The first of two articles I wrote for the ‘UK Press Gazette’ in November 1986, still has some relevance 40 years on.
When Princess Anne complains about Press harassment and falling journalists standards, it is news for a day.
The Press listens politely, cast sagely about for a rival to blame, then sets off in pursuit of another Royal scoop: The Sunday Times, constructing a constitutional crisis to boost circulation;.Sunday Sport and others inventing salacious headlines to sell another old, non-story.
When a bereaved woman complains that an inaccurate report in a local paper about the death of her lover may adversely affect her legitimate right to supplementary benefits for their child, she can be fobbed off with the line that normally agency copy is very reliable, but perhaps a reporter misunderstood a tiny detail. She merits neither an apology nor correction.
The Press is safe in the knowledge that there is little either complainant can do to alter its practices – they are as powerless to intervene effectively as the Press Council or the Government of the day.
[Long before the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO 2015 -) and the Press Complaints Commission (1991- 2014) there was a UK Press Council which ran, ineffectively, from 1953 to 1991.]
The Government of these days has little to fear from the Press, even if Fleet Street is wearying of its long honeymoon with Mrs Thatcher. Her continuation in office was backed by 12 out of 18 national newspaper at the last election.
Mrs Thatcher has presided over an astonishing concentration of Press ownership. Despite the alleged safeguards of independent directors (irrelevant) and Fair Trading legislation (ignored) five millionaires between them now control 84% of our daily newspapers and 96% of our Sundays.
Their international business interests extend from oil wells, mining and manufacture to travel, transport and tourism. Perhaps most significantly, they are heavily engaged in other aspects of the media – cable, publishing, radio, satellites, telecommunications and television.
The First law of Modern Media appears to be that as the frontiers of communications exp[and, they also contract,
While leader-writers spill crocodile tears over the loss of British assets to overseas concerns, do they weep for British democracy as its watchdogs become the playthings of multi-national conglomerate, or do they stifle a grin at the irony of it all as they collect pay cheque drawn from a Liechtenstein account?
Journalism in Maxwell’s Mirror Lonhro’s Observer and Today or Murdoch’s Wapping stable do not need razor wire, surveillance cameras and colour-coded security cards to remind them that certain stories are unlikely to appear when the bosses’ business interests are so extensive.
Nor is it to the credit of British journalism that so many leading practitioners have accepted honours doled out by Downing Street for services rendered since the Tories came it power in 1979.
But Mrs Thatcher’s seal of approval is no guarantee that the rest of us are getting the Press we deserve – especially if we are black or gay, or a member of the majority gender.
I wonder why it is that market research suggests that women aren’t the main buyers of newspapers. Would men be if they found themselves constantly derided, stripped naked or consigned to the role of passive onlooker or ferocious harridan?
And how must it have felt to be black in Handsworth last summer after several papers announced that a ‘West Indian gang’ of between 10 and 100 youths had beaten and burned to death two Asian brothers in their sub-post office last summer. The men had not been beaten it turned out, and it was white youths who were subsequently charged with the killing. There were no banner headline retractions of so gross a misrepresentation and few papers bothered to give the facts much prominence.
When the Press discovered Aids, riders might’ve been forgiven for thinking that homosexuality had become a fatal infectious disease, from the coverage given to a serious public health hazard with no sexual preferences.
To be a black woman, gay, and opposed to nuclear weapons, is somehow the ultimate crime to the hacks who serve us our diet of daily news. If you were disabled too, and lived in certain parts of London during the last days of the GLC – your chances of a fair hearing, let along sympathetic coverage, were as remote as the possibility of Rupert Murdoch reinstating the 5,500 with full back-pay.
[GLC – The Greater London Council (1965-1986), headed at its closure by Ken Livingstone, was abolished by Thatcher. The 5,500 is a reference to the sacking of print-workers and clerical staff by Murdoch which gave rise to the 1986 Wapping Dispute.]
I have only one question: why?
Perhaps because there are so few women/black/gay/disabled journalists working on our national Press. Perhaps because one of the the main functions of the British Press is to supply their readers with scapegoats. Surely not because our busy proprietors have issued explicit instructions that non-white, non-heterosexual, non-male, non-able bodied people must be scorned daily in the pages of their publications.
It has always been there fashion, thank goodness, to present the case against the Press. But woe betide anyone who comes up with concrete proposals for reform.
Whatever happened to the four post-war Royal Commissions on the Press? They died a death and suffer resurrection in every righteous study of the media. Was this another snub to Buck House from the republicans of Fleet Street, or was the legislature reined in by the Press barons and reminded of the did Second Law of Modern Media – that the pen is mightier than the sword for power-brokers.
The Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, a festering rag-bag of left-wing media freaks and failed fat-cats in tabloid terminology, has had the temerity to produce its own Manifesto for the Media.
[The CPBF (1979-2018) was formed as the Campaign for Press Freedom by print and media workers active in their trade unions, broadened out to engaged with broadcasters. the wider labour movement and social action groups.]
It proposes restrictions on the number of titles owned by any individual or corporation; a levy on advertising revenue and/or profits to finance a more diverse range of publications through a Media Enterprise Board; the introduction of French-style distribution laws to guarantee display for all legitimate publications; a statutory Right of Reply and internal controls to govern journalistic standards; positive action to guarantee improved representation, in terms of image and employment, for groups currently discriminated against; and workers’ participation in the management of national newspapers.
Journalists’ rights to work free from hindrances are upheld, along with demand for comprehensive Freedom of Information laws and repeal of Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act. [This threatened journalists and was used as a pretext against Crispin Aubrey, John Berry and Duncan Campbell in the notorious ABC trial of 1978.]
Unveiled at the TUC, the Media Manifesto is a consultive document aimed at encouraging people to consider their (lack of) democratic rights in respect of the media, It went down surprisingly well with delegates at the Green Party conference, the Liberal Assembly, and, more predictably, among Labour supporters in Blackpool. the SDP has already announced plans for a unified ministry covering the Press, broadcasting and the arts, another of the Media Manifesto proposals.
[SDP – the Social Democratic Party formed by 4 breakaway Labour MPs in 1981 (reformed in 1990)]
It is a measure of the low esteem in which journalists are held – and the anxiety that too much power is held in too few hands – that such a document has caught the imagination of so diverse a range of political activists.
An initial print-ruin of 50,000 had to be trebled to meet demand, and the Campaign is determined to make the media an issue at the next General Election, the media permitting of course.
The Manifesto marks the culmination seven years of campaigning on ethical and industrial issues, primarily within the labour movement. More recently the CPBF has broadened its base and its horizons and begin to tackle the political and industrial implications of merging communication technologies.
Two of the last titles from ill-fated publisher Pluto Press provide much of the evidence and the main arguments behind the Manifesto (Bending Reality: the State of the Media, edited by James Curran and Jake Ecclestone, and Mark Hollingsworth’s The Press and Political Dissent: a Question of Censorship).
[Thankfully Pluto Press has survived to this day. https://www.plutobooks.com/]
For some years the Campaign has found a ready market for its own booklets and videos, not least among teachers of media studies and community organisations.
Inevitably the Manifesto haș been largely ignored by the Press. That is a pity because it has been the smugness of journalists and proprietors alike that has convinced more and more readers, and non-readers, that the Third Law of Modern Media is – you get closer to the truth by believing the exact opposite of what appears in the Press.
UK Press Gazette, 3 November 1986
