“Mounce, the Pictures Editor, was busy putting the fear of God into his staff. He had plenty of the fear of God to hand, but just at present only one member of his staff to put it into, a small meek photographer called Lovebold. Mounce was looking at a sheaf of prints which Lovebold had just brought down from the darkroom.
“What’s all this crap supposed to be,” he asked insultingly.
“I thought it was the sort of crap you wanted,” said Lovebold.
“Well, it’s crap”
“I thought we were supposed to be taking this sort of crap.”
“It’s still crap”
We all know them. The bullying warrant officers and trumped-up subalterns of the newsroom, whose legends may have mellowed over time, but whose regimens were no less brutal for all that. The horrible Reg Mounce was created by Michael Frayn in his 1967 novel Towards the End of the Morning, based on his period working at the Observer, but the newsroom monsters are not just fictional inventions.
The Daily Mail’s venerable Ann Leslie, who spent a distinguished career covering wars around the world, honed her courage in the offices of the Daily Express in Manchester, where she learned “how to see off assorted sexist bullying men like news editors”, according to her autobiography Killing My Own Snakes. “Nothing in my earlier life had equipped me for working for such a man” as her “irascible Scot” news editor Tom Campbell. “I was everything he hated: young, a woman, privately educated and worst of all, someone from the south of England.”
I faced my own nemesis in the terrifying form of Liverpool Echo news editor George Cregeen, who tried to sack me because he did not want “commies” like me on his paper. The indictment was based simply on the fact that I happened to be friends with Jon Snow who had just been sent down from the local university for his part in a protest against a visit by a member of the Royal Family. Nor did Cregeen reserve his terror tactics just for me. Fellow trainee John Sergeant, who went on to become one of the toughest political correspondents in broadcasting, was so affected by Cregeen that he felt he had to write about his in his autobiography §§§§§§§§§.
And then there was Andy Coulson. Although he spent his brief tenure at No. 10 swanning around in smooth Downing Street issue suits trying to look unflappable and as unlike Alistair Campbell as possible, he already had a place assured in the pantheon of newsroom super-bullies. In November 2009, before the phone hacking scandal was revealed in its full enormity, he was revealed as one of the biggest bullies of all, in an employment tribunal case in which former sports reporter Matt Driscoll was awarded almost £800,000 – the highest payout of its kind in the media. “Andy Coulson was at the heart of all this,” Driscoll said. “If I were him,” I would find it very hard to look in the mirror.”
But bullying, it turned out was merely part of it. By the summer of 2011, as the full horror of the Milly Dowler hacking scandal unfolded, I, too, was beginning to wonder about the person staring back at me from the mirror in the mornings. Like Coulson, I had been one of Murdoch’s senior news executives for a long period in the post-Wapping years, and it was a chance lunch with one of my senior colleagues on the Murdoch London broadsheets. This was a man who was once so “on the Murdoch message” that he dismissed an investigation that I had produced into child labour sweatshops as “Well, what’s wrong? It’s the market isn’t it?”
“I now think,” he told me with a deep sigh, “I was in denial.” I had never thought of it in quite that way. The queasy feeling in my stomach was nothing to do with the quality of the steak and kidney pudding at the Garrick. As the truth about some of Rupert Murdoch’s news operations – hacking, blagging, payment to police and worse – was exposed in all its awfulness, my friend articulated something that many of us News Corp journalists really suspected, but could never quite bring ourselves to admit.
My time as head of news at the Murdoch Sunday Times through the late 1980s and early 1990s was a relative age of innocence compared with the horrors of recent times. Yet this was the period in which the seeds of the disaster that is now engulfing News Corporation were planted. News journalism is a complex and often chaotic cocktail of adrenaline, risk-taking, egotism and competitiveness. Most of the time it is underpinned by a genuine quest for the truth and a sense of decency, however confused it might seem. But the Murdoch news machine is fuelled by more toxic and combustible ingredients – a culture of fear, unquestioning subservience to the media tycoon’s political and business interests and a willingness to push the envelope till it falls off the table.
As one former News of the World editor used to advise his staff: “Take the story to breaking point and then ratchet it back a notch.” Unfortunately, many journalists at Wapping conveniently forgot about the last bit as they got carried away in the wild west atmosphere
Unscrupulous though his methods were, I know exactly what the phone-hacking private detective Glenn Mulcaire meant when he told the Guardian that his employers exerted “relentless pressure” and “constant demand for results. “I knew what we did pushed the limits ethically. It was precisely this attitude that impelled many people inside Wapping to do dangerous things – especially in the atmosphere of mass hysteria that followed the 1986 dispute. Many of the Sturmtruppen who cut their teeth in the years following Fortress Wapping were the very same people who went on to high executive positions as phone hacking went on unfettered.
