather than of economic statistics. The sig- natories of the so far unpublished letter Betsy and Ronald Dworkin, Katya and Anthony Lester, Sally and Anthony Samp- son — are such as would normally guaran- tee prominent publication. Mr Stothard did publish last Saturday, at the very bottom of the letters page, a letter from Mr Marr, edi- tor of the Independent, chiding the Times in surprisingly gentle tones.
It is on these occasions that one should be able to look to the Times to take a moral and intellectual lead. We should be able to depend on it rising far above the inquisito- rial Daily Mail. In other newspapers jour- nalists have mostly approached the Toyn- bee affair on the basis of whether or not they like her. One columnist, who had pri- vately told me that he agreed with every word of Miss Toynbee's original article, took issue with her on grounds of her appearance. The matter at hand is not her appearance or character — or indeed the rights and wrongs of divorce — but the behaviour of one newspaper in invading the private life of an individual. How one longs for the wise and disinterested voice of the old Times! Under William Rees-Mogg's editorship that letter would have been printed, and perhaps a third leader written. In Mr Stothard's and Mr Rupert Mur- doch's Times we have only an exploitative and degrading article dredged up from the Mail, while the great Rees-Mogg, columnist not editor, remains silent.
Three weeks ago I wrote approvingly about the transformation of the Indepen- dent's front page under the new editorship of Andrew Marr. Almost every day there is a feature article or an opinionated piece on the front — Polly Toynbee's being one example. Mr Marr would not be doing this so much if he had more reporters. And there are dangers if readers think they are getting opinion dressed up as news. So it is a little surprising that the Guardian, with much greater reportorial resources, should be following the Independent's lead, and on occasion going further. Before the opening of the recent talks in Northern Ireland, the paper 'splashed' with the headline 'Time to offer hands of peace' above a 'think piece' by David Sharrock, Ireland correspondent, and beneath a photograph of a sculpture of two hands reaching out for each other. On Wednesday, there was the featurey head- line 'Where does he go from here?' along- side a picture of Gerry Adams, and above the main front-page story. This imitation of the flagging Independent is odd in a paper as apparently self-confident as the Guardian. Wouldn't it be better off trying to be itself?
Previous page
