Why the new editor of the Times has to keep on printing stories about celebs and nasal hair
STEPHEN OLON, ER
E'er since Robert Thomson became editor of the Times two and a half months ago, I have picked up the paper with something more than my usual enthusiasm. How was it changing? More specifically, was it dumbing up or, as it might be, dumbing down? I looked and I looked and I looked. Naturally, a little voice in the back of my head — the voice of fairness — pointed out that these were still early days, and it was a bit much to expect Mr Thomson to effect an immediate revolution. As the weeks passed, and no significant changes in tone or presentation were visible, another, increasingly insistent voice began to ask whether anything was ever going to happen. Was Mr Thomson perhaps not Mr Thomson at all, but a construct dreamt up by my old friend Peter Stothard to prolong his long and memorable editorship?
Monday's Guardian gave us a kind of answer. It contained an interview with Mr Thomson undertaken by my highly esteemed colleague Roy Greenslade. Roy is not one to be taken in by a construct. He had seen, met and talked to Mr Thomson. There was even a new picture of him. It was certainly reassuring to know that he existed, but it cannot be said that Roy took us very much further. This is not to reproach him, for he asked the right questions. It is just that Mr Thomson seemed fey, evasive and, to be frank, a tiny bit goofy. There was little enlightenment on the great dumbing-down question. Mr Thomson simply said that 'it wouldn't be me to go downmarket' before talking in general terms about there being 'a greater opening for what you might call a fact-based paper at the quality end of the market', which he and Rupert had spotted.
It then came to me that the great dumbing-down question was misconceived. I happened recently to be perusing copies of the Times from 1991. I expected to find a newspaper which, after ten years of being owned by Rupert Murdoch, was already tragically degraded. But it wasn't like that at all. The elegant paper before me was 80 or 90 per cent the old, pre-Murdoch Times. There were no stories whatsoever about celebrities or any soft features about nasal hair. I grasped what I had not fully grasped before — that it was the Times price-cut of September 1993 which precipitated the great dumbing down, and took half its market with it. Its effect was to open the paper to people who were not really Times readers — but a lower price in itself was not enough to retain them. In order to hang on to its expanded readership, the Times was required permanently to change many aspects of itself.
Mr Thomson, in short, does not have much of a choice. He can give a touch on the tiller here and there — run special supplements such as the somewhat commonplace one he carried on Tuesday about the transatlantic crisis. He can redesign the tabloid section and. I expect, bring back the obituaries to the main paper from which they were expelled by my old friend in his final days. But if Mr Thomson goes very far in the direction of dumbing up, he will disenchant those new readers who were attracted to the paper after September 1993, and do the one thing Mr Murdoch does not want him to do, which is to lose sales. Equally, he dare not risk upsetting those old readers, many of whom are already rather grumpy, by further dumbing down. That is why there will be no great change at the Times.
Ihave observed before that no one — politician, businessman, journalist — should speak `off the record' to a journalist whom he or she does not know and trust. The old conventions are no longer recognised. Look at the case of Stephen Byers last week. Everybody was cockahoop that he had made a fool of himself (again) by confiding over lunch to a group of female political journalists that the government was planning to introduce legislation in the next session of Parliament to pave the way for a referendum on the euro. Some of us were overjoyed to see New Labour's double-dealing revealed. In our euphoria we forgot that these reporters had breached a confidence by identifying Mr Byers. You may say he was an idiot not to realise that such an explosive story could not be kept under wraps. Nonetheless. Mr Byers was betrayed.
British Airways is spending some £300,000 flying 50 guests — City journalists, travel agents and corporate customers — to Japan for each of England's first-round World Cup games. The cost of a return business-club seat is £4,600, and guests will stay in a luxury hotel for three nights. British Airways, which has just announced its worst losses since privatisation, is giving away seats it could easily have sold.
The travel agents and the corporate cus
tomers will have to search their own consciences. I can offer them no guidance. The journalists on this freebie-to-end-all-freebies are another matter. I have been asking myself what I would have done in the unlikely event of receiving such an invitation. I would certainly have been tempted to accept, either on the grounds that I am never likely to write about British Airways, or that if I did I would try to go out of my way to be more critical than I otherwise might have been. But I hope I would have had the strength of mind to resist.
Journalists must always examine the motives of their hosts. If British Airways were inviting travel correspondents to test a new kind of aircraft seat, it would seem perfectly natural to accept — indeed, rather perverse to refuse. But in this case there is no such specific purpose. The idea is to spoil hand-picked City editors and reporters with the treat of a lifetime. No doubt it would be possible to enjoy the freebie and return to one's desk to write a piece highly critical of British Airways, but one would have to have the hide of a rhinoceros to do so. There is no disguising the fact that a company in a mess is attempting to buy favourable publicity.
We should not be too hard on these journalists. They have not done anything wrong — yet. It would be churlish of me — very churlish — to reveal their names, and perhaps risk taking the shine off what promises to be the junket of the century. On the other hand, if any of them should write a panegyric to British Airways over the next few months, or cause a panegyric to be written, or not write dispassionately and objectively about British Airways when the moment arises — well, we shall be watching.
Three weeks ago I described Peter Wilby, editor of the New Statesman. as 'curmudgeonly'. Last week a correspondent upbraided me for saying this, and rightly so. Mr Wilby might possibly be mistaken for a curmudgeon by a shallow observer, but I used to know him quite well, and treasured his generosity of spirit and sweet nature. I must have been in a very curmudgeonly mood to have described such a man as a curmudgeon.
Next week: Sun vs Daily Mirror, and the lunacy of their price war (if it is still going on).
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