AND ANOTHER THING
Is there any form of human life quite so low as a journalist?
PAUL JOHNSON
The behaviour of some newspapers is now so degrading that I wonder how much longer I can belong to such a foul trade. The crucifixion of Earl Spencer, not just by the tabloids but by the broadsheets, is a classic example of the abuse of power. Everyone knows that Spencer's offence is not adultery and that the indignation of the press is hum- bug. Spencer's crime was to stick up for his dead sister and accuse the press, rightly, of harassing her. He believes, along with most people, that curbs should be placed on the present unrestricted right of the media to invade privacy. That is a capital offence in the eyes of the press, and the assault on Spencer, in which any regard for fairness, let alone truth, has been cast aside, is a blatant act of revenge against a brave man. It is also intended as a deterrent. The press, in effect, is saying to anyone — espe- cially politicans — who might be inclined to advocate a privacy law, 'See what happened to Spencer. That could happen to you, if you raise your voice against our divine right to intrude and bully, terrorise and perse- cute, lie and invent.' Well, it won't deter me. The character assassination of Spencer, a private citizen who has never sought a public role and has been going through a divorce case harrowing for all concerned, makes me more determined than ever to bring the press, as we brought the unions in the 1980s, back under the law.
However, we must not necessarily assume that London journalists are the worst in the world. There are some pretty grim specimens in New York, especially on the pseudo-intellectual Left. Their latest form of character assassination is to accuse their victim of anti-Semitism. Tragically, there is still quite a lot of real anti- Semitism around, and for the Left to invent bogus cases makes it harder for us to nail the genuine ones. Last week I was visited by a nice young man from the New York weekly Forward, one of the best Jewish papers in the world (originally in Yiddish), who was inquiring into the case of Norman Davies's bestseller, A History of Europe. As I explained to my visitor, the success of this book, unequivocal in its condemnation of the Soviet Union, has infuriated the Left, which in New York has invented the anti- Semitism charge in a desperate attempt to discredit it. Davies is no more anti-Semitic than my old friend Benjamin Netanyahu. His crime, like Benji's, is anti-communism. The same tactic has been used against John le Carl* the ablest of our spymasters and a writer in the Raymond Chandler class. Le Carre has been in HM Foreign Service, itself a crime in the eyes of the Left, and has taught at Eton, another; worst of all, he has dared to criticise 'Salmonella' Rushdie. Rushdie may not be a good writer — I find him unreadable — but he is a valuable item of left-wing ideological furniture, what Lenin used to call a 'useful idiot', and for someone to suggest that he is anything other than a secular saint is heresy. So le Cane is branded an anti-Semite, an extremely damaging charge in the American book world, and one easy to make against any novelist who uses a Jew as a fictional character. All sorts of New York journalistic curs have joined in the dog- fight, including Christopher Hitchens, a man so unpleasant that even the city's pavements rise up in protest at his finical tread. The Guardian printed a sentence which reflects Hitchens's literary character so precisely that it is worth preserving: ILe Carre] is a man who, having relieved himself in his own hat, makes haste to clamp the brimming chapeau on his head.'
These people, having lost their faith in the Marxist Utopia, take refuge in hatred of the West, anti-Americanism and person- al vendettas to work off the bile which lingers in their burnt-out souls. Their heroes are people like Gore Vidal, who spits at America's gods from his Italian fastnesses, and Seymour Hersh, the Kitty Kelly of United States political journalism, whose chief aim in life seems to be to destroy anything or anybody Americans hold dear. Hersh's latest bucket of vitriol is hurled at that old target John F. Kennedy, or what is left of it. Since all Kennedy's weaknesses have already been comprehen- sively exposed in such devastating biogra- phies as Thomas C. Reeves's authoritative study, A Question of Character, there was not much point in Hersh's further mud-
And you should have seen the burger that got away.'
slinging, especially since his new 'evidence', letters from JFK to Marilyn Monroe, turned out to be forgeries. But right or wrong, Hersh is the Left's talisman and has to be protected. So various defences of him have been put forward, notably a flattering profile in Vanity Fair.
This piece of hagiography interested me because its author, R.S. Anson, is more usually cast in the role of hatchet man. He was picked by the anti-American literary editor of the Sunday Times, Geordie Greig, to assassinate my new book, A History of the American People, no doubt on the advice of Anson's Vanity Fair colleague Hitchens, who is a crony of Greig's. My crime was to treat Americans and their heroes as mem- bers of the human race and not as demons. It is curious that the assassin should have been picked from among this clique, as one of their commonest targets for abuse is Rupert Murdoch, Greig's employer. Even odder was Anson's attempt to justify his attack on me by a concern for historical truth. He must be one of the most inaccu- rate reporters at large in New York today, as was shown by a recent hatchet job he tried to do on the Wall Street Journal and the wife of the chairman of Dow Jones, the company which owns the Journal.
Anson accused this lady of an affair with Zbigniew Brzezinski, at a time when he was President Carter's adviser and she was a correspondent covering the State Depart- ment. Anson quoted as his 'source' the con- veniently dead Pamela Harriman, but the Journal was able to show that the dates of the alleged incident did not fit and that the tale was invented. The Journal, one of the few papers left in America with any reputa- tion for objectivity and decency, demon- strated 21 other errors of fact in Anson's comparatively short article, some of them extremely serious.
It is the presence of such nasty people on the journalistic scene which makes me want to quit it. The fact that I am 70 next year might provide a convenient excuse. On the other hand, if some of us don't bring these miscreants to book, who will? Not many journalists are prepared to criticise col- leagues or newspapers, for the simple reason that they have a living to earn, families to support, and can't afford to make enemies. I am coming to the end of my life, I am rich and can tell anyone I choose to get stuffed, though being by nature polite I rarely do. So maybe I will carry on for a bit longer.
Previous page
