My
career (if one can call it a career, which I rather doubt) as a journalist can
be traced back to when I was at high school in the 1940s. One day, one of our
teachers who had undertaken to coach aspiring athletes after school, remarked
in passing as we stood around on the open field, that he had been reading The Observer, a London Sunday newspaper,
and he remarked, in an idle kind of fashion, “those fellows can really write.”
Somehow, that made an impression on me, already in the first stages of
contemplating becoming a journalist, and established for me a sort of bench
mark worthy of aiming for: not just to write for newspapers, but to be able to
“really write”, which meant that I would have to strive to write really well.
I left school in 1945, at the end of
my fourth year, and took a job as a copyholder in the reading room of one of
the two local dailies, the lowest job in the hierarchy as laid out in the
collective agreement of the New Zealand Journalists’ Association, that started
me off at the princely sum of thirty shillings a week, rising in slow seven
year increments to 10 or 11 pounds a
week. It was not a spectacular prospect,
but I showed some aptitude for the job, and managed to make the seven-year
journey in two and as half years.
Although I had no reason to object to
how I was treated by my employers, I was already an enthusiastic socialist, and
it was not lost on me that every newspaper in the country stood irreconcilably
against the Labour government that I supported. The reasons were obvious: the
newspapers were owned by wealthy people, and wealthy people, as far as I was
concerned, were the enemy.
I worked for newspapers in New
Zealand, Australia, Britain and Canada for 27 years as a daily journalist, and
the same facts applied everywhere. From
time to time there would be an outburst of ethical concern about standards, but
I always regarded these as claptrap.
I started this blog in 1996 as it
became obvious that my formal working life was wearing down, and I had only one
objective, namely, to provide a sounding-off board in which I could write what
I liked without my stuff being interfered with by editors, sub-editors or other gatekeepers. (I know
there are good editors, but my experience of newspapers did not turn up too
many, if any, of them).
In the 21 years I have been writing
the blog I have sounded off on almost
every subject under the sun, but one subject I have steered clear of is
journalism itself, and its pretensions. The reason is that one of the higher
levels of journalism is the writing of editorials, to which many, almost one
might say most, journalists aspire, but my experience has led me to believe that
the people who do this job are paid liars for their bosses, so this was
something I never aspired to.
All this is to explain my silence on
this subject, in case any readers might have noticed, a silence that I have
clung to in spite of the fact that journalism, its honesty, its pretensions,
its cowardice and hypocrisy, its meretriciousness, its occasional outburst of
courage, has recently been under immense pressure. What has persuaded me to set
aside my silence is a six-page article
in the last issue for 2017 of the Guardian
Weekly, the only newspaper I subscribe to, by Katherine Viner, the current
holder of one of he most illustrious jobs in journalism, editor-in-chief of The Guardian, the modern version of the
fabled British newspaper The Manchester
Guardian.
She begins her article on
the day in 1819 when a vast crowd of 60,000 gathered in Manchester to agitate
for parliamentary reform. These were the days when Manchester, a crowded city,
had no member of Parliament, while Old Sarum, a hamlet in the south with one
voter, had two. At the demo, the armed cavalry charged the crowd, hacking away
with their sabres, killing eleven and injuring hundreds. This became known as
the Peterloo massacre, and was later described by historian A.J.P. Taylor as
the event “that began the break up of the old order in England.” Two years later, a 28-year-old journalist who
was present at the massacre, John Edward Taylor, and who had taken his job
seriously, reporting for months to London papers on the fate of the wounded,
thus bringing the incident to national prominence, decided to start his own
newspaper, and so, with financial backing from eleven donors, The Manchester Guardian was born in a
surge of hope and faith in ordinary people, and bearing Taylor’s belief
that “in spite of Peterloo and police
spies, reason was great and would prevail.”
