YOUNG and FOOLISH

The late Michael Young was a great man and much revered by progressive educationalists and leftists alike. His long association with the famously free-thinking independent school, Dartington Hall in Devon, is enshrined in the title he took, Lord Young of Dartington.

But it must have been the black sheep among the particular emission of spermatozoa that fertilised the ovum that gave rise to his son. Toby Young, by contrast, is a great booby and much scorned by progressive educationalists and leftists alike. Because reactionary blowhards have no difficulty securing platforms in the Tory press for their irrational, irrelevant views and because Young has distinguished himself insofar as he has never been deterred by being seen to make an utter jackass of himself, he has carved out a good living from blowing off on anything that catches his fancy. The name I have bestowed upon him and shall use herebelow is Yobby Tounge.

In the current hailstorm pouring over News International in general and the News of the World in particular, Yobby Tounge has shown himself to be unique among journalists outside the Murdoch fold by attempting to mount any kind of defence (or, as he spells it in his tweets, “defense”) of the phone-hacking that was evidently standard practice both at NoW and throughout the gutter press. Here are his arguments with my notes in bold.

Michael Young and the egregious sprog

From The Daily Telegraph blog:

IN DEFENCE OF TABLOID JOURNALISM (by someone who’s been turned over by the Screws)
By Yobby Tounge

I’m disappointed by how few people are willing [already you see that YT cannot craft a decent English sentence] to defend the News of the World. Not the phone-hacking, obviously, but the paper itself. It’s always the first paper I read on a Sunday morning and has been for at least 35 years. [I don’t think he sees what a trivial clown this makes him look. If I have had as many as five copies of NoW in my hands in the whole of my life, I would be surprised and now of course I will never add to that total]. And I say this as someone who’s been turned over by the Screws. [For those innocent of this field, the paper is known to its fan-base as News of the Screws, due to its predilection for the salacious, the repellent and the untrue]. In my wayward youth, I was once discovered in the ladies lavatories of the Groucho Club with Christina Hance, the official Lady Di lookalike. It was fairly innocent – we were just snogging – but it was enough for the News of the World who ran a story about it under the headline: “Milord’s son in love flush.” My father was not best pleased. [Now, YT reveals a great deal of his character in retailing this piffling anecdote. It allows him to swank about his father being a peer and about his supposed success as an adventurous Lothario – though why he should want people to know that he “snogged” a woman who looked like Lady Diana Cooper is hard to fathom. What we see here is someone so distressed by being “turned over” by NoW that he feels it necessary to repeat the calumny without prompting. You wonder if he didn’t sell the story to the paper in the first place].

Yobby Tounge: oh dear, pissed again

I’ve written a defence of tabloid journalism in today’s Spectator that you can read here [below]. The gist of it is that the reason tabloid hacks sometimes cross the line into illegality is not because they’re dishonest or corrupt or lack a moral compass [though that is clearly precisely what they lack]. It’s because they have until 5.30pm that evening to nail the story and they know that if they don’t some other bast**d will [or in any other words the ends justify any means, however dishonest, corrupt or lacking in moral compass]. This newsroom culture – the belief that you should stop at nothing in pursuit of a good story – can lead to the sort of excesses we’ve learnt about this week, but it can also lead to the discovery of wrongdoing at the highest level.

Without the unscrupulous, appalling, “shocking” behaviour of red-top reporters, we probably wouldn’t know about Cecil Parkinson’s infidelity or John Prescott’s affair with his secretary [in what parallel universe are these examples of “wrongdoing at the highest level”? Sexual adventurism, of the kind that YT in his “wayward youth” would certainly have grabbed with both hands, is nobody’s business outside those intimately concerned. Aren’t Parkinson and Prescott men who were “turned over” by the tabloids?]. We wouldn’t know about the match-fixing antics of Pakistani cricketers [true, this was a NoW investigation and I could care less about it] or the corruption at the heart of FIFA [mostly exposed, I believe, by the BBC]. Yes, the ink-stained wretches regularly desecrate the graves of dead girls [this levity is wholly inappropriate; and the phone-hacking involving murder victims cannot possibly be justified by citing the match-fixing in cricket], but they also speak truth to power [no they fucking don’t] and they do it more often – and with more impact – than the broadsheets [they may reach more paying customers but I doubt the establishment takes their customarily fanciful claims more seriously than those of broadsheets and broadcasters].

Yobby Tounge ... erm ... exposed (look away now)

I can see the problem with this defence. It sounds like I’m making an excuse for the tabloids’ use of the “black arts” – that anything goes because they occasionally break important stories. Clearly, there are people who should be protected from tabloid intrusion, such as the victims of the 7/7 bombings or the families of dead soldiers. But how do you shield them without also shielding wrongdoers? A privacy law wouldn’t just protect the innocent, it would also protect the guilty. Do we really want Britain to become more like France, where members of the political class know they can get away with behaving appallingly because there’s no danger there’ll ever be exposed in the press? Without papers like the News of the World, Britain would be more like France. [This isn’t a serious argument. There is a distinction, perfectly definable in law and recognisable by any grown-up in practice, between privacy, confidentiality and the right not to be stalked on the one hand and deceit, hypocrisy and improbity on the other. YT seems to believe that any discretion practised by public figures to keep infidelity private is tantamount to fraud, bribery and corruption. In any case, the tabloids themselves employ deceit, hypocrisy and improbity in the pursuit of stories – undercover reporters, kiss’n’tell payments, wired moles posing as members of the public, agents provocateurs].

