a day online.
*
The film of the year in 1976 was All the President’s Men, in which Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman gave us the journalist-as-hero role model, which would prove very resilient over the decades to come.
It is the narrative we have often told the world, and which a few journalists might even believe. It usually involves the word ‘truth’: we speak truth to power; we are truth-seekers; we tell uncomfortable truths in order to hold people accountable.
The truth about journalism, it’s always seemed to me, is something messier and less perfect. Carl Bernstein, one of the twin begetters of Watergate, goes no further nowadays than ‘the best obtainable version of the truth’.
When living in Washington in 1987 I read a new book by the Washington Post’s veteran political commentator David Broder,2 which contained a passage that leaped off the page because it felt so much closer to what journalism actually does.
The process of selecting what the reader reads involves not just objective facts but subjective judgments, personal values and, yes, prejudices. Instead of promising ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print’, I would like to see us say over and over until the point has been made . . . that the newspaper that drops on your doorstep is a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we heard about in the past 24 hours . . . distorted despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you to lift it from the doorstep and read it in about an hour. If we labelled the paper accurately then we would immediately add: ‘But it’s the best we could do under the circumstances, and we will be back tomorrow with a corrected updated version . . .’
‘Partial, hasty, incomplete . . . somewhat flawed and inaccurate.’ Most journalists I know recognise a kind of honesty in those words – as does anyone who has ever been written about by a journalist. That doesn’t make journalism less valuable. But, as Broder argued, we might well earn more respect and trust if we acknowledged the reality of the activity we’re engaged in.
As reporters and editors of the Cambridge Evening News, we lived among the people on whom we reported. We would meet the councillors and coppers the following morning in the queue for bread. Did that, on occasion, make us pull our punches? Probably. But that closeness and familiarity also bred respect and trust. We were on the brink of a new world in which a proprietor on the other side of the world could dictate his view of how a country should be run. Or when the chief executive of a giant newspaper conglomerate would have trouble finding some of his ‘properties’ on a map. Small was, in some ways, beautiful.
*
While a young reporter on the CEN I fell in love. The relationship lasted just under two years. It was between two consenting adults – one male, one female – and was perfectly legal, even if it did not accord with one of the commandments in the Book of Exodus, Chapter 20. The relationship caused some happiness; and some unhappiness to a few people – literally, no more than half-a-dozen either way.
One Friday night there was a knock on the door. A reporter and photographer from the Sunday Mirror wanted to tell the ‘story of our love’, as he put it, to the 4 million readers who then bought the newspaper every week. The reporter, a man called Richard, was charming.
I was a cub reporter, she was a university lecturer. Nobodies, end of story. Well, almost – for her late father had, some years earlier, been on the telly. So you could, at a stretch, make a consumable tale out of it: ‘Daughter of quite famous man has affair.’
Our relationship really didn’t seem to be anyone else’s business and so we politely declined the opportunity to invite Richard and his photographer over the doorstep.
Richard’s tone changed. ‘We can do this nice or we can do it nasty,’ he said abruptly, and then explained what nice and nasty looked like. Nice was for us to sit down on the sofa and tell the world about our love, and be portrayed in a sympathetic way that would warm the cockles of millions of Sunday Mirror readers all over Britain. Nasty meant they would start knocking on the doors of neighbours and contacting our relatives to put together a story that would be altogether less heart-warming.
It was a good pitch. How many people want their elderly parents, friends or neighbours telephoned or knocked up on a Friday night by a man preparing a self-confessed hatchet job? All the same, we felt this was – well, private. We were living together openly, and made no attempt to hide our relationship from friends or family. But we had no wish to tell the whole world. So we said no.
Richard and his photographer did not go away and sat outside the house for another 24 hours. From time to time he would lean on the doorbell – not to mention the neighbours’ – to test whether we had changed our minds. They stayed until Saturday afternoon, reappearing the following Friday evening to try again. Eventually we asked them in for a cup of tea, and I – the trainee kid in the room compared with Richard – suggested I might ring his news editor to explain we wouldn’t be talking. That seemed to do the trick. The story – nice or nasty – never saw the light of day.
My life at that point had been learning to report councils, courts, freak weather and flower shows. That was what I understood journalism to be – a record of public events of varying degrees of significance. The ring on the doorbell was my first, sharp realisation that ‘journalism’ meant many different things to many different people. And, also, of what it was like to have journalism done to you.
2
More Than a Business
It was a lovely time to be a local newspaper journalist. But after a couple of years I had – as my Cambridge colleagues knew I would – started to make my exit plans. I began using my days off doing reporting shifts at the London Evening Standard, where ancient typewriters were chained to dark green metal desks. I was turned down for a job there, and also by the Times. But my cuttings caught the eye of the news editor on the Guardian, Peter Cole. I bought a new suit and gave what Cole later described as the worst interview he could remember. But he was impressed by my scrapbook of stories and considered I had a modest facility with words. I feel I may have lied when asked about my shorthand speed.
There was another young reporter starting at the Guardian on my first day in July 1979 – fresh from the Mirror Group training scheme in the west country. His name was Nick Davies. He was extrovert; I was more introverted. He loved standing on doorsteps; I preferred polishing sentences. With his beaten leather jacket, he looked like a beatnik French philosopher. As has sometimes been remarked, I looked more like Harry Potter. We became lifelong friends . . . and got up to mischief.
The Guardian Nick and I joined had been around for 158 years.
The Manchester Guardian started life as a small start-up in 1821. Its intention was almost purely altruistic. Its founders had no ambition to reap huge profits from it. It was imagined as a piece of public service. Somehow – amazingly, mystifyingly, staggeringly – it remained a venture devoted to that public service of news more than a century and a half later. It existed to ask questions, to bear witness and to offer forthright (and anonymous) opinion.
There was no great business model for serious, awkward, enquiring journalism in 1821, any more than there was in 2015 when I left the paper, 194 years into its existence. But most of the time – buttressed by advertising and subsidy from other companies within family or trust ownership – the paper struggled through, with occasional crises along the way.
Its