This part of the history I did not
know; what I have known about the newspaper dates from when a 25-year-old man called C.P.Scott became editor in 1872, who,
during the 57 years of his editorship, took unpopular stances in favour of
Irish Home Rule, and against the Boer war
of 1899, where he allowed a brilliant
young woman writer to expose the concentration camps set up by the British
military for captured Boers. This was extremely unpopular in an age of intense
jingoism, and almost finished off The Guardian,
which lost readers, but established that it was a paper, as one observer
remarked, “that cannot be bought.”
As a kid in New Zealand journalism, I
developed an admiration for this newspaper. I began to pummel it with short
items of news and comment, some of which were published. During my four years in England in the early
1950s I never rose to anything higher than an ancient weekly in Coventry, but I
developed an enhanced admiration for The
Guardian, even though I did not agree with its Liberal party politics, which
led it to oppose establishment of the National Health Service --- probably, as
Ms. Viner confesses, because the editor of the time A.P.Wadsworth, disliked Aneurin
Bevan, the Labour minister who created the NHS. My admiration was further
enhanced when I spent eight years in London as correspondent for The Montreal Star, and could compare the
seven or eight dailies that were delivered to my doorstep each morning. At that
time I got to know Guardian reporters,
who tended to be men of gravitas and deep experience.
Ms. Viner is a serious woman, and she
believes, as her headline says, that journalism needs a new mission in its
current crisis. The crisis has been caused by the technological revolution carried
by the creation of the Internet. This has led to the collapse of the model by
which selling advertisements could cover the costs of journalism, and as a result
newspapers are biting the dust all over the world. Also, the hopes for a bright new dawn from the Internet were exaggerated: just as with
many other startling modern inventions, “our digital town squares have been
mobbed with bullies, misogynists and racists
who brought a new kind of hysteria to public debate.”
I had developed an admiration for Ms. Viner’s
predecessor as Editor, Alan Rushbridger, who led the paper for twenty of its
most difficult years. He attempted to elevate the readers into a more central
position, embraced the Internet, published, against intense official
opposition, such stolen revelations as were provided by Edward Snowden from
official secret sources.
Truth to tell, I have not been especially
cheerful about how Ms.Viner has handled the newspaper. Although she pays tribute
to its left-leaning past, I found appalling the paper’s treatment of Jeremy Corbyn as
leader of the Labour party. With a couple of exceptions, Guardian writers went after him like a pack of ravening dogs, denigrating
and abusing Corbyn as a man who had no hope of selling his old-fashioned
leftist agenda to the voting public.
Corbyn did have problems, but they
came from the fact that although his election as leader was greeted with an
outburst of subscriptions to the party that made it the largest in Europe, most
of his MPs in Parliament were chosen by Tony Blair, whose outlook with his
so-called New Labour, was closely akin to the Thatcherism that he succeeded. The attacks on the Labour leader were relentless,
pitiless and in my view entirely scurrilous. All of this was brought to a halt
when Corbyn campaigned on his leftist programme with such spectacular success
in the recent election.
Ms. Viner says that some 800,000 readers
now support The Guardian in response
to her frequent appeals for donations in addition to simply buying the newspaper. She has dedicated the paper, still owned by
the Scott Trust, which was set up in 1936, to expressing the public interest
which she defines thus:
“…our guiding focus… will be to challenge
the economic assumptions of the past three decades which have extended market
values such as competition and self-interest far beyond their natural sphere
and seized the public realm.”
The new Guardian mission will be, “to constantly examine our assumptions,
our biases, how the world is changing,
what it means.” She lays out five principles:
*we will develop ideas that help
improve the world, not just critique it;
*we will collaborate with readers, and
others, to have greater impact;
*we will diversify, to have richer reporting
from a representative newsroom;
*we will be meaningful in all our
work;
*and, underpinning it, we will report fairly
on people as well as power, and find things out.
I hope, but cannot say for sure, that
these objectives are not what I used to call claptrap, the customary pious
hopes for good journalism that I very early began to discount.
Only time will tell, I guess.
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