NEWSPAPERS, WROTE A. J. P. Taylor, ‘serve their noblest purpose when they are popular newspapers. A newspaper which is read by just a few of the so-called influential figures of the establishment is like an inter-departmental memorandum of the elite. It is a bloodless thing. Newspapers are also about crusading. They are part of people’s lives. That is what the great popular newspapers were in the past and should be now.’21
The man who popularised history got it right. He wrote those words in 1984 when Robert Maxwell bought the Mirror, a paper for which I worked for most of my adult life. His sentiments were, of course, nostalgic; by that time all mention of popular or tabloid journalism conjured little that was noble and much that was ignoble and cynical. The Sun had provided a new model in 1970; and today there is little to choose between Rupert Murdoch’s moneymaker and its rivals, especially the Mirror. Take away Paul Foot’s fine weekly column and an occasional defence of the National Health Service and the homeless and the difference is, says a Mirror-man of many years, ‘about the width of a cigarette paper’.
The Mirror’s support for the Labour Party is spoken of as a significant difference; but this is confined to the uncritical underpinning of a leadership whose policies owe more to Thatcher’s influence on British political life than to the needs of Labour’s constituency. Moreover, it is a support that is prepared to go to the same lengths as the Tory papers in defence of the established order – such as the smear campaign against Arthur Scargill, whose warning about the coal industry has been proven right, whose willingness to negotiate and compromise during the coal strike was suppressed and whose personal honesty bears striking comparison with that of the crook, Maxwell, who tried to crush him. It was a hatchet job the Sun and other tabloids could only admire. That the Mirror’s dogs barked after an honest man while they remained silent, presumably gulled, as their own master stole from them, describes the extent to which the ‘noblest purpose’ of popular journalism has been betrayed.
‘The history of the Daily Mirror is the history of our times,’ wrote Maurice Edelman in his book about the paper.22 If that is so, Maxwell’s coming was inevitable. He and Murdoch, their voraciousness feeding off relentless loans and secret deals, exemplified the Thatcher years. Between them, they hijacked popular journalism; yet even that truth is denied, no doubt because there remain so many acolytes to deny and distort it. Consider, for example, the now infamous headline, ‘The man who saved the Mirror,’ which was splashed across the Mirror’s front page the day after Maxwell’s death.
To understand the falsity of this claim, one need only look at the period immediately before Maxwell took over in 1984.23 After more than a decade of decline in the 1970s, during which the Mirror had tried and failed to compete with the Sun, the paper’s fortunes began to improve in the early 1980s. For example, during the Falklands War the Mirror’s circulation rose when it countered the Sun’s racist hysteria (‘Argies’ and ‘GOTCHA!’) with calm, erudite leaders (written mostly by Joe Haines) that, while not opposing the war, expressed the misgivings of a large section of the British population. This was popular journalism at its best.
Not only did the circulation continue to recover, but there was the prospect of a new kind of ownership that had every chance of guaranteeing the independence of the paper for many years. The chief executive of the Abbey National Building Society, Clive Thornton, was appointed chairman of the Mirror Group with a brief from the owner, Reed International, to prepare the company for flotation on the stock market. Thornton was an interesting maverick who had grown up in poverty on Tyneside, left school at fourteen, and studied law the hard way. While at the Abbey National, he broke the building societies’ cartel and financed inner-city housing. He drew up a ‘protective structure’ for the Mirror in which no single shareholder could own more than 15 per cent of the company; and he began to assemble a portfolio of solid, institutional capital. On top of this, he intended to give the workforce a substantial share of the company. He had no airs. He shunned the executive lift. He ate in the office canteen.
Reed was taken aback: it had hired Thornton on the implicit understanding that he would ‘cut the unions down to size’ and instead he was winning them over. He found the unions co-operative and the real canker in the management. He also proposed that the company launch a ‘serious left-wing tabloid’ in addition to the Mirror, with a second London evening paper. For all of this, he was criticised as ‘naive’ by managers and journalists alike. When Reed chairman Alex Jarratt broke his public pledge not to sell to ‘a single individual’ and looked like selling to Maxwell, the unions, including the journalists, gave Thornton a pledge of industrial peace for a year: a commitment unprecedented in newspapers.
I well remember the passion expressed at the Mirror chapel meeting at which we voted for Thornton. A red-faced Joe Haines said he would have to be ‘dragged through the door to work for a crook and a monster like Robert Maxwell’. Indeed, Haines was one of those who all that week had been warning us that Maxwell might plunder the pension fund. Within 48 hours, Thornton was virtually thrown out of the Mirror building by Maxwell, and Haines was Maxwell’s man.
One year later the leader of the Labour Party was guest of honour at a lavish party which Maxwell held to celebrate the first anniversary of his takeover of the Mirror. Neil Kinnock, it was said, did not approve of Maxwell, but Roy Hattersley ensured they kept smiling. Of those who now controlled Britain’s press, Maxwell was all they had. Seen from the point of view of Mirror readers and Labour voters, the scale of the tragedy became clear. And if the journalists could not spot the con man, the readers could. They resented their paper being turned into a Maxwell family album; and they stopped buying it in their droves. In June 1984 the Mirror under Thornton was selling 3,487,721 copies daily. After eighteen months under Maxwell, this had dropped to an all-time low of 2,900,000 and falling.24 Calculating readership figures, at least a million people stopped reading the Daily Mirror in the wake of Maxwell’s takeover. ‘It takes something close to genius’, according to an observer quoted by Marketing Week, ‘to lose so much circulation so quickly.’25
The Murdoch press have had wonderful sport at the expense of the Mirror, and who can blame them? But surely we can now expect the Insight team of the Sunday Times to dig into Murdoch’s own, huge indebtedness and the allegations regarding his business practices made by Christopher Hird in his book on Murdoch and his Channel 4 investigation?26 And will they now ask how Murdoch ended up controlling 70 per cent of the press in his native Australia when the Foreign Investment Review Board opposed his acquisition of the Herald and Weekly Times empire?
