THE PRESS

Off the record

BILL GRUNDY

Readers of the Times, that Eminent Paper of Record, will be delighted to learn that

the civil war in Nigeria is still going on.

Correction. Readers of the Times, that Eminent, Etc., may be interested to learn

that the civil war in Nigeria is still going

on. It could very well be news to them, be- cause they haven't been hearing very much

about it lately, at least not from the pages of the Eminent, Etc., assuming the editions I read are typical.

During the last month it gradually dawned on me that somehow Nigeria

wasn't cropping up in the papers, and particularly in the Eminent, Etc., quite as frequently as it has done is the past. So

out of interest I went through the august, and August, pages of the Times and found to my astonishment that from the beginning

of the month its coverage of the actual

fighting in that unhappy country added up to about six column inches. Of course,

there were other articles as well, concerned with other aspects of the war, but these were usually datelined Geneva or Copen-

hagen and were about Red Cross mercy flights and so on, and they didn't add up to much either. We also had a great chunk

about the Pope's African visit and how his plan for Nigerian peace talks failed, but that was datelined Kampala, and didn't tell me anything about the actual fighting. The drought was broken by an article on the leader page last Friday in which Mr Alan Hart, back from his fourth tour of reporting the war, discussed General Gowon's problems. A lot of it was about 'the quick kill' and whether General Gowon will ever pull it off. Now it doesn't need me to point out that in studying such a question, it is a great help to know how

the fighting is going on, and if it isn't being reported in the Times readers of that paper are being put at a considerable disadvantage when assessing Mr Hart's article. Mr Hart is in no doubt that things have been going on out there, and they're very important: 'All the signs are then that General Gowon is facing a very serious and mounting crisis over his conduct of the war in which not only his own life is possibly at stake, but the lives of very many of the four or five million Ibos in what is left in Biafra'.

Well, four or five million lives add up to something important in anybody's book, so

I want to hear about it, and if I haven't been hearing much about it for a month, rcl like to know why. The first explanation that occurred to me is that the subject has been dropped for a while in case the great British reading pub- lic has had too much of this particular good thing. They are getting bored by Biafra, I can almost hear the editorial boys saying over their steaming cups of canteen cocoa, so let's drop it for a bit and then they'll appreciate it all the more when we

do reintroduce it. This idea isn't quite as mad as it sounds. Many newspapers in this country work on just that principle, the Principle that every story has a natural life and it isn't wise to stretch it beyond that

They may be right, although a lot of foreign papers don't work that way and they still seem to prosper. But in any case, is such an idea one that should concern an Eminent Paper of Record like the Times? Of course not. So think of something else.

Is it possible that some member of the staff, say the editor, whose pet subject Biafra maybe was, has been on holiday and in his absence his deputies thought they'd give it a breather until he got back? Surely not. It sounds too unlikely; but then six column inches sounds unlikely too, so I thought there'd be no harm in finding out. A phone call to Printing House Square re- vealed that the editor has been away on holiday, so there might be something in it after all. But the call revealed something else too. The Times hasn't had anybody there for a month or so. 'We did have a man, but he's left now'. When I suggested that this could be the reason for the rarity of reports about the situation, the Times replied that there's little coming out of Biafra anyway. Which may or may not be true, but it doesn't help to get stuff out if you withdraw your man on the spot. I would have thought. At this point I began to get a distinct feeling of dip vu. Hadn't Evelyn Waugh written something like this? Was it in Scoop? When the gentleman from the Times leaves the country, then the war has officially ended, I think it went. But if Mr Hart's article last Friday—a good and disturbing article, by the way— marks the resumption of the reporting of hostilities, I for one shall be grateful. For I like the Times and to see it devote so little space to the brutal, bloody and beastly fighting that's taking place over there is hardly worthy of an Eminent Paper of Record. So I look forward to seeing events in Biafra being reported in the Times at their right and proper length once again. Soon, perhaps?

Congratulations to the Mirror on leading their front page on Monday with a slashing attack on Paisley—`THE BORING BIGOT', said the headline. Cynical, I wondered if they'd dared to do the same in their Belfast edi- tions. They had. There's brave for you.