Was there any phone-hacking on my watch? It was policy that all reporters were routinely interrogated on their sources. Neverthess – feeble though it may sound – I could not present myself to Lord Leveson and swear, hand on heart, there was none. As the former People editor Bill Hagerty pointed out recently, senior editors cannot know everything. At the very least there was a great deal of reckless risk-taking – not exactly discouraged by the News International corporate ethos. I summarily dismissed a reporter who was caught trying to cover his mistakes by offering a financial bribe to the staff in the newspaper computer room to falsify his copy. (An action he has never subsequently denied.) Shortly afterwards he went seamlessly on to a senior job at our sister paper the News of the World, and his “scoops” were celebrated in the final issue earlier this month as some of the best journalism in that newspaper’s history. This autumn (2011) he was re-hired by the Sunday Times as an “undercover reporter” – as though all corporate memory of scandal had been erased
More traditional journalists were shocked by the “creative” techniques used by former Sun journalists staff, “bussed” in to fill the gaps filled by so-called refuseniks (journalists who left for other jobs during the Wapping dispute or refused for moral reasons to work for Murdoch when he had sacked their colleagues). And recent events have shown they were not limited to the duration of the dispute and its aftermath.
With Lord Leveson’s inquiry now under full sail, News Corp executives and PRs remain busy trying to close down the idea of “contamination” inside the company – and to hold the line that the News of the World was a “rogue” newspaper – one rotten apple in the barrel. But should anyone be surprised at that the spores of the rot could have spread, since Wapping (and its swish new offices over the road), has always been a kind of journalistic “factory farm”. Swapping executives, stories and news values between the Wappng titles was commonplace – and still is. The long-standing former managing editor of the Sunday Times, for instance, was recently transferred to stand guard againstThe Sun, just as the night editor of the Sunday broadsheet is a former sun reporter
I vividly recall one Saturday night passing Rupert on the way into the editor’s office with a clutch of page proofs direct from the composing room. “Why haven’t you put that story on Page One?” he growled, referring to an exclusive he had he had bought expensively for the News of the World and which I had relegated to Page Two of The Sunday Times. Such direct interference didn’t happen very often. But it didn’t need to – the reality was far subtler.
It may have passed the thesaurus test but plainly nonsense when Rupert told the House of Commons House of Commons this summer that he didn’t interfere with his editors. As Harold Evans writes in a new introduction to his book Good Times, Bad Times: “In all Murdoch’s far flung enterprises, the question is not whether this or that is a good idea but ‘What will Rupert think?’ He doesn’t have to give direct orders. His executives act like courtiers, working towards what they perceive to be his wishes or might be construed as his wishes.”
For instance, I was required, as news editor, to use the services of a “media correspondent” hand-picked by Rupert, whose main function, it seemed to me, was studying his proprietor’s utterances about Sky, placing stories attacking the broadcasting unions and rubbishing the BBC. On one occasion the Old Man swept into the office, calling all his senior executives up to the boardroom. “Why do you guys ignore the sports pages at the back of the paper?” he rasped before striding out past the barbed wire to his limousine. Some thought the Boss had taken leave of his senses. But the coded message was: “I’m about to launch Sky Sports and make bloody sure you get it on the front pages.”
On other occasions he would have his senior staff delivered by chauffeur to his London home, or that of his chief executive, where the Sun King would declaim his prejudices about the politicians or businessmen of the day. No one dared to dissent in case they fell out of favour – though one worse-for-wear political journalist did just that when he dropped a glass of red wine on the expensive white silk carpet.
The ‘Murdochisation’ of the press, as Carl Bernstein has called it, rapidly spread beyond News International, as a diaspora of his loyal executives moved on to other parts of the media. Admiration for the man was not dimmed, even by those who had those he had brutally fired from their jobs. (I recall one hard-bitten Ossie manager, who had come over in the first wave of loyal sturmtruppen to secretly install the Wapping plant, close to tears as he struggled for the reasons for his inexplicable dismissal. Yet he still would not say a word against his boss.)
More insidious were those who went on to emulate the style of their erstwhile proprietor in other organisations. Shortly after I moved from my job at The Sunday Times to become Executive Editor of The Independent, the management of that newspaper was assumed by David Montgomery, then chief executive of the Mirror Group, which had come to own a 50 per cent share in the paper.“Monty”, who had edited two Murdoch papers – Today and the News of the World – wasted no time outflanking his former proprietor in the scale of interference with his editors or in trying to manipulate the Independent into the corporate shape of what was essentially a tabloid newspaper group.
