Tabloids Must Be Free to Offend
Peter Preston: You have to be pretty oblivious of history, and market reality, to believe that kiss-and-tell tales are not a formidable sales aid
On Monday 4 May 1896, Alfred Harmsworth published his first Daily Mail. Now see how what goes around comes around. Harmsworth’s triumph was inventing a paper that appealed to a totally new, young audience – ‘by office boys, for office boys’ sniffed Prime Minister Lord Salisbury. It wasn’t elitist. It was avowedly popular and populist, with sales figures to match.
On 9 November 2008, the editor of that same, continuing Mail, Paul Dacre, stayed true to tradition. He belaboured one judge for some very odd (privacy) judgments and he produced an argument Harmsworth would have saluted. ‘If mass-circulation newspapers, which also devote considerable space to reporting and analysis of public affairs, don’t have the freedom to write about scandal, I doubt whether they will retain their mass circulations – with obvious and worrying implications for the democratic process,’ he told the Society of Editors.
It’s a case you can put in different ways. ‘To keep this squalid industry afloat, unrestricted right to publicise the sex lives of others is necessary, so the judiciary must be silenced’ (Max Mosley, writing in the Guardian). Alternatively, try Lord Woolf in the Appeal Court in 2002: ‘The courts must not ignore the fact that if newspapers do not publish information the public is interested in, then there will be fewer newspapers published, which will not be in the public interest.’ It is also an argument deserving very serious attention.
The danger – amply demonstrated as the ineffable Mosley strides stage centre yet again – is that any debate becomes simply a matter of whether you love or loathe the Mail or News of the World: queues of moralising bloggers and flagellating columnists duly form. But Dacre’s speech, which was mostly about threats to press freedom, delivered by an editor who devotes much time and effort to that cause, deserves something better.
Is it true, as he asserts, that the press in France is weak, feeble and subsidised because of French privacy law? Is it true that America’s newspapers are plunging so far, so fast, because they’re too keen on their righteous self-image to ditch enough dirt? Very little of this, in fact, has anything to do with European or other human rights law. It’s more about national attitudes, traditions and geography.
Who can argue with a straight face that President Barack Obama will rule a failing democracy because the New York Times doesn’t put Britney Spears on its front page? And Europe’s most dynamic and innovative tabloids (conventions of human rights or not) currently come to newsstands across the EU courtesy of Axel Springer’s Berlin HQ.
But that, in British terms, doesn’t mean Dacre has got it all wrong. The ABC circulation report for October shows that 5.6 million bought a redtop – Mirror, Sun, Sport, Star or Record – every day. Add in the Mail and Express, and that swells to 8.5 million. The Mail alone (2.2 million) sells more copies than the Times, Telegraph, Guardian and Independent combined. Would 8.5 million wither away without S for scandal? Not entirely: but you have to be pretty oblivious of history, and market reality, to believe that kiss-and-tell tales and celebrity gossip are not a formidable sales aid. (See them sweep through Heat/Closer/Nuts/OK magazine shelves and pour into the internet – one reason why mere newspapers are taking a hit.)
There’s money at stake here, to be sure, but there’s also something else. The right of the public – broadly, not narrowly, defined; Joe as well as Polly Public – to have the news they want in the way they want it. And those who seek to deny that right automatically join hands with Salisbury on the first Daily Mail so long ago.
They say that only sentient, refined people like us – like me, like Max Mosley – should have newspapers that match their interests. They prescribe the morals and mores of the nation in terms of themselves and their own constituency of chums. Their ideals don’t extend to trusting the people to pick and choose (so seven million Mail readers are cast into outer space). They don’t seem to realise that the initial success of the Sun was built on providing news, views and nipples for those with a reading age below anything Fleet Street then acknowledged or catered for, but who promptly bought the Bun in their millions, daily readers for the first time.
Elitism is the curse of bad government and a struggling democracy. Press freedom inevitably includes the right to get up people’s noses, or the opportunity to observe the president of world motor racing at play. (Why didn’t he sue for libel before a jury of 12 good men and true, rather than beat a privacy path to Judge Eady alone?) Of course, free doesn’t mean free-for-all. Of course there are standards and shocking blunders, by the News of the World among many others, but news itself isn’t a commodity for prim definition or sniffy rationing. It’s more important than that.
Which, time travelling back to 1896, makes you wonder what young Alfred the subsequently Great would have made of Saint Paul 2008 on the BBC and Ross-Brand. Would Harmsworth have BBC-bashed away over Andrew Sachs? Would he have warmed to Dacre’s praise for Radio Four? No, busy founding the Mail (and the Mirror), he’d have served up something for punters everywhere. And, whether you like it or not, quite right, too.
Appear for the defence, m’lud
Which was more shocking then: Paul Dacre’s attack on the no-win-no-fee balloon of libel costs, with distinguished QCs on 7,000 a day, or his direct onslaught on Judge David Eady, who seems to hear so many of these cases?
Enter (via a letter to the Times, naturally) four of Britain’s most distinguished libel silks. Dacre’s attack ‘cannot go unanswered’, they say; but since, ‘by convention’, Eady has to keep mum, they’ll answer for him.
Fine; indeed, very comradely. But will nobody equally now jump to defend m’learned friends on 7,000 a day? Perhaps, with or without convention, Eady himself might rally to their flag?
| © Guardian News & Media 2008 Published: 11/15/2008 |
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