JUST ANOTHER WORD for NOTHING LEFT to LOSE

Until about a decade ago, I was, for thirty years on and off, a working journalist and a fully paid-up member of the National Union of Journalists. I’d be a journalist again if anyone took my stuff, but I am too long out of the business; the people who decide things have never heard of me and don’t deign to respond to unsolicited pieces; and maybe what I think and/or how I write is no longer wanted (quiet at the back there).

I had a lot of regard for many of the people I met in my newspaper and magazine years – photographers, stringers, reporters, printers, sub-editors, reviewers, researchers, columnists, editors – but I learned to be very sceptical about the culture of the press. Almost everything that made me feel uncomfortable in those years has got more intense since.

Some scene setting before we get onto that. The press is in terminal decline – no one can doubt that. If there are any printed newspapers at all a decade hence, it will be astonishing. In Britain, many national and London newspapers have (come and) gone in my lifetime: Daily Sketch, News Chronicle, The Star, Daily Herald, The Graphic, Sunday Dispatch, The Evening News, Today, The European, The Post, The Illustrated London News, Sunday Correspondent, London Daily News, Sunday Sport. The Guardian came awfully close to closing its stable-mate, the oldest surviving British paper The Observer, last year and commentators ring the death-knell of The Independent and Independent on Sunday pretty much every month.

The late News Chronicle

It’s the very necessity to publish and print that hands the newspapers their fatal disadvantage. Direct on-line printing is certainly quicker than the linotype, cold press, peeling-a-spread-off-the-stone world that still obtained when I joined The Observer in 1977. It’s the distribution that kills it. I don’t know if the same routines obtain now but, in my day, if you walked along Fleet Street around 4:00 am and peered down the side streets, you’d see the Bedford vans, bearing the liveries of the national organs and the news-agency chains, parked on the pavements, while bundles of early editions tumbled down chutes to men waiting on the tailboards below: the press’s nocturnal emissions.

First cinema newsreels, then the wireless, then much more decisively television, now conclusively the internet, the print’s successors have demonstrated the crucial ingredient that printed newspapers can never have: immediacy. As a consequence, those fast media have marauded into newspapers’ primary source of revenue, advertising. Compare any printed paper’s current edition with one from just two or three years back and the drop in advertising is stark, classified even more than display.

And compare the coverage. Most papers have trimmed the number of their supplements and rationalised their staff. There are notably fewer special offers and give-aways. And the newsprint on which The Guardian is printed is clearly flimsier than a year or two ago.

At the same time, the press has been markedly slow to respond to challenges from elsewhere. Only three years ago, The Daily Telegraph still carried a large proportion of pages printed in monochrome. This is no competition for television that has been in full colour for nearly half a century.

The Times in the days when its front was given over to classifieds

The strategies that editors and proprietors have followed are rarely admirable and not always comprehensible. It’s not just the dreary, industry-wide reliance on pictures of “pretty girls”, notoriously naked ones in Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun, which has actually trademarked the phrase “Page Three”. It’s that Murdoch, more than any media proprietor, has sought to influence governments and in that quest he has been highly successful.

Of the British prime ministers over the last fifty years or so, those who assiduously courted Fleet Street in general and, more recently, Murdoch in particular, have benefited from a generally benign press – Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair – while those who scorned such low cunning have found themselves increasingly excoriated by columnists and editorial alike – Sir Alec Douglas Home, Edward Heath, Jim Callaghan, John Major, Gordon Brown. Thus far, David Cameron has diligently shown himself to belong to the former camp, with what result only the 2015 election will show; although note that Ed Miliband has not seemed to attend much to press relations.

In a wider sense, the wider media has invented and developed that horrendous phenomenon of contemporary society, celebrity culture. The famous were ever a staple for the popular press – hitherto known as “the tabloids” until middle market papers like The Express and Daily Mail adopted the format, followed by supposedly “quality” organs like The Times and The Independent which call their tabloid manifestations “compact”. Cinema, wireless and then television, in their form such threats to the very existence of newspapers, yet furnished a lifeline by vouchsafing sprinklings of stardust that reporters and photographers might gratefully snort up. And now, newspapers from all parts of the market are celebrity obsessed. One reason why no-name journalists like me ceased to find work is because so many columns and reviews are written by – or at least by-lined by – actors and comedians.