The principled Ian Hargreaves, who had arrived from the gentler shores of the BBC and the FT, was soon out of the revolving door. Even more misery was heaped on the hapless Andrew Marr, who was given an ultimatum by Montgomery on the day before a redesign of the paper was due to come into effect: “Sack another 20 staff or the redesign gets canned”. (I recall the miseries deliberating with the anguished Marr, as he called a meeting of senior colleagues in a Canary Wharf bar ironically called The First Edition. To pile on the agony, the credit card offered to pay the bill was rejected.)
But maybe it was all a bad dream? Are Hackgate and Murdochism just another manifestation of what has always gone on? Are they just part of the rough and tumble of newspaper life, essentially no different from the days when M’Luds Copper and Beaverbrook called the shots and Gauleiters called Reg, Tom and George ruled the newsrooms? Certainly many seem to think little has changed, including the veteran Sun columnist and Murdoch trusty Trevor Kavanagh, who told a Leveson inquiry seminar in October that the idea of today’s reporters being forced to make the facts fit the story in pursuit of profit was “a grotesque caricature of the news world I have known for 50 years.”
But my students, setting out on their careers in journalism, tell a different story. At Britain’s biggest and oldest journalism school at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, we could hardly be accused of sending out our graduates wide-eyed and unprepared, as any of our hard-nosed alumni – to be found in a diaspora of senior positions across the media – will vouch. Yet many report back on an altered journalistic landscape – certainly less principled than the one I encountered when I set out on my own Fleet Street career on the Thomson-owned Times in the 1970s. From the regional papers, those once great powerhouses of civic discourse, through TV and radio stations who once thought that community mattered as much as celebrity, to the national press which is now in the unenviable position of not doing the investigating but being investigated itself, the story is the same.
The pressure is to produce cheap, uncontroversial stories full of material that newsdesks think readers want to hear, often divorced from local context as the regional newspapers move to centralised production at their “print centres”. The common denominator is oodles of TV, “lifestyle” and celebrity coverage and heavy reliance on press releases which are frequently published verbatim and unchecked. (I know this firsthand because I have read my own words, unaltered from my book publishers’ press releases, in newspapers where no reporter has lifted the telephone to talk to me.)
Young journalists who thought they might occasionally leave the office to talk to real people are disappointed to find themselves find themselves shackled to their computers, where they recycle stories and quotes off the internet like grey water in a sewage plant. The pressures are even worse in online news organisations and websites. In some cases, former students tell me, their stories and performance are measured by “hits” on Google. At Bloomberg, student entrants have been horrified to find another stick – the speed at which your stories hit the net is counted in your overall performance at the world’s most powerful business data machine. How would you like to take your bullying – from Reg Mounce or from an algorithm that sits on your boss’s desktop?
The underlying mantra, whose utterance is unspoken, but which is feared by all young journalists these days, is “There are plenty more where you came from”. In other words, perform or lose your job in a climate One of my former female postgraduates, working for a local newspaper in Birmingham told me how she had been made to dress up and do “ridiculous poses” for a photographer. “I told him to sod off, but I imagine there are some who wouldn’t have the courage to do that.”
Worse, she was sent to write a story about a girl with severe behavioural problems, who needed cushioning on her bedroom walls to deal with her tantrums. “I spent a whole afternoon interviewing her mother and convincing her to do the story to raise awareness of the condition. In the conversation, the mother had said the girl could be ‘a bit like Jekyll and Hyde’. Next day it was all over the news with the headline ‘The Jekyll and Hyde girl.’ The mother was distraught.” Worse, it was then republished in a magazine with the headline “Girl in a padded cell”. “The mother was convinced I had stabbed her in the back. She was such a lovely woman and I felt so awful”.
More trumatised still was another of my postgrads, a high-flyer who was fast tracked straight off my course to a coveted staff job on one of the major red-tops. Alex could hardly have been accused of being naïve – her parents both worked in newspapers and her father was a much admired veteran executive at the Daily Express and Daily Star, but what she found
Quote from Chris Blackhurst, national newspaper editor who as a reporter had worked in the newsrooms of many different papers, both quality and tabloid:
‘The pressure’s much greater than it ever was. Of course there were eccentric whims of the proprietor and his well connected friends or his political hobbies. But in the new climate for newspapers, facing a declining market things are infinitely worse. It’s a double whammy.
