RIP News International? RIP News Corp? Remember Thomson Newspapers? No, hardly anyone else does, either. And the euro shit gets ever closer to the real world fan

When I first started in newspapers in the mid-Seventies a job with Thomson newspapers was something like the gold standard. Thomson’s paid well, were comparatively enlightened employers and the holidays were good. But above all they were successful in producing newspapers. The Times and the Sunday Times were Thomson, as was The Scotsman and a string of regional papers owned by a subsidiary, Thomson Regional Newspapers.
In July 1978, I joined The Journal as a head office reporter. The Journal was a Thomson paper, and one of the perks was a discount on a package deal with Thomson Holidays. (Incidentally, my stint with The Journal was not particularly distinguished. I was, technically, as good a reporter as any other, but unfortunately I wasn’t a reporter at heart. I don’t give a flying fuck about what passes for news for one thing, and just can’t get into the mindset. Also, the really good reporters, the ones employed by the national for very good money usually have the morals of an alley cat and would sell their mums for sex if needs must. I, on the other hand, wouldn’t. Then, about halfway through my time on The Journal, my inexperience landed me and the paper in an awful lot of trouble when I accidentally shut down Newcastle airport. But more on that another time, if ever, because it was not my finest hour.)
In the Sixties and Seventies, Thomson papers were respected. In those days, admittedly at a time when, as we now know, television was more or less in its infancy, there was no local radio or the internet, and many more people turned to read newspapers, both local and national, to keep up with what was going on, they did have a little more to boast about. The Sunday Times, under the editorship of Harold Evans didn’t rely on tarted up tittle-tattle and lifestyle pieces about what aftershave to use when opening a bottle of Californian red, but was, for example, known for the exposes of it Insight team. It also pioneered the magazine format and it had real photojournalism, not just glossy piccies of rich men’s yachts around the world and features on how to decorate your second home. (If the majority of its readers didn’t have a second home, they were self-regarding enough to believe they jolly well should have one and that, all things being equal, getting one was just a matter of time)
My point is that in an ever-changing world, Thomson Newspapers were a fixed point. But no more. These days, the Thomson Corporation is a multi-billion dollar enterprise but it doesn’t own a single paper, TV station or radio. (Lord Thomson, the man who began it all, got going when he bought a down-at-heel shop in provincial Canada which, among other items, sold radio sets. He realised that sales of these sets were so low because the area had precious few stations to tune into. So he simply started one. That sort of thinking lay at the basis of his business brain.) It might be a similar story with News International – in Britain – and News Corp worldwide: to suggest that a time when neither exists could be sooner than expected sounds mad. But don’t bet your shirt.
The problem for both is the both are Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch, who might have become a naturalised American, but who thought and acted like the Australian he was born, is not just the brains of both companies, but their soul. His son and heir apparent James is, by all accounts not a patch on Rupert. I was talking to a guy here at work who was a Times reporter for ten years and sat through many talks given by James. James, the man expected to steer News International and News Corp from strength to strength refers to ‘readers’ as ‘users’ and ‘newspapers’ become ‘the end-product’. It might be impeccable and classic Harvard Business School speak, but in the real world of newspapers it is the kiss of death.
Rupert is in his mid-eighties, and from where I sit, the guy who once had one of the sharpest brains in the business and was not afraid to roll up his sleeves and muck in with the troops – which is why so many of those troops are loyal to him – had lost it. For all his brilliance, he did not know when to take a bow and leave the stage. It might be that in his heart he knows James is a duffer and that he didn’t want to relinquish the reins to a man who sooner or later is bound to fuck it all up. I don’t know. But his behaviour over the whole News of the World phone hacking scandal and his backing for that idiot Rebekah Brooks seem to indicate just one thing: he’s lost it.
. . .

But why should this mean that News International and News Corp could go to the wall a lot sooner than expected? Well, I am just another armchair pundit whose experience of finance and big business is restricted to shoving my debit card in a cashpoint every few days. So please bear that in mind. But I can see the following happening: already a staggering £4billion has been wiped off News Corp’s share price because investors are getting queasy about the whole hacking affair and how it is being handled. Who knows? Rupert pops his clogs in a few months’ time, James takes over, the investors don’t like him in charge and vote in another chairman, the new board decides to ‘rationalise’ the company (whose parts might be worth more individually than they are as divisions of News Corp), and within a few years the once mighty News Corp is no more. That’s just one scenario, but … (I reckon the same will happen to Apple, too, when Steve Jobs finally pops his clogs.)

