Goodbye, gutter press!

Men who spar with Government

To back their blows

Need something more than

Ordinary journalistic prose.

Yes, I know that you are sick of hearing about the Dirty Digger, but this story will run and run. Get used to it.

I will make two predictions:

News International will survive quite easily but it will sell its print interests. They are not big money spinners and the Times and Sunday Times lose £70,000,000 a year. They will be bought by Russian ‘oligarchs’, a euphemism used to describe businessmen who could not lay straight in bed. And the current witch-hunt will turn public opinion against the hunters. The truth is that the public just couldn’t give a damn. To them, this is mob-hysteria amongst the chattering classes. The public concerns are prices, taxes, jobs and homes – as always. So what, if the Assistant Commissioner at the Met is so thick he couldn’t go two rounds with a revolving door?

Restrictions imposed on press reporting will have no effect on the Red Tops as they don’t print any news, just tits and bums and fairy stories. If Dave really wants to make a difference I suggest two simple measures.

First is to select Parliamentary candidates through primaries. This will encourage MPs to look after their constituents rather than their public image. Second, prohibit foreign interests from owning a majority stake in any newspaper or terrestrial TV news service.

The real story is that the influence of the print medium is vanishing fast, and the news industry is literally changing before our eyes. The heyday of the press barons was the first 60 years of the 20th Century. The culture of deference started to crumble in the 1960’s which led to the brief reign of the Red Tops, but the high-water mark was the 80’s when the tabloids tortured the Royal family and ceased even pretending to report news. Now, the press is being superseded by electronic media.

TV news now included amateur videos taken from You-Tube and similar sites. They were used extensively to cover events in Tunisia, Egypt and especially Syria. The first reports of the end of Bin Laden were carried on Twitter. They have greater immediacy and seem more trustworthy and genuine than profession coverage, which can be rigged (I remember Sefton Delmer’s ‘eye-witness account’ of the mutiny of the Force Publique in the Belgian Congo in 1960, filed from the bar of the Elephant & Castle in Ndola, Zambia. ‘As I sit here in the bar of the Hotel Splendido, all around me men are dropping like flies’).

Then we have Wikileaks which will continue to torment our masters even if Assanje gets before the kangaroo court in Sweden. The excellent Al Jazeera is leading the way in using social media such as tweets, Facebook, and amateur video in its news coverage. We forget that the age of mass print media was quite modern, created by universal education. Prior to that news was transmitted – if at all – by word of mouth, by market place gossip, by pamphlets and other informal means. I believe that in the mid-19^th century the largest newspaper circulation was the Times with about 50,000. We are moving back to something resembling this, with news increasingly gathered and circulated by the public.