For the listed papers, the circulation graph is going down when the shareholders want to see one that is going up. For the ones that are not listed, there’s an even bigger problem. If the proprietor is not buying influence for his bucks ( and no proprietor is going to get near Downing Street for a very long time after the hacking scandal) the focus turns to the commercial side – where the paper is possibly losing tens of millions.
Add to that the downward spiral we are all familiar with – cuts to staff, lower levels of investment, perceived loss of value by readers and lower circulation. No wonder the pressure piles on those that remain. And it gets worse when there are certain factors outside your control. The ever rising cost of newsprint, for example, seems likely to dominate the newspaper world of the near future – and possibly for a long time to come.
Over the next few months many fine words will be utttered by a multitude of the great and the good as they parade in front of Lord Leveson. Can the patient be saved? It has certainly been weakened by the toxins of Murdochisation which have been running dangerously through its veins for too long. But there’s another less publicised set of pressures, which may prove even more corrosive. Each year I do a rule of thumb survey with my 20 year old journalism students in the year before they graduate about what media they consume. It’s in no way scientific, but fewer than 10 per cent will generally put their hands up to reading a national newspaper regularly. Nor can the BBC congratulate itself either, where roughly half will dips into it website before returning to the comforts of Facebook or soccer fm or xxx fm
Combine this with the dismal statitistic that the average British under-26-year-old is more likely to buy a bar of chocolate than a newspaper each day, plus the fact that national daily newspaper sales are plummeting dangerously
What future for the media post-Hackgate? “Crap, as Reg might have said. “All crap. (And I bet that’s what Rupert is thinking, too!)
Quotes from Alex McGowan
At the now there were stories I really did not want to do. You couldn’t say no at a place like that. You were so lucky to be working at news international. That,s how they made. I you feel. couldn’t really say no.
I felt unhappy about doing stories that weren’t really other people’ business. X factor was an absolute nightmare. you,d go on these peoples Facebook. They were absolute nobodies but you were forced to find out whether they were on drugs. You had to diss their best friends, pay their best friends. people would do it for two hundred quid. You,d bring out the worst in everyone.
On occasions I,ve really gone further than I,ve wanted to go. At the time they make you think you.re doing what you want. With the mum story I mentioned, she was a really nice girl and I had to say she was a benefit scrounged. but she wasn’t,t the sort of monster the paper wanted me to make her out to be. she was just trying to get a nice life for her and her kid. I had to make her out as Britain,s worst mum, but she kept saying to me are you going to put me in a bad light, but I had to say no,no.
It was royal wedding week and there wasn’t,t very much else around, and I felt I just had to do anything to get a story in the paper.
It wasn’t,t just the Now. my of my friends who graduated at the same time as me have felt under pressure to do things they haven’t wanted to keep their jobs.
It,s happening everywhere. You think if you say no it,s going to to be last in first out. “there,s plenty more where you came from.” you keep thinking of three words over and over again – make it work, make it work.
My dad was a senior journalist on the Daily Express in the old days. Of course he had to make it work. but there’s a difference. At one time if was a professional pride in competition between newspapers and newspapers and tv. And of course there was a bit of bullying and macho that’d went with it. It was done for the intents of pure journalism.
The pressures for me at the Murdoch empire were different. You woer told you were the best in the world and you could do anything. s one of their youngest reporters,, if the place hand.t closed, I don.t think I would have had the courage to walk away. But now it.s over, I,m really glad about it.now as editor of my own business I feel more at ease with myself. the job,s still the job,
it,s not a charsity. You do still have to take an upopulars view of people sometimes. But it,s nothing like what I did at the N ow. It,s all about the profile. Think the Now was so high profile. You had to follow the agenda – benefit scroungers, gipsies etdc. ow I don,t have to do stuff that hurts people so much. it’s stu,ff people want to read. It!s not political, it.,s not going to hurt anyone.
The pressures at News Corp were intensely politicl. It was all about big business. I was defi.nitely forced to tie my journalism in with the Murdoch interested. I felt pressure to tie my stories in. They just wouldn’t,t have been publishes if they didn’t, fir the Murdoch view of the world.. If I can up with a story that went against the grain,, you knew you wouldn’t, get it in the paper. and that made you work even harder because then you thoughts you might lose your job.
I used to be an idealistic young students journalist.That.s what people taught me – about ethics and the like. now it,s all commercial. Inconference they were talking about how many papers were sold on a Sunday. It,s all about
money and it was made clear that the advertising was more important than ever. It’s all about money.
Murdoch’s journalism isn’t quite so appetising when you know how it’s made.