. . .

The shit is getting every closer to developing a mind of its own and going for a head-to-head with the fan. Guess who’s going to come off best? I’m talking about the euro, of course. Now the, more or less ‘official’, talk is that it might not be such a bad idea if Greece ‘defaults’, the posh word for telling those you owe loads of money to fuck off and stop bothering you. The new big worry is now Italy. It is no longer just idiots like me who just wish the EU would just get on with it and bite the bullet. The trouble is that when the bullet is bitten, it will be the Ordinary Joes throughout Europe who will carry the can. All those dicks in Brussels will simply retire to their country of origin, accept an honour or two, allow themselves to be granted a sinecure and settle back to write their memoirs and how they knew it was all going to go wrong and said as much but no one would listen! Plus ca change …

What’s worse than an unsentimental hack? A sentimental hack. Lord save me from them and their bullshit

Back at work after a week off sick when, coincidentally, the News of the Screws went to the wall, and I am fed up to the back teeth with all the maudlin crap from colleagues about ‘how sad it is that the Screws is closing’. If I come across one more boasting of how they have bought three copies of the final edition ‘because it’s historical’, I’ll kill someone. The only sad thing about the whole affair is that around 200 people have lost their jobs, the huge majority of whom will be completely innocent of the skulduggery that went on at the Screws. Furthermore, the paper being superbly produced - and I am not talking of its worth as a newspaper but the professionalism of the hacks who brought it out every week - the vast majority of those 200 will be working in equally well-paid jobs within two weeks. They will be snapped up because of their kind they are the best of the best. By the way, last week not 200 but 1,400 will be lost at a firm called Bombardier which makes trains because the Government has handed a vital contract to a German firm - no hacks crying tears over them, you’ll notice, and few if any of them will have been on the rather splendid salary the Screws will have been paying its staff. As for the paper: good riddance. Don’t believe a word of the self-serving crap about what important stories it ‘cracked’. Off-hand I can’t remember one. The Screws specialised in digging for dirt about those in the public eye - for example, Max Moseley who runs Formula One and who liked nothing better than being whipped by tarts dressed as Nazis - and then publishing it for the titillation of folk whose lives are otherwise dull, dull, dull. Someone this morning suggested that printing the story of one David Mellor, a Tory Cabinet minister who was playing away and who liked to shag his squeeze dressed in a Chelsea football strip was the kind of worthwhile story the Screws printed. Why? Because Mellor was a Cabinet minister. Give me a break. And ‘the Great British Public’ should also shoulder some of the blame: if it were not so bloody prurient and ready to soak up the latest salacious details of some D-list turd’s sex life, the Screws and its rivals wouldn’t bother publishing it. There’s a well-known saying - well, well-known to me, anyway - that ‘news is what doesn’t appear in the newspapers’, so given that, with one or two honourable exceptions, our national newspapers choose to print nothing but celebrity tittle-tattle, diets, ‘lifestyle features’, property columns and pieces on where best to save your money, the next time someone brags about Her Majesty’s Press, do me a favour and tell them to fuck off. The one thing that does concern me is that after the MPs’ expenses scandal of last year, those same MPs, many of who got away scot-free with more or less dipping their fingers in the till, will be queuing up to table motions about ‘regulating the Press’, ‘harnessing and out-of-control’ Press’ and all the rest of the hooey. If and when it comes to a confrontation with MPs, I shall most certainly stand by my colleagues to fight against any control. But I shall still be obliged to hold my fingers to my nose in the company of some of them.

Has Murdoch pulled it off? The Devil closes the News of the Screws and claims ‘I am blameless in this whole affair. Now bloody well get a move on and let my buy all of Sky’ . . . UPDATE. . . UPDATE. . .

