Who envies who?
One day we may even view Conrad Black's Telegraph as the end of a golden age of press barons
Nick Cohen
Sunday November 23, 2003
The Observer
In 1931, the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin tackled the press barons with an aggression no modern leader would dare match. His opponents were Lord Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook, who had taken up the cause of Empire Free Trade, the Euroscepticism of the day. Their Lordships ordered their journalists to tear into Baldwin, who had no time for their obsession. Baldwin gave as good as he got. The papers, he said, were 'not newspapers in the ordinary acceptance of the term. They are engines of propaganda for the constantly changing policies, desires, personal wishes and personal dislikes of two men. What are their methods? Their methods are direct falsehood, misrepresentation, half-truths ... What the proprietorships of these papers is aiming at is power and power without responsibility - the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.'
Modern critics of the media lack Baldwin's eloquence - his cousin Rudyard Kipling helped write his speeches - but the gist of their complaint remains the same. Press barons are accountable to no one but their shareholders, if, that is, they have shareholders. While serious public figures must face the consequences of their decisions, irresponsible proprietors can veer from contradictory policy to contradictory policy without the volume of their self-righteous outrage diminishing for a moment.
Conrad Black is the nearest we have to an old-fashioned press baron. His bitterest enemy wouldn't accuse his newspapers in London, Canada, Chicago and Jerusalem of 'direct falsehood', but his best friend wouldn't deny that they have been vehicles for his capricious wishes. Max Hastings, a former Black editor, has described how he was woken in the middle of the night and required to listen to rants on whatever subject was troubling his boss at the time. The witterings of Black's wife, Barbara Amiel, have been accorded pride of place in the Daily Telegraph by editors who perhaps wouldn't have given her so much space if she had made a less advantageous marriage.
Baldwin, Kipling and their successors wondered by what right rich newspaper owners demanded the attention of governments. Black dismissed the question as illegitimate. Those who have asked it have succeeded only in revealing the base and snivelling nature of whining little people who contribute nothing to the world, but seek to compensate for their natural inferiority by dragging down great men. In short, those who complain about power without responsibility are envious. Black has said so time and again. His career has been one long struggle against envy.
In his native Canada there was a lot of sniggering about the prominence the Black press gave to the views of Mrs Black. So loud did the laughter become that she was forced to look for work on Mr Black's Daily Telegraph , where the good-mannered English treated her with the respect she deserved. 'There was intense interest in the press of Canada,' Black explained, 'including some exceptionally nasty misrepresentations of Barbara's previous romantic and marital life and a few completely false insinuations that she had broken up my marriage. The editor of the Globe and Mail spontaneously apologised for one particularly insolent piece. All those envious of Barbara's great talent and beauty, all those affronted by her ideological solidity, all the forces of professional and "lifestyle" and lesbian antagonism erupted splenetically. The British press was much more able to accept her editorial gifts and pulchritude and much less vulgar and contemptible than the Canadian newspapers.'
It's not only lesbians who were envious. Envy fuelled all the socialists, liberals and other scoffers who have failed to listen to Black's opinions and act on them. They had made Canada an 'uncompetitive, slothful, self-righteous, spiteful, an envious nanny-state, hovering on the verge of dissolution and bankruptcy,' he exclaimed on one occasion. It was a country where there was 'almost no literate dissent from the righteous, envious, soft-Left conventional wisdom,' he exclaimed on another. When talented men, such as Black himself, did well, they were undermined by opponents motivated by a 'sadistic desire, corroded by soul-destroying envy, to intimidate all those who might aspire to anything in the slightest exceptional.'
At least the British government was big enough to recognise Black's talents. It offered him a seat in the House of Lords and with it the chance to have a say in the making of the laws of this country without the vulgar requirement that he must stand for election. The envious Canadian government intervened and used an obscure statute to stop him receiving the peerage. Black was forced to renounce his Canadian citizenship.
He is now Lord Black of Crossharbour, but whether he will continue to be a press baron is another matter. Shareholders, who again are almost certainly motivated by envy, have demanded to know why millions of pounds have found their way into the pockets of Black and his fellow executives. The American financial authorities are investigating. Even if they clear him, Black's business seems doomed.
In the past, one bombastic press lord would be succeeded by another. Newspaper ownership bought political influence, seats in Parliament, and hundreds of journalists who would propagate your opinions. In an age of rampaging inequality there are plenty of rich men and cash-rich companies. But hardly any of them want to buy a newspaper.
If the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs are put up for sale, the most likely bidder is Richard Desmond, owner of the Express, and a man beside whom even Black can look good. The other day the well-spoken young woman on the Today programme described Desmond as a publisher of 'soft-porn' magazines. If the BBC thinks that Big Ones International, Double Sex Action and Spunk-Loving Sluts are soft, I shudder to think what passes for hardcore in Broadcasting House. That good Christian, Tony Blair, has already fawned before the pornographer, and last week the stern moralist, Michael Howard, followed suit, when he secured a promise from Desmond that he would keep the Telegraph a Tory paper if he bought it. The competition is hardly fierce. The Mail might put in a bid, and that's about it. No one else seems keen.
The reason for the absence of interest is not hard to fathom. Newspapers in Britain are in a long decline. Although individual papers make profits or secure sales increases at the expense of their rivals, the industry as a whole is on a slow journey south.
Nothing can reverse decline, not supplements, price cuts or the supposed upsurge of interest in news after 11 September. In an audio-visual age, the reading habit falters. It's not that people can't read, it's that they can't be bothered to read.
Given that the British newspaper industry has given us such monsters as Rothermere, Beaverbrook, Maxwell, Murdoch, Black and Desmond, the switch to the impartial purveyors of broadcast news might cause some to rejoice. They should hold back for two reasons. The first is that there is a chance that the press will become worse as it shrivels. The far-Right campaign against asylum-seekers in some tabloids and the blurring of the distinction between news and comment on the front pages of some broadsheets are signs of the panic among editors who realise they must scream louder and louder to get attention.
But then, so too must their counterparts in television and radio. Although audio-visual media are everywhere, their ubiquity conceals the crisis in their component parts. In a multi-channel age, they can't afford to make good programmes because the audience is too fragmented to support the investment. As Roger Mosey, head of BBC television news, said a few weeks ago, 'middle-class producers and commissioners' have been reduced to 'using less-educated and less-sophisticated "real people" to make bad television programmes in the hope of getting ratings.' What attracted an audience was, he continued, pointless smut and drunken yobbishness.
Britain is probably becoming better educated because of the stupendous increase in the numbers going to university. But in a classic example of market failure the media can't reflect society. A channel competing with dozens of others has little option but to provide the pointless and the smutty. Even if its editors wanted to, they couldn't afford to produce quality programmes.
I don't wish to sound pessimistic, but it may just be possible that one day we will look back on the time when Lord Black ran the Telegraph with a grudging nostalgia and, indeed, a touch of envy. |
