'What the papers say...........'

Amidst all the hoo-hah about Murdoch and the News of the World, it might be as well to put some of this into context.

The scandal was not exposed by the ‘establishment’ – not by the police, not by the politicians, not by the courts, not by the press watchdogs either at OFCOM or the PCC.

It was exposed by the media itself, primarily, to its eternal credit, the Guardian.

But why did the Times, another Murdoch paper, turn down the greatest scoop of the century? The DT took the MPs’ expenses scandal instead. I think we should be told!

Needless to say, the politicians including Dave have not been able to resist the opportunity to mouth-off about imposing restrictions on the press, giving the PCC and OFCOM more teeth blah, blah. In the DT the excellent Janet Daley had a rather different take; that there has been an unhealthy symbiosis growing up between politicians and the media over recent years  which has created a political environment in which the power of the media to make or break individuals, parties and government  is assumed to be a ‘given’. Unsurprisingly, the politicians now see this as an opportunity to put the beast back in its cage. Well, they would, wouldn’t they!

But is the assumption that the power of the press has grown, is growing and ought to be diminished really true? Is not the reality that the opposite is the case and that the print media in particular is facing a ruthless battle for survival. The NotW was Britain’s largest selling paper, with a circulation just over 2 million. Contrast this with the heyday of the Street of Shame when the daily (not weekly) sale of the Daily Mirror was 8 million. One or two papers are showing slight increases in circulation but the trend is inexorably downwards. The best selling broadsheet, the DT, has seen  its circulation slump from over a million to about 650,000. All papers have responded to the change by dumbing-down. Illustrative of this is the news that hit the front pages this week (including the DT) and was headlined on radio news that Beckham Prince of Chavs had produced another little chavette and devised another ludicrous name for it.

So how can it be that the power of the press has increased dangerously when its circulation is puny compared with what it was, say, in the 1950’s?

There are those of us who are old enough to remember when the media was toe-curlingly deferential –‘Has the Prime Minister anything he would care to say to the BBC about his visit to Moscow?’ That was the epitome of investigative journalism in the good old days. It started to go the other way with David Frost and satirical TV shows and probably hit its apogee when Peter Cook publicly humiliated Harold Macmillan when the PM went to see ‘Beyond the Fringe’. Enter the Dirty Digger with first his purchase of the NotW and then the ailing Sun. From memory, there were only 2 redtops  in those days – the Mirror and the Sketch. Murdoch set the pace and what we have today is a spate of tabloids with only the DT as a broadsheet. The redtops contain almost no news and miniscule editorials, so how come they can influence – no,  determine (it woz the Sun wot won it) - the outcome of an election?

As for the power of Rupert Murdoch, I venture to suggest that this is as nothing compared with megalomaniacs such as Beaverbrook, Northcliffe, Rothermere and the rest who dominated the media for the first half of the 20^th century. (It may be a little ironic that a new on-line paper has been launched in the US with the same title as the one so wonderfully satirised in ‘Scoop’; the Daily Beast!).

The press has been dying on its feet for the last forty years. Gone are the News Chronicle, the Daily Sketch, the Evening News , the Daily Star and many others, killed by crooked print unions and the rise of other news vehicles, firstly TV  and a plethora of new independent radio services, and in the last few years increasingly by the internet.

As for more press regulation, England has pretty well the most draconian libel laws in the civilised world. More regulation will mean more control by government. A free press and the House of Lords are all that stand between us and elective dictatorship, God help us all.

I have mixed with hacks over many years. They are larrikins, scallywags and top o’ me thumbs, and very, very good at their jobs. They are almost always good company provided that you are not tee-total. To suggest that journalism has lost its moral compass (to use an over-worked phrase) is nonsense. It never had one.