Well, the news flows so fast that even this award-winning* blog can’t keep up (*St Breward and District Gardening Club (incorporating Blisland and Temple Green Fingers and Mount Friends of the Earth) Blog of The Year 2010). Yesterday, the news came through that several firms were so disgusted by the behaviour of the News of the World that they would be withdrawing their advertising. Their principled charge for the high moral ground came after the Screws admitted that the mobile phone of a young murder victim had been hacked into and it was further revealed that the mobile phones of the relatives of those who British soldiers who had died in Afghanistan were also hacked into.
The issue was obvious: the News of the World and all who sailed in her were scum and firms including Ford, Renault, 02, Butlin’s, Sainsbury’s, npower, Mitsubishi, the Halifax, Aldi, Virgin Holidays and the Co-operative were shocked to the core by the revelations and did not feel their good names should be associated with such a publication.
Well, forgive me if I don’t organise a parade in admiration for such high-minded action.
Notwithstanding the specific instances of abysmal behaviour — sanctioning, or at the very least, condoning the hacking into the phone of the murder victim Milly Dowler and the phones of war victim relatives — those firms will most certainly have been aware that thereunto the Screws’ reputation was not exactly on par with that of a virgin bride on her wedding day. You will have to be under 12 or living on the North Pole not to know of the many, many complaints over the years of ‘tabloid intrusion’ into people’s lives and as arguably the most successful red-top Sunday paper it was highly unlikely the Screws was the exception to the rule, especially as over the years it has been sued for libel and carried sensationalist stories every week. So the various firms’ newly adopted stance of ‘goodness me, who are we dealing with!’ is disingenuous to say the least. What will have been on their minds is that because of the shit the Screws had landed itself in, they would be in a very strong  and very welcome position to ‘re-negotiate’ ad rates and get the same volume of advertising for a lot less moolah. Naturally, this could not be allowed to happen overnight, but their ads would have slowly started appearing over the next few weeks — at a far more favourable rate, of course — in conjunction with lofty corporate statements along the lines of ‘the News of the World and its owners News International have re-assured [name of saintly firm] that it has dealt severely with staff responsible for past unacceptable journalistic practices and that such practices are are a thing of the past. In the light of this solemn assurance [name of saintly firm] is happy to continue . . .’ etc. ad nauseam. But in view of yesterday’s ‘shock announcement’ that is no longer how it will all play out.
For yesterday, Rupert Murdoch played, if not a masterstroke, a very clever move: he simply shut down the News of the World.

. . .

How clever doing so was remains to be seen. The point is that the big prize is ensuring that his company News Corporation, which owns News International, manages to get complete control Sky or, strictly, BSkyB, although calling it that was merely a sop when Sky took over — or officially merged with — the abysmal and failing British Satellite Broadcasting, whose unique selling point was the ‘squarial’, a ‘square aerial’. (Why this should somehow have improved whatever crap they were intending to broadcast I really don’t know.
In fact, the Brits have form in the way of utterly daft unique

