Abstract
One of the more intriguing phenomena of the last decade has been the rise of the self-hating journalist – on the whole a welcome development. Newspapers, while notoriously ready to criticise outsiders, have been hopeless at holding each other to account, an important reason why a criminal culture entrenched itself inside News International. Malcolm Dean is the latest to enter the ranks. I must confess I felt an instinctive hostility when I picked up his book. Mr Dean was social affairs leader writer of The Guardian, therefore a priestly figure in the British left-liberal establishment, and I was braced for a volume full of left-wing prejudice and snobbish hostility to the tabloid press.
It would be idle to pretend that such elements are absent. Mr Dean has nevertheless produced a book of considerable learning and importance, written with charm and clarity. This book is partly autobiographical and contains many anecdotes illustrating his central argument that British newspapers have debased British politics and democracy. The strength of the book is its learning, rigour and integrity. Previous attacks on mainstream journalism – for example John Lloyd's What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics – have amounted at best to a series of assertions, largely unsubstantiated by serious evidence or analysis. Mr Dean, by contrast, supports his attack with facts, argument, and very telling examples.
At the core of his book are a series of brilliantly argued case studies, each of which shows how newspapers have distorted public debate on vital issues: law and order, drugs, asylum, child poverty, education, health care, housing. Mr Dean demonstrates that rational discussion has again and again been hi-jacked by emotionally-driven media campaigns, which have panicked ministers into wrong-headed decisions.
Much of his analysis (for instance the account of how media hype appears to have pressured then Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt to undermine the National Institute for Clinical Excellence by prematurely throwing her weight behind the breast cancer “wonder drug” Herceptin) is lucid, powerful and hard to refute. Mr Dean made me consider a number of difficult issues in a fresh light.
This book has weaknesses. The author's hostility to what he calls the “right wing press” is so entrenched that he can overstate his case. In his well-made argument on asylum seekers he overlooks the role played by papers such as the Daily Mail – the main focus of many of his attacks – in uncovering official complacency and deception. He fails to give enough credit to the exemplary way in which the Mail explains and clarifies serious issues for its mass readership, thus performing an essential role in a modern democracy. Nor does he properly take into account the paper's superb campaigning record, ranging from Stephen Lawrence to Gary McKinnon.
He also accepts much too uncritically the argument, central to Tony Blair's “feral beasts” speech, that newspapers are negative and hostile to established authority. If anything editors and reporters are much too close to politicians – one important reason why most newspapers were so slow to expose the lies told about weapons of mass destruction ahead of the Iraq War, or allowed MPs to pillage their expenses for so long without exposure or comment.
Nevertheless Mr Dean has produced a book that deserves to become a core text for students and should be read by all serious journalists.
The same cannot be said for John Lloyd's latest pamphlet, produced in the wake of the phone-hacking affair. The author has no idea how to write clearly and intelligibly. Some of Mr Lloyd's sentences are merely hideous, such as: “When you consider [Mazher] Mahmood's achievements, you get some sense of what a public interest haul a cavalier attitude to private life can turn up.” But others make no sense at all. Try this: “Yet the fact that what liberals regard as ‘true’ journalism – journalism which, in Timothy Garton Ash's phrase, is factual and can thus be subversive of everything from bureaucratic obstructiveness to systematic state oppression or corporate criminality – is what active and idealistic journalists everywhere now aspire to, was a huge step.”
The atrocious grammar, the clumsy use of parentheses, the name dropping are all typical of Lloyd's writing. Some sentences stretch towards eternity – one contains 135 words. His argument lurches from the hacking scandal to new media, super-injunctions and the rise of the internet, without discernible logical structure. It includes lazy mistakes of fact and interpretation. Mr Lloyd considers, for example, that something called the Declaration of Human Rights was incorporated into the legislation of European Union member states. He has a fondness for clunky, otiose, show-off words, referring for example to a “prophylactic clampdown” on the press. Is there any other kind of clampdown?
I read his pamphlet through twice and still have no idea what Mr Lloyd is really trying to say, beyond the assertion that “public figures need a private and protected space more than non-public figures” because “without it, they are progressively shorn of the psychic resources which would allow them to do the job”. This demand for the creation of a privileged caste of public figures is of great interest and importance, but unfortunately Mr Lloyd provides no substantive argument to support it. He just slips it into his narrative, then moves on sharpish. Professor Ian Hargreaves of Cardiff University has apparently read Mr Lloyd's essay twice “and commented on it acutely both times”. Not acutely enough, I feel.
As Director of Journalism at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, John Lloyd presumably has some role in educating students. It is alarming that someone with such profound difficulties in expressing himself is placed in such an influential position. Indeed Mr Lloyd is in desperate need of education himself. He should start by reading George Orwell's “Politics and the English Language”, an essay which advocates clear, direct, simple and unpretentious prose. Malcolm Dean's elegant volume demonstrates that he has fully absorbed and understood Orwell's teaching. It is way beyond time that the Reuters Director of Journalism did so too.