Say you had a pensions adviser who put all of your money into a fund that failed, or, infinitely worse, a GP who neglected to diagnose a malignant cancer ravaging your body and assured you all was fine. Imagine you yourself went into work one day and made a series of wrong decisions that cost your employers dearly, and, worse, you compounded things by having an almighty hissy fit when anyone dared to mention it.
Politicians can sometimes, of course, get away with murder, and, too often, our political system makes them seem all but untouchable, but, in the long run, there is almost always a reckoning to be had at the ballot box.
There is a group in our midst, however, who can say what they like with total impunity, make bad judgment calls and diagnoses time and again, and, in the process, play a part in creating a national mood that is profoundly destructive for us all.
I’m talking about members of my own trade. Peter Hitchens – praised by Michael Gove as a “distinguished Mail on Sunday columnist” the other day – has lately carved out a niche for himself as a Covid-sceptic as the death toll mounts. We saw the Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, meanwhile, threatening to “finish” a scientist in the courts who had dared to displease her on Twitter.
Other high-profile journalists have cleaned up their acts, but how they must dread anyone doing a google search on them. Peter Oborne is now a vociferous critic of Boris Johnson, but, when it mattered and this unscrupulous politician could still have been held in check, he was churning out remunerative pieces for the Daily Mail praising his “good friend.”
“Brilliant himself, he will want to have brilliant men and women about him,” Oborne drooled after Johnson’s election to the Tory leadership in July 2019. “My friend Boris has a brain that can operate with Exocet precision…” Sarah Baxter in the Sunday Times wrote an even more notorious piece beneath a headline and standfirst that said “Give Boris his shot at the top job. He’s earned it. He will deliver no lectures on morality, just a more cheerful Brexit.”
A pensions adviser or a GP or anyone doing a real job who dispensed pearls of wisdom such as these would soon almost certainly be out of a job. Sarah Baxter now assures me that she was never actually a supporter of Brexit, but, while she is no longer the deputy editor of the Sunday Times, she continues to write for her paper from America, where, during the election campaign, she wrote about how amusing she’d found Donald Trump.
Oborne, too, continues to ply his trade and I could name many others who’ve made equally idiotic judgment calls without consequences. Worse still, a lot of them have never even recanted, but have aspired to still greater idiocy. So far from making their employers reconsider their six figure salaries, it has all too often made them even bigger stars of the firmament.
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A lot has changed in journalism since the turn of the millennium and it’s important we all understand why. When I started out in the eighties, the stars were the men and women who brought in the big stories. The internet changed all of that. No one newspaper could “own” an exclusive in the way that it could in the good old days of print – nowadays it’s everywhere online within seconds – and, while print journalism had at least some pretensions to being cerebral, popular online journalism is almost always emotional. Comment journalists therefore came to be regarded as more important than news journalists and got to command the biggest salaries.
When I was still working for the Telegraph, I was phoned by the booker of a mainstream television show and asked what I thought about Muslims. A bit bemused, I said that they are just like all the rest of us: there are good ones and bad ones. She heard me out and then said she’d keep me in mind, but I never got to go on the show.
The problem with anyone who sees the world in moderate and reasonable terms – “on the one hand and on the other hand” – is that they don’t fit into this brave new media world. They make for boring television. There is no click bait to be had in their copy. Johnson got that very quickly, wrote always in intemperate language and made a speciality of Islamophobia – and, for that matter, homophobia, xenophobia and just about any phobia you can mention – and we see where it has taken his career.
The migration of advertising revenue from print newspapers to online has also meant there isn’t the money there once was to fund newsrooms. Good old-fashioned journalism is always expensive and labour intensive and requires costly libel insurance as rich and powerful people invariably have recourse to very good lawyers.
The days when strong, principled journalists would threaten to resign when their newspapers published stuff they found unacceptable are long gone. They have almost all of them now had their bluffs called and been replaced by cheap and easily dispensable youngsters who live in constant fear of their jobs. And theirs is not to reason why.
Now the owners of newspapers are without exception ruthless businessmen for whom the bottom line – and, more often than not, the propagation of their extreme ideology – is all.
In journalism, as in politics, the perfect storm we have now is the result of the wrong people being in the wrong jobs at the wrong time. Would the Daily Mail have backed Brexit if Sir David English – a committed Europhile, who campaigned passionately for the UK to join the European family in the first place – have been editing the paper? Would the Daily Telegraph if Lord Deedes – a thoughtful One Nation Tory – have been at the helm of the paper? Would either news outfit have been willing to retail the views of the Covid sceptics if these patrician gentlemen still held sway?
Newspaper proprietors, too, are different. Gone are the days when long-suffering souls like Lord Hartwell regarded owning a paper as a public service and thought nothing of ploughing his own family fortune into the Telegraph during the endless union disputes of the seventies. David Astor was just as wonderful when he kept The Observer afloat with his family’s money as advertisers deserted as the paper dared to take on the government of the day’s handling of the Suez crisis. Now the owners of newspapers are without exception ruthless businessmen for whom the bottom line – and, more often than not, the propagation of their extreme ideology – is all.
Of course some old hands hang on in the newsrooms of Tory newspapers, but they’re almost always sad and compromised figures. In a grand London restaurant, before covid struck and Johnson pushed through his disastrous deal to leave the EU, I was having lunch with the celebrated theatre producer Denise Silvey, when a man I recognised from the Telegraph came up to us, red-faced and furious.
“Why do you keep banging on about bloody Brexit, Tim?” he demanded. “We’ll be alright. This place will keep going. Life will go on. I don’t understand why you’re making such a bloody fuss.”
The restaurant I need hardly add closed down shortly afterwards because of Covid and we are now all of us beginning to feel the national diminution of status that it was always obvious Brexit would cause. I looked into this guy’s wrinkled face and I saw in it everything I had come to hate about the heritage journalism that we are still stuck with.
He knew Johnson every bit as well as I did and I remember him slagging him off in the old days. He had made the conscious decision just to do as he was told by what Deedes called “the stinking mob” who’d taken over at the Telegraph.
That confrontation made me more determined than ever to continue to write for honest and worthwhile publications such as The New European, the Guardian, the Mirror and the New Statesman – and now for NewsLeaf.com, which is excitingly linking up with other news outfits coming up from the streets all over the world. I may be an old hack from another age, but I think they are on to something and I urge you to support them. Give the people light and they will find their way.
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To read future articles by Tim Walker and other prominent writers, sign up to NewsLeaf.com’s exclusive newsletter here: https://patreon.com/NewsLeaf
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Tim Walker is a journalist for The New European.