The relations between reporters and photographers and their prey soon grew complicated. With the growth of so-called “yellow” journalism and the arrival of the paparazzo photographer (named after the aggressive lensman in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita), the famous found themselves more the victims than the beneficiaries of press interest.

Ryan & Stacey Giggs, tweeted into the limelight

So we come to the present sorry and entangled juncture, at which people in the public eye attempt to cover their personal affairs (in every sense) by securing so-called super-injunctions that can be ignored by thousands of civilians gossiping on social internet platforms like Twitter. The latter breach of law – if that is what it is – is clearly far too easy to commit. I did it myself, mentioning the footballer Ryan Giggs en passant as “a super-injunctor” because by the time I did so he had already been fingered numberless times.

The reality is that Twitter hands its users a power that they do not have the inclination to ponder. Those few of us who bother to read the drearily endless legalese of the terms and conditions, that every commercial site posts somewhere and diligently prompts joiners to read and agree to, can hardly be expected to carry in our memories the responsibilities to which we have signed up, even if we had ever thought about them. No doubt there will sooner or later be a test case – perhaps the action taken by South Tyneside Council to secure from Twitter the identity of a tweeter whom it wants to sue for libel – that will bring home starkly to the Twitterati the enormity of the responsibility they undertake in setting out to gossip to the world.

But there is an ocean of muddy water here and the press is itself as responsible as anyone for making it so muddy. Consider the related but conflicted notions that are in play in this whole area: discretion, confidentiality, privacy, security, secrecy, evasion, dissimulation, subterfuge, suppression, conspiracy, treason. And in confronting all of these related but importantly separate notions, the press invokes the holiest of modern holy cows: the freedom of the press.

Not in the most perfervid of imaginations can the press truly be said to be free in any meaningful sense. First of all, the newspapers are owned. Their owners are much like those billionaires who buy football clubs. They tend to be foreigners or at any rate domiciled abroad, technically if not actually. They have bottomless pockets and they need to have such because newspapers, like football clubs, swim in seas of debt. And of course those owners have views and they are inclined to want to see their mouthpieces reflecting those views in a general and sometimes in a particular sense.

Proprietorial requirements dictate a great deal of the stances taken by the press. For instance, Rupert Murdoch’s complex interests in broadcasting are reflected in the consistently hostile posture struck by his organs towards the BBC and, to a lesser extent, ITV. This is less true of coverage of individual programmes or stars, because the editors gain little from being out of step on what the public adores. The constant carping is upon corporate policy. The editors imagine that this undermines the public’s affection for the BBC so that readers may be drawn to BSkyB instead.

The Barclays, honoured by the Queen for services to tax avoidance

What brings viewers to Sky is its greedy accumulation of rights to sports and ever newer movies. Viewers grumble that they can no longer see major sporting events and films “free” on the traditional channels but then vote with their credit cards and sign up for Sky packages. The Murdoch papers play a significant cheerleading role in this process, just as Richard Desmond’s papers are obliged to enter into mutual promotion with Channel Five since the media empire builder added that faltering enterprise to his portfolio.

It can’t be news to many that the press is full of special pleading, self-interest and hypocrisy. The long and far-reaching campaign conducted by The Daily Telegraph concerning parliamentary expenses made my blood boil. The seemingly not very onerous task of owning The Telegraph (along with The Spectator) is conducted by the identical Barclay twins, Sir David and Sir Frederick, from their home on Monaco where they protect their billions from taxation. They must have enjoyed enormously their reporters’ stories of the trivial swindles of the pathetic politicos while they themselves wallow in untouched dosh. But none of their paper’s rivals pointed out this contrast: The Guardian declined to publish a letter I wrote, couched in diligently diplomatic terms, on the matter.