selling points: the first Austin Allegro was touted as being rather special and different because it had a ‘square steering wheel’. That was soon dropped, but not before several hundred drivers had died in crashes while trying to get to grips with this important motoring innovation.) The whole phone hacking scandal was very damaging, not only to the Screws itself, but arguably to Murdoch’s bid for full control — so why not shut it down? It kills the hacking scandal far faster than it might otherwise have gone away and Murdoch can blame a corrupt culture in the Screws which had nothing to do with him and can attempt to claim moral high ground by shutting the paper and sacking staff who might have been responsible.
Furthermore, the Screws might have a long history, but in the upper echelons of hackdom folk aren’t nostalgic. More to the point, Murdoch can launch a ‘Sun on Sunday’ to take the place of the Screws, re-hire the Screws staff he values and get rid of any dead wood. All those oh-so-moral advertisers who announced that buying ad space from the Screws was now more than they could stomach can now buy ad space in the newly launched Sun on Sunday in good conscience (and most likely dealing with the same people they previously dealt with). And, dear friends, a new, more perfect era can begin. Naturally, everyone will know what is really going on, but all those anti-Murdoch critics who continue to call for blood — as they will — will now begin to look rather silly with News International claiming they had dealt with the problem decisively, there can be no doubt that the wrongdoers had been brought to book and further criticism was in bad faith.
The main flaw in this strategy is that Rebekah Brooks, now News International CEO, who was editor of the Screws when much of this is going on, has not been sacrificed, and critics can legitimately ask ‘why not’. Murdoch could, of course, announce that she had been given a stern talking to and that her canteen privileges have been revoked for a month, but the truth is he needs her and he needs her to keep her mouth shut, so she is in no real danger. Her successor as editor, Andy Coulson, is, we are told due to be arrested today, but I don’t think he is in much danger of doing time. Labour’s leader Ed Miliband has been banging on about how David Cameron appointing Andy Coulson as his director of communications was a ‘catastrophic failure of judgment’, but sadly for Ed that just sounds like so much politicking and no one give a toss. Anyway, it wasn’t. Cameron probably asked Coulson ‘were you involved’, Coulson probably said ‘yes’, and Cameron then probably said ‘well, we’ll see how it goes. If it gets too hairy, I’ll have to cut you loose, but let’s play it by ear.’
Meanwhile, the National Union of Journalists and all ‘concerned’ journalist — i.e. those on papers which hardly sell at all: the Guardian and The Independent — are all still banging on about the whole affair, but truthfully by closing the Screws, Murdoch has pulled the rug from under their feet. There’s also another ‘big story’ brewing — unprecedented famine in the Horn of Africa — so all those who still might have something to lose if the hacking scandal does linger on will be praying that it hurries up and gets far worse and starts taking everyone’s mind off the matter. God bless them all. It’s at moments like this that I thank my lucky starts I am nothing but an utterly insignificant little tick who drives an £800, 11-year-old Rover and is invisible to every good-looking woman he encounters. Actually, forget that last bit: it still irritates me.

. . .

Let me repeat what I have written here before and which will probably earn me the sheer disgust if not the outright hatred of many: when he bought The Times in 1981, Rupert Murdoch was asked to give his solemn assurance that he would not interfere in editorial policy of the papers. He is said to have replied: ‘I didn’t spend several million pounds buying The Times not to interfere.’ So the man can’t be all bad.

. . .

Since writing the above, I have a special edition of Radio 4’s The Media Show (available on all good radios) in which the usual suspects were trotted out to pontificate and observe, including the former Guardian editor Peter Preston and Bill Hagerty, a former editor of the Daily Mirror (now The Mirror) and The People, as well as Carole Malone, with whom I once worked with who could broadly be described, a la Private Eye, as one of the Street’s foremost Glenda Slaggs. It was, in my view, the usual whitewash and how the Screws always did its best ‘to get things right’ etc. Well, yes, but to keep their lawyers happy and to ensure not to much dosh was wasted on avoidable libel trials. And the observation that it always did its best ‘to get things right’ is pretty bloody irrelevant when the story you are doing your best ‘to get right’ is as vitally important as to whether Ryan Giggs is cheating on his wife or whether Blue’s Duncan James also bats for his own side. The distinction was made long ago, and is worth repeating here that what is ‘in the public interest’ and what ‘the public are interested in’ are not necessarily always (or even ever given the gormless nature of much of the tabloid readership) the same thing.
I don’t doubt that in the wake of the Press’s extensive coverage of MPs’ expenses scandal, that gang will not try their utmost to muzzle us as much as they can and then some. They have been handed a grand advantage thanks to the idiots on the Screws. And they mustn’t be allowed to do so. But please let us draw the line somewhere: yes, every democracy needs a free and, within reason, unfettered Press, but that doesn’t and will never mean that we should defend up to the hilt each and every nasty thing the Press does. It boils down to this: if a democracy wants a free Press, it must take the rough with the smooth. But I, for one, am not going to spend a single second arguing that the rough the Press gets up to is in the slightest bit necessary.
Another update concerns Rupert and his son James: apparently it was James who insisted on the strategy of shutting down the Screws. Rupert had to be persuaded.

‘Citizen journalism’: complete cobblers or just a load of old cack?

I gather from the BBC News website that a UK edition of The Huffington Post is being launched today. I have spent the past few minutes trying to find it, mostly by using Google, but haven’t yet been able to track it down. But it’s still only 8.31 in the morning, so perhaps it’s a little late into work. All I knew about The Huffington Post is that it was launched my Arianna Huffington as a conservative commentary on the world, but is now regarded as more liberal, which is remarkable as most drift with age is in the opposite directions, i.e. we want to legalise everything when they are 20 and want to hang, draw and quarter everything by the time the are 40 and can’t go anywhere without a quart of whisky in our back pocket.