Alan Rusbridger’s [editor of The Guardian] line is that you can regulate the tabloids without clipping their wings. They’ll still be able to go after corrupt sports officials, just not the grieving parents of dead girls. They can be forced to behave more responsibly and still speak truth to power.

But is that feasible? Can you have the good without the bad? I’m not so sure. [I am. But then I don’t require the “freedom” to pore gleefully over malicious and inaccurate gossip about the peccadilloes of celebs].

Masthead of the News of the Screws: it is now

Never one to earn himself one fee when he can bag two with the same material, Yobby Tounge wrote the following for The Spectator, of which he is something called associate editor:

STATUS ANXIETY: A word in defence of tabloid journalism
Yobby Tounge suffers from Status Anxiety

Forgive me if I don’t join in the orgy of sanctimony surrounding the News of the World. If any evidence is uncovered that proves a member of the paper’s staff hacked into Milly Dowler’s phone and deleted her voicemail messages, then, yes, he or she should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. [13 year-old Milly was murdered. While she was classed as missing, her mobile was hacked into on behalf of NoW and, when it filled up with in-coming messages, the hacker deleted them. The knowledge that messages had been deleted encouraged the Dowler family to believe that Milly was still alive]. But to describe such behaviour as ‘shocking’ is to reveal an astonishing ignorance about the tabloid profession. It’s a bit like claiming to be ‘shocked’ when a celebrity is caught cheating on his wife or a politician is caught lying through his teeth. [This is itself an astonishing statement. Had such tactics been known about, arrests would have been made, new regulations brought in and politicians would have backed away from the Murdoch press. I submit that Yobby Tounge is the only non-tabloid journo not to have been ignorant of this practice and its extent, which makes me ask: shouldn’t the police be interviewing him?]

The reason phone-hacking was, until recently, such an established tool of the Fleet Street trade — and I’m talking about every red-top, not just the News of the World — is because a good [sic] tabloid journalist will stop at nothing in pursuit of a story. That’s the newsroom culture. They don’t cross the line into illegality because they’re dishonest or corrupt or lack a moral compass. It’s because they have until 5.30 p.m. that evening to nail the story and they know that if they don’t, some other bastard will.

2010 election poster from the vonpip.wordpress website

People unconnected with Fleet Street imagine that tabloid journalists have all sorts of sinister agendas. They’re determined to distract the masses from their wretched plight by bombarding them with celebrity tittle-tattle or trick them into voting for whichever political party has promised to do the most to advance the business interests of their proprietor. Or they’re racists or homophobes or misogynists. [Well, sir, all of the above is indeed true of many tabloid journalists. Have a read of Richard Littlejohn or Kelvin MacKenzie sometime]. In fact, there’s only one agenda on the Street of Shame and it’s the news agenda. Getting stories — and getting them first — is the vital thing. Everything else pales in comparison.

The reason the Milly Dowler revelations have surprised some people is because at the time of the alleged incident she was missing, presumed dead. Again, this is to reveal a breathtaking lack of knowledge about the culture of tabloid hacks. They pride themselves on being unsentimental about the dead or the recently bereaved. Surely everyone knows that if you lose a member of your family in a terrible accident and a tabloid reporter turns up on your doorstep, the last thing you should do is invite them in for a cup of tea? The moment your back is turned, they’ll steal a photograph of your loved one from your mantelpiece. Remember, it used to be a rule of the Daily Express foreign desk that any journalist coming across a scene of carnage and devastation was to announce themselves with the following words: ‘Anyone here been raped and speaks English?’ [No it wasn’t “a rule” at the Express. It was overheard in 1960 in the Congo, spoken just once by an English reporter from an unnamed paper. But it’s hard to see how this particular piece of insensitivity and any other of the hobnail-booted behaviour YT ascribes to tabloid hacks may be hauled in to justify phone-hacking of the brutal kind now being exposed. YT’s position seems to be: “wow, these guys are awesomely amoral so you are showing your own ignorance if you are surprised that sometimes they surpass themselves”. I suppose it’s certainly true that my own position could be summed up as: “gosh, Yobby Tounge is such a complete prat that only someone ignorant of the depths of human immaturity can be amazed by how deeply stupid he is really capable of being”].

Lewis Milestone's 1931 movie version of The Front Page starring Adolphe Menjou, centre left in fedora

Walter Kerr, the late New York Times drama critic, summed up this attitude when he reviewed a production of The Front Page, Hecht and MacArthur’s affectionate satire of the Chicago newspaper industry. The central character is a no-nonsense editor called Walter Burns and Kerr described the essence of his appeal as his ability ‘to walk into a tough situation in order to be brutally nonchalant’. This was the chief characteristic of Chicago newspapermen, their complete lack of sentimentality, and it remains the hallmark of most tabloid hacks. Any News of the World journalist who thought he ought to temper his zeal because the story he was working on concerned a 13-year-old schoolgirl who had probably been murdered was in the wrong office. [There’s a vast difference between the amorality of the Murdoch empire and the realism of Hildy Johnson and the other newshounds in Hecht & MacArthur’s sour comedy, whose real-life models would certainly deplore the antics of their real-life successors. And the proprietor didn’t come to feel obliged to close the Chicago Morning Post].

Now, you might disapprove of some of the ‘dark arts’ that tabloid journalists use — phone hacking, for instance — but if they always played by the rules they’d rarely get the scoop. Some of these stories are trivial and hardly of vital national importance, but others are not ... [from here he repeats par 3 of the Telegraph blog and concludes with a light rewrite of par 4].

In sum, my view is: with friends like Yobby Tounge, Rupert Murdoch needs no enemies.