Not so far from us in Wiltshire lies the grand estate of Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail. I have no intelligence as to how much of each week, month or year his lordship resides there but, for the purposes of taxation, he “lives in France”. I’d be interested to hear his explanation as to how that arrangement differs from those of the so-called “benefits cheats” against whom his columnists rail. As long as the coalition government shows no sign of attending to the legal loopholes that allow the mega-rich to avoid paying taxation on a massive scale, you can be sure that the Tory press will not be switching its allegiance to Labour. Little wonder that Cameron smarms up to the news proprietors.

Lord Rothermere plus disinterested friend

And what do the editors and reporters do with their endlessly trumpeted freedom? Well, they invoke it most often in conjunction with another illusory shibboleth: “the public’s right to know”. These two great causes may be thought well served when the press works long and hard, carefully and restrainedly, to uncover real wrongdoing. The exemplary research and diligence that powered the campaign in the 1960s by The Sunday Times to have victims of the drug thalidomide recompensed remains a template for investigative journalism.

Pursuing salacious stories about people who’ve been on the telly is not of the same order. To combat this blood sport, it is hardly surprising that the hunted have sought legal protection and so we have the super-injunctions that have attracted such scorn and been preposterously dismissed as an attack on “the freedom of the press”.

What should we make of the Ryan Giggs debacle? So many views are canvassed: that it serves him right, that it overshadows his career as a footballer, that he’s in an impossible position, that he’s perfectly entitled to cover his tracks. The Lib Dem backbencher John Hemming named Giggs in the House, using parliamentary privilege for a purpose that many MPs felt was illegitimate. Under such privilege, an MP may not be brought before the law by anyone for what he says, however libellous it might be, although he may certainly be disciplined by the Speaker for breaching parliamentary regulation and custom.

It’s fair to ask whether, if MPs are to use their privilege in this way, the protection it offers ought to be withdrawn. I have long believed it utterly iniquitous that, if the employee of a foreign embassy kills your child through dangerous or drunken driving, he is not liable and you may have no redress because he enjoys diplomatic immunity. And it hardly distinguishes Hemming’s stance that he himself is a ludicrous figure with a personal life as messy and amoral as any soap opera character, lived with careless unconcern.

John Hemming MP, not especially choosy about his causes

The notion that Giggs “deserves everything he gets for cheating on his wife” errs on the side of puritan severity and determinism. Giggs is one of the oldest professional footballers still active at the highest level of the game and the corollary of that is that the world has changed profoundly since he entered the game. It’s easy to be morally superior about relatively uneducated working class boys who become very rich and famous without much psychological tuition in how to handle it. Henry Kissinger, a very clever and well educated man, once observed with delighted surprise that “power is a great aphrodisiac”. Giggs and Wayne Rooney and John Terry may not know what that means but they experience its operation. So did I in a small way. In the years that I was a television producer, I was offered sexual favours on a far more regular – even routine – basis than I ever was at any other period of my life. It’s an extremely disciplined individual who remembers always to just say no.

On the other hand, Giggs is a grown-up and he must know that involving himself in an adulterous relationship is a risky business, especially with a woman whose own “fame” derives from a so-called reality show and who could very readily be mistaken for a gold-digger. It’s in the nature of “cheating” in any way – adultery, drug-enhancement, expenses-fiddling, plotting terrorism – that a degree of furtive behaviour is required in its execution. Behaving furtively in itself implies a danger of being found out. Everybody being furtive must understand that the behaviour is AYOR.

But of course it’s nobody’s business what Giggs gets up to in his sexual life and nobody has any basis on which to pontificate, for instance, that his behaviour has “destroyed his family”. It might be that the public fuss has done far more damage to his domestic situation than would have been caused had he informed his wife of the adultery in his own time and without the hovering media. None of us can know what the ramifications might be but Mrs Stacey Giggs may well reflect that there have been four people in her marriage: her and her husband, his mistress and the watching world.