All I know of Arianna was that when she was still Arianna Stasinopoulos, she had a long love affair with the much older Bernard Levin (a big noise in journalism at the time, now I’m afraid ‘who he?’ for those readers who aren’t yet 70), but left him when he told her he didn’t want to marry and have chidlren and moved to America. She was later involved accused of plagiarism over parts of her biography of Maria Callas, married a man from a rich family, divorced him when she discovered that the other people he was seeing behind her back included men, and co-launched The Huffington Post.

While trying to track down the UK edition of The Huffington Post, I came across a website called the Online Journalism Blog (a rather clever name which seems to cover more or less all the angles; give it a print edition and I think it comes pretty close to having the full set) which reports the news of the launch. There I noticed that its report on the launch had already received six tweets (‘tweets’) and there is even a facility to ‘retweet’. Bless! And that got me thinking about the concept of ‘citizen journalism’.

On the face of it ‘citizen journalism’ sounds rather admirable in that it might be regarded as a ‘democratising’ force, but even after a just a few minutes reflection, there seems a great

deal less to it than meets the eye. What does it mean, exactly? Forget, for a moment, the ‘citizen’ bit and reflect on what ‘journalism’ is. There is, in my view rather less to that, too, than meets the eye.

Certainly, among others, the following will spring to mind: Horace Greeley (surely the patron saint of every spotty adolescent who has not yet paid a penny in taxes), ‘the public’s right to know’, the ‘public interest’, the Fourth Estate, ‘keeping sources confidential’, Watergate, thalidomide, Bernstein and Woodward, Arthur Christiansen and Dutton Peabody of the Shinbone Star. But let me beef up that list a little and attempt to rebalance it: Tunnels & Tunnelling and Carpet & Flooring Review (two publications which most certainly do exist, the first catering for men and women with a keen interest in tunnelling and the second for those whose lives involve laying carpets and other floor coverings. I have provided links for both to silences the doubters, and I should add that although the links prove a web presence, I first came across them before the web existed when they were most certainly print publication), the Daily Star, Asian Babes, Fox & Hound (pronounced ‘Fox and Hind), the St Breward Parish Magazine, Power News (the staff newspaper of the former Central Electricity Generating Board for whom I once worked), What Camera, the News of the World (‘The Screws’) and any number of coke-snorting alcoholics who earn their daily crust writing cobblers for the masses. My point is that this second list is no less legitimate and no less part of ‘journalism’. For the fact is that, in essence, ‘journalism’ is as much about being part of a noble tradition of ‘righting wrongs’ as so many would like it to be seen, as ‘eating’ is about ensuring the continued good health of the world’s population.

Certainly — and it is very important that I make this point — there are a great many men and women journalists who risk their lives in order that the public might know what’s going on; they are active — and given that many are killed that should strictly be ‘were active’ — in Russia, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Argentina, the Philippines, Zimbabwe and many other places and are all doing an admirable job. (Let me mention some names with which I am familiar from listening to the BBC: Barbara Plett, Hugh Sykes, Damian Grammaticus, Lyse Doucet and Orla Guerin. There are many, many more) But there are a loads of others working in the media who are equally entitled to call themselves ‘journalists’, but whose work has nothing to do with ‘righting wrongs’. For example, my day at work consists of first checking the puzzle page proofs against the puzzles ‘hard copy’, then helping to read, check, correct and do whatever is necessary to the promo page, the letters pages and the ‘answers’ page; at what point in my working day is my life at risk? Which is all a very long-winded way of pointing out that being ‘a journalist’ as such doesn’t really add up to a row of beans. It’s what you do that counts.

