The press
Is there a conspiracy?
Paul Johnson
This is the week in the year in which the Labour Party's paranoia about 'the media' is given free range, whipped on by the recent publication of Tony Benn's Arguments for Democracy, which devotes a whole chapter to the subject. Benn is now so obsessed by the press that he actually gave his backing to the Sunday Times cowboys, a public gesture which not only embittered the journalists at Brighton, but aroused the fury of the print union leaders.
At a purely personal level, I think Benn has a case: there is a media bias against him, expressed notably in visual attempts to present him as a raving lunatic. But he is not the only victim: the bias against Enoch Powell, for instance (let alone Ian Paisley) IS much more severe and crude, and thoroughly approved of by most of the Bennites as well as all right-thinking members of the consensus.
Moreover, in my observation, media bias against a politician rarely works. If Powell is a fallen archangel of British politics he is SO in consequence of his own misjudgments and obstinacy; the media has done him no harm. Media hostility is usually counterproductive. Franklin Roosevelt dominated American politics for an entire generation With the overwhelming majority of US newspapers against him. Last year, the press and TV hatred of Ronald Reagan, right up to the eve of his election, was worse than anything Benn has had to put up with. If, last summer, anyone in Washington ventured to predict to leading US journalists and proprietors, as I delighted to do, that Reagan would win handsomely, and a good thing too, you were treated as an enemy of civilisation. Reagan benefitted from this bitter campaign against him, especially when the voters were able to see and hear him for themselves on television and contrast the reality with the press caricature. On the whole the media is influential only when it reinforces conclusions people reach for themselves.
Media hostility is peculiarly susceptible to what has been termed (by Karl Popper, I think) 'the law of unintended effect', one of the very few 'laws of history' which has any validity. I well remember Vicky thinking up `Supermac' as a device for covering Harold Macmillan in ridicule; it turned out to be the making of the Old Pretender. I think on balance Benn has benefitted from media aggression, rather as Reagan did. Whatever he may say, Benn gets plenty of air-time to present himself as a reasonable creature and expose any myth-making. To some extent he is an unintended creation of the media: by attacking him they have transformed a fringe radical into the leader of the Left. In the Labour Party it actually pays to be a media hate-object.
On the general charge of anti-Left bias, no persuasive case has been made. On the Royal Commission on the Press, we invited people to submit evidence of it and got nothing substantial. We commissioned our own survey into anti-union bias, and it came up with the answer that (editorials apart) there was none. Indeed, among industrial correspondents there is a pro-union bias, just as among city editors there is a pro-city bias. The Glasgow University Media Group (a thoroughly objective organisation, naturally) has produced detailed charges against the television news services: but they have been effectively refuted by the staff of ITN. On the whole, the bias on television is strongly anti-Right, especially in the documentary field.
The structure of Fleet Street ownership should give a strong right-wing bias. But somehow it doesn't. Benn betrays a weak case in his book by dragging up the Zinoviev Letter and a 1949 quote from Beaverbrook boasting that he ran a paper purely to make propaganda. In the 30 years since then, the power of proprietors and even (alas!) of editors has declined steadily. On proprietors, Benn writes: 'It is inconceivable that men whose backgrounds and all the other circumstances of their lives make them conservatives would wish to be associated with publications propagating a consistently different point of view from their own. They do not have to tolerate such a state of affairs'. There are two errors here. 'Backgrounds' and 'circumstances' do not dictate political views, otherwise Benn himself would be a howling Thatcherite or at least a Tory 'wee . Has he not noticed that, for a whole generation, the multi-millionaire Bernsteins have run Britain's most left-wing TV company? The US media swarm with this phenomenon, from the three major networks to the New York Times and the Washington Post. The radical rich, for whom Reagan and Thatcher are devils incarnate (as well as fearfully non-U) are deeply entrenched in the media on both sides of the Atlantic.
Benn is wrong on the second point too. Proprietors do have to tolerate a great deal nowadays, as Rupert Murdoch is painfully discovering. Today it is considered good going in Fleet Street if a proprietor can actually stop one of his own gossip columns from insulting his wife. As I write, Murdoch cannot even ensure that two of his papers will appear at all, a problem which does not, I imagine, trouble the proprietors of the Morning Star. As for Murdoch influencing what goes into The Times and Sunday Times, assuming anything does, I calculate that both papers have shifted several points to the Left since he acquired them, not by any conscious decision of the editors (Murdoch himself does not come into it) but by the sheer momentum of previous staff radicalisation. Text-papers tend increasingly, these days, to be collegiate affairs, with the editor no more than a primus inter pares, if that. The editor, indeed, is rather like Charles I: he has lost his prerogatives but is still subject to instant execution, since he is the only person left on the paper who can now be fired without fuss. Behind Labour's stereotyped image of wicked Fleet Street there is the reality of creeping anarchy.
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