Press
Doing the honours
Bill Grundy Last Thursday there was a press lOnch in the River Room of the Savoy Hotel. It was for the Presentation of Granada TV's annual What the Papers Say award and the national and provincial Press was so well represented that a bomb in that room would have Made quite a big hole in the comInunications industry. Things were rather spoilt by the fact that the Chief guest didn't turn up. He was „the Home Secretary, the Right rionourable Robert Carr', who was f,O have presented the awards and !lad rung up at midnight to say sorry, no dice; presumably Lbe,cause the PM wanted to talk to nn about something called an election. Frantic phone calls to all and sundry went on into the early hours, with suggestions for ,replacements ranging from Harold ilson to Mike Yarwood as riarold Wilson: finally they got hOld of Lord Pearce, who is ought to be connected with the hrress Council. I say "thought" yecause it wasn't possible to l-leduce it from what he said. I Wnold have liked to have given Ynu his analysis of the plight
of the press; I would have liked to have told you how he draws the line between investigative journalism and intrusion into privacy; I would have liked to have given you his views on the role-of a free press in a free society. Unfortunately, I can't, because all that Lord Pearce said was — a long experience of these sort of functions has taught me that what you want is for me to stand up, speak up and shut up. Whereupon he sat down leaving his audience feeling rather more than deprived.
Nevertheless, the presentations did take place. The recipients of the awards made neat little speeches or didn't as the fancy took them, and everybody was chuffed or unchuffed as the case may be. The prize for newspaper of the year went for the first time ever to a foreign paper, the Washington Post. The citation said that without the Post's writers digging into the Watergate Affair the whole massive cover-up operation might have succeeded. Which is not only true but poses the question, could any English paper have done such a job? I think the answer is no. American newspapers work in an entirely different climate from the one we have in this country. The libel laws are different; publishing conventions are different; government attitudes to the press and to publicity are different. In this country even the most industrious of diggers would have found just how sealed civil service lips can be. The Ministry of Silence would have been nonetheless effective for there being no discernible conspiracy (the present editor of the New Statesman, Mr Anthony Howard, had some experience of that some years ago when he was successfully frozen out of the newly-invented job of Whitehall correspondent for one of the Sundays). A Watergate may be impossible in this country: but we shall never know because we could never uncover one. One paper that would have a brave try, though, is the Daily Telegraph which also received an award as British Newspaper of the Year. Some surprise was expressed privately afterwards at the judges' decision, but the fact is that if you want to know what is going on the place where you are likeliest to find out is the Telegraph. Its foreign, political, industrial and arts pages are excellent; its sports coverage is as full as you will find anywhere; Peter Simple remains consistently the best right-wing satirist writing today, and the leading articles have lately got far away from the balanced pomposity that used to be thejr hallmark. It's nice to see the Telegraph so honoured: it isn't, and I don't suppose it will ever be, a 'fashionable' newspaper. There's nothing trendy about it, its readership as deduced from its Letters column seems even to sleep in pin stripes and a bowler but it knows its mind, it knows its market and it remains the most professional of papers. The paper any journalist would take if he were allowed only one a day.
There were several other awards including one that simply had to be given to the oldest whiz kid of them all, a man of whom Nigel Dempster has said in the Mail on Friday that he has made more farewell appearances than Dame Nelly Melba. He is of course the newly retired Sir Hugh Cudlipp.
His speech of thanks was entirely
. .
typical — funny, brash, rumbus tious and almost completely inaccurate. The looks that crossed the faces of the panel of judges as Hugh suggested that their awards are almost entirely dictated by Granada boss Lord Bernstein had to be seen to be believed.
And then it was all over and everybody trooped off to their offices or their bars or other places where they sing. Maybe it was after-lunch port that I got a warm feeling that perhaps the press isn't so bad after all. But don't worry. It won't last.
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