And so we get to ‘citizen journalists’: I don’t know who first came up with the phrase, but don’t be taken in by it. It means very, very little and has more in common with advertising agency puffery than the real world. Yet it sounds so grand, doesn’t it, it gives the impression of democracy on the march, of a steady progress towards a more enlightened, more caring world. Here in Britain, as I’m sure is the case throughout the world, the websites of all the national papers now offer the facility to allow us, the reader, to leave our comments on a particular issue or news story. What does that tell us? Well, here is what it tells me: that a great many people have a great many different opinions on a great many different subjects. And none is willing or even able to listen to the other’s point of view. What counts, what is of supreme importance is that their voice should be heard. But you only have to spend a minute or two in your nearest public bar to establish that. What do you get when everyone is allowed to have their say? Nothing but a noisy cacophony in which nothing is intelligible. And so much for ‘citizen journalism’.

And doesn’t it get sticky at the top. Here’s why one complete nonentity is sometimes glad that his life is basically sweet and, above all, simple

There are times, dear reader, when I am glad I am nothing but an ageing boring old fart whose one vice is to pontificate in this ’ere blog but who otherwise has a character which is without stain. Who in their right mind, for example, would want to swap places with the West African hotel maid who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of trying to rape her and then was herself accused of being a prostitute? She is now suing the New York Post for libel after it published stories of her selling sex (pictured). Or who would want to be Rebekah Brooks (always referred to as ‘flame-haired’ and you can see why) as the affair

over a private detective hacking into mobile phones on behalf of the News of the World spins ever more out of control for — well, for one reason or another more or less everyone involved? Brooks was editor of the Screws while a lot of this was going on, but is now chief executive officer (one of those American titles we are slowly adopting over here) of News International. Or who would be Rupert Murdoch, who must be 80 if he is a day, who is seeing a great deal of his life’s work in danger of unravelling over the affair. News Corporation, which owns News International, is doing its damnedest to take over all of BSkyB, but the Tory government, whose approval it needs to do so will not want to give it the nod if this whole business with phone hacking gets any worse. Or who wants to be any one of several ‘senior police officers’ of the Metropolitan Police who appear at best to have been clay-footed and at worse turned a blind eye to their mates in Her Majesty’s Press. The trouble is it is all getting worse, more or less by the hour.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, conveniently referred to as DSK in tabloid headlines in New York is no longer under house arrest, and although he still faces various charges, might have had as stroke of luck courtesy of the league of private detectives employed by his expensive lawyers to dig up whatever dirt they can on the accusing maid to undermine her claims. So far, we are told, the story she told of being gang-raped in order to get asylum in the U.S. is a load of cobblers and there is ‘said to be evidence’ that $50,000 had been deposited in her bank account by a known drug dealer. Then the Post added its two ha’porth worth by claiming she was nothing but a tart touting for business at the hotel where she worked. Her suit against the Post raises the stakes because if she loses, she is utterly discredited, and if she wins, it will seem crystal-clear to the world that a nasty dirty tricks campaign is afoot against her, and the only one to gain from her being discredited would be DSK. Incidentally, there is still talk in France that once all this has blown over (of course), DSK might still be nominated to stand for the Left at the coming presidential elections. They are even talking of postponing the deadline for nominations to be submitted just to accommodate the old rogue. Whether of not they have also taken into account more rape claims made against him is unclear.
As for Rebekah Brooks, well she seems to be sinking ever further in the shit by the day. Strictly speaking News Corporation cannot be held responsible for any dealings, however murky, conducted by the News of the World, but we all know it doesn’t work that way. All Murdoch’s enemies will shriek (and they do tend to shriek) that if he allowed that kind of thing to go on in his newspaper division, who’s to say what he would allow at a wholly News Corp owned Sky TV? By the way, I do find the phrase often trotted out in these cases — ‘not a fit and proper person’ — to be pompous beyond belief. The Tories, of course, who like Labour are usually only to keen to kiss Murdoch’s arse (and allow him to take over Sky if at all possible — that should keep the old rogue sweet and onside for many more years) don’t know what to do. His problem is that he now has to hang on to Brooks through thick and thin whatever she might have done, for getting rid of her at this late stage will only make him look ridiculous. And, of course, she will know where several other bodies are buried. So that is why, dear reader, I don’t feel the slightest twinge of envy for any of those who reap the benefits of living in the public eye. Just give me my pipe, my half ounce of shag and several pint bottles of pale ale and I am utterly contented. Who would want the limelight?