Into the middle of this melange has erupted another matter on which the press has not distinguished itself. I am not of the view that the highest achievement of press freedom is its willingness to pour abuse upon a public servant. The press, loudly led by the tabloids, decided very quickly after the so-called “Baby P” case broke that the witch to be hunted should be Head of Haringey Social Services, Sharon Shoesmith.

Sharon Shoesmith, a rare image not chosen to suggest that she is smug

Now that she has appealed her dismissal and won her case, the knives have been unsheathed again. I accept that Shoesmith has not helped her own image with some of the comments she made to the media. Many a tweeter thrust into the spotlight might make comments that were not thought-through too. The Twitter bandwagon blackguarding Shoesmith is gleefully leapt on by thousands of know-nothings who wouldn’t themselves dream of taking a social worker job for ten times the miserable salary and wouldn’t begin to have the sense or sensibility to consider the conundrums daily presented by social work.

In a posting when the story first broke, before Shoesmith’s unfair dismissal, I wrote the following and I stand by it:

“Armchair pundits, among whom I readily number myself, have turned their special venom on the hapless social workers of Haringey. Because Baby P died on their watch, they have, in an inimitable headline from The Sun, ‘BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS’. Being wise after an event that they didn’t even know had happened until they read about it in the news columns is the special talent of armchair pundits. Columnists who couldn’t find Haringey in the London A-Z (let alone their arses with both hands) profess to know better than seasoned social workers what constitutes a palpable risk. Columnists whose entertainment expense accounts are higher in a week than a social worker earns in a month demand that heads roll.

“Social work is a vocational career. You need infinite patience and human sympathy. You have to be ready to work anti-social hours and be poorly paid. And you are immediately made aware that it is an art rather than a science. The decisions you make are based wholly on impressions and assessments that are subjective. There will be people whose casework you take on who will tell you what they think you’ll want to hear; others who will have few means of articulating what their situation is; and most of them will be in some degree desperate and not all of them can be saved from self-harm or harming others. Nobody pays you any heed until something “goes wrong” and then a bunch of scandalised know-alls in London, whose knowledge of social deprivation derives almost entirely from an occasional look at EastEnders, start writing about you as if you yourself are a serial killer.

“I honestly don’t understand why cases like this are taken up by the media at all. They have no news value. Editors prate about ‘human interest’ but if viewers, listeners and readers are ‘interested’ it is because the media does its best to make them so. It’s mere prurience. The day after the Baby P case went large, there was a brief story, played almost as big for a day or two, of a mother who had been sectioned after killing her two small children. Tragically for the pundits, there was no evidence of social workers stoking the fire of this particular case so it fell off the news agenda. That didn’t prevent the BBC Television News bulletins from carrying a vox pop with a neighbour who was too emotional to be able to contribute anything useful. What is the value of this kind of coverage? Do the editors believe that we need to be shown someone upset before we can understand that the case is upsetting? And what are we supposed to do with this knowledge? Wring our hands? Take to the streets? Perhaps write to our MPs – not least the prime minister and the leader of the opposition – and ask them to stop uttering the word “families” as though it has a religious connotation when all the media evidence suggests that families can actually be fatal for children?” [P BABY: NO MORE DRAMAS November 19th 2008]

Traditionally, the point at which one fully realises how grossly inaccurate is the daily reporting carried by the papers is the occasion when one is unfortunate enough to become the object of press interest. Again in a modest way, I have had my own small experience of this. The arrogant assumption, empty speculation and reckless kite-flying that routinely informs press coverage has been further overlaid of late by the greatly increased encouragement of rebarbative levels of abuse from readers. On-line comment threads attached to the threadbare and frequently synthetic sneerings of columnists and the gathering momentum of sanctimonious abuse on Twitter have demonstrated just how widespread among the public is the taste for impotent rage. The press gleefully throws petrol on these wildfires in the form of hapless individuals: Ken Clarke one week, Ryan Giggs the next, Sharon Shoesmith the next.

The media wields enormous power and prompts millions to assume they have knowledge that in fact they do not have. I would have a great deal more faith and confidence in the press if it considered and discussed its own responsibilities half as readily as it shouts its claims to rights to which it is not entitled.