In Britain, the Murdoch and Maxwell papers between them have the biggest single share of the daily tabloid market. On Sundays, their papers are the majority. Such is the influence of Murdoch that a whole generation of journalists have come to the craft believing that Murdochism is an immutable tabloid tradition: that sexism, racism, voyeurism, the pillorying of people and fabrications are ‘what the British public wants’. This means, at best, patronising the readers. For journalists on the Mirror it meant – and still means – a breathless wait on the editorial floor for the arrival of the first edition of the Sun. It means a vocabulary of justification and self-deceit. ‘The readers’, that strange amorphous body, are constantly evoked. ‘The readers’ are no longer interested in real news and serious issues; ‘the readers’ are interested mainly in royalty scrapings, and handouts from those who hustle television soaps and pop music business.
In last week’s Sunday Mirror, under a front-page headline ‘Bedded and Fired’, a secretary claiming to have been ‘seduced’ by Maxwell, a man she found ‘repulsive’, complained that he ‘made’ her go home on a bus and did not keep a ‘promise’ to give her a flat and a car. As part of the Mirror’s current spasm of contrition, the aim of this story was no doubt to show what a rat Maxwell was. It didn’t work. Instead, it provided yet another example of how deep the rot in popular journalism is. Over the page was some self-serving nonsense about how the paper had had ‘an awful week’ and it promised ‘at all costs, to continue to expose corruption WHEREVER we find it . . .’ The reference to ‘continue’ will puzzle those Mirror pensioners embezzled by the publisher of the Mirror. The rest was oddly familiar. ‘Our rivals in Fleet Street’, it complained, ‘are trying to talk us down because they can’t beat us down. Jackals and reptiles in harness!’ Did Cap’n Bob dictate this from the grave? ‘Our heart’, it finished up, ‘beats strongly because we and you, our readers, care for each other . . .’27
The last line has become something of a refrain lately as the rudderless Mirror papers lay claim to a legacy that is no longer theirs. The years of Murdoch and of Maxwell show. The obsequiousness of yesterday has been replaced by abuse of Maxwell that abuses too much and protests too much. Meanwhile, the newspapers of the ordinary man and woman are, on many days, hardly newspapers at all. It is almost as if there is a missing generation of journalists. As young journalists are often told that the standards of Hugh Cudlipp’s Mirror are ‘not what the readers want’, many are unaware that a popular tabloid, the Mirror, brought the world to a quarter of the British people every day, and did so with humanity, intelligence and a flair that never patronised readers; and that such a paper encouraged its writers to abandon what Dr Johnson called ‘the tyranny of the stock response’ and, above all, to warn their readers when they were conned – conned by governments or by vested interests or by powerful individuals. Mawkish tracts about ‘caring for each other’ were never necessary; care was evident.
Since popular journalism was redefined by the Sun, the effect on young journalists has, in my observation, been phenomenal. Denied a popular paper that allows them to express their natural idealism and curiosity, many instead affect a mock cynicism that they believe ordains them as journalists. And what they gain in cynicism they lose in heart by having to pursue a debased version of their craft. This applies to the young both on tabloids and the ‘quality’ papers.
This need no longer be so. The demise of Maxwell offers an opportunity to journalists to confront not only the truth of proprietorial crookedness but the corruption of journalism itself and to purge it with a paper that is truly on the side of its readers. The Mirror could be this paper again – as long as the residue of Maxwell’s influence is cleared away completely. Or another could take its place.
It is significant that, of all the discussion about Europe, none has been about the press. In France, anti-trust media laws prohibit any individual or group from owning newspapers with more than 30 per cent of combined national and regional sales. In Germany, a cartel office sees that minority shareholders in newspapers have rights to veto the decision of a block majority. In Sweden, a Press Support Board ensures, independent of government, the health of a wide range of papers. In none of these countries does the existence of specific legislation restrict the freedom of the press. Rather, freedom and independence are enhanced.
My source for this is a Labour Party discussion document, ‘Freeing the Press’, published in 1988. It proposed a Media Enterprise Board similar to the Swedish board that provides ‘seed’ funds for new newspapers. It calls for a right of reply and legal aid on libel cases. It recommends a Right to Distribution, similar to that in France which allows small imprints to reach the bookstalls; and, most important, it says it is time for an anti-trust legislation and a legally binding obligation on owners to ensure editorial independence.
Are Labour still serious about this? If they are, they should say so now before their enemies catch them for having consorted with Maxwell. Of course, there is much to add to these reforms, notably that aspiring young journalists are taught and encouraged to believe that achievement of that ‘noblest purpose’ is indeed possible, and that in the end it depends on them.
December 13, 1991