Abstract
Nobody dies in media journalism, but reporting on the subject carries with it its own hazards. Or so I appreciated after a man dressed as a yellow chicken burst into the executive dining room at News International, accompanied by, naturally enough, Rebekah Brooks. So much for The Times editor's private lunch with the chairman and the chief executive of Channel 4, at which this writer happened to be in attendance. There was a charity abseil going on. Minutes later it was my turn to stand on the roof of the old Wapping fortress and stare down the drop of the six-storey building.
Some of us went into newspaper journalism precisely because it didn't involve sport (or getting up early in the morning), and while Brooks, James Harding, Luke Johnson, Andy Duncan and all managed to abseil down the building with ease, the sudden grip of vertigo made this writer's descent impossible. Nobody, of course, mentioned my solitary funk of failure when the lunch resumed its dissection of the sinews of broadcasting – but as a way to look like an idiot in front of all one's bosses, the twitch at the top was certainly novel.
The next time I saw Rebekah Brooks she sat at the back of the dock at the famous Court Number One of the Old Bailey, while Andy Coulson and former News of the Screws men sat in a phalanx at the front, all facing charges to do with phone hacking. A reminder, perhaps, of the whirligig of media power – but above all of the sheer joy of having a ringside seat, watching the rise and fall of some of the most powerful people in Britain over nearly a decade at The Times and latterly The Guardian. This was a period that began in my case with the fall of the Telegraph boss Conrad Black, and ended with Lord Justice Leveson's preposterously large, Wikipedia-adulterated report.
The problem, of course, is that the subjects of study were one's own boss class – and the friends and rivals of the management. It is impossible to do reporting of any kind without offending somebody, but in media it can be just that bit more lively. Richard Desmond, unamused that I had written that he underinvested in his Express and Star titles, called up to complain about my errors, an upbeat call that ended with him promising to call News International's then chairman Les Hinton. “See ya,” he said, in his most menacing tone, and the line went dead.
Dame Majorie Scardino, until recently the chief executive of Pearson, the FT's owner, kindly cut out the middle-man to summon me to a bollocking in a featureless white riverside office after a column rashly questioned the purpose and effectiveness of the conglomerate she ran. But the Barclay twins, after some provocative articles that Times executives seemed keen on, chose to sue for libel in Paris. That prompted a two-year battle that ended when The Times published a mildly conciliatory statement, shortly after a trip to the French court that involved a stay in a very fine hotel off the Place des Vosges selected by the paper's impish editor, Robert Thomson.
The mogul I was briefly impressed by was Viscount Rothermere, whom Thomson also invited to lunch – partly in an effort to help me get to know him. Rothermere's opinions precisely mirrored those of the Mail – half the lunch was taken up in a discussion about the wrongness of the Iraq War. Meanwhile Thomson's deputies competed to impress Rothermere, perhaps on the off chance that the editorship of the Daily Mail was going. Who wouldn't?
The media baron seemed eager to trade newspaper gossip too, and we reporters told him all we could. In return, he told us he couldn't see a clear commercial future for the Evening Standard, so it was no surprise when he sold it to an oligarch a few years later. Sadly, he seemed to ration his public appearances. Lord Rothermere could have been a visible leader for a newspaper industry that – as the post Leveson negotiations show – seems happier secretly dining the political elite and stalking the corridors of power. Instead, demonstrating similarities between newspaper owners and Premier League chairmen, the peer joined fellow proprietors in keeping a low profile – no help when troubles loom.
Occasionally the bosses would leave the door ajar. Rupert Murdoch briefed the FT that his son James was going to be chief executive of BSkyB, to the consternation of those Times executives, who worried that the mogul's mogul could not bring his unproven 30-something son into a public company. I wrote the catch-up story the next day. “It will be James,” an insider intoned. So it proved, whatever the Times types thought.
Writing from the business desk gave you regular contact with most media bosses – although interviewing James Murdoch quarterly turned out to be no sure way to advance. At his first press conference in charge of Sky, a hot August day where his invest-to-grow strategy prompted a plunge in the share price, we managed to get into a row about what he meant when he cautioned that profit margins would be “compressed” in the near future.
It was a reminder of how fissile the younger Murdoch could be – although the question as phrased was also probably a little pompous. Later, I learned the best way to interview him was to ask the hard questions without raising one's voice, but Murdoch junior never seemed to enjoy the company of journalists much; or as one former adviser put it to me: “He never seemed to understand that some of these bastards were his bastards.”
I got to meet his father Rupert only once. To do so involved flying to New York, by agreement with his spokesman, an Australian former journalist. Nobody in London would let you near, but in his Sixth Avenue office he was interested and engaging. Murdoch liked the big picture it seemed: he told a story about how the Daily Mail's sales success was overrated, a narrative that began with the closure of the Daily Sketch and its merger with the Mail. I had to look up the Sketch. It closed in 1971, the year of my birth. Anyway, as a man who invested in media, took risks on deals, and loved news and gossip, he was irresistible. He told us, rightly, that the Barclays were poised to buy the Telegraph – and wrongly, a few weeks before, that the purchaser would be Rothermere's Daily Mail. Unfortunately I wrote up the latter.
On the other hand, who knew for sure how much Murdoch knew about what happened at the News of the World? In that respect, I was very fortunate, as my own stock as media editor of The Times was tumbling, the phone-hacking story was breaking. Visibly angry when I briefed him on The Guardian's 2009 exposé, James Harding, The Times editor, concluded that “all they had was Gordon Taylor” – the football boss who had secretly settled a hacking case a year or so before.
My media days were done at The Times soon after. An attempted comeback story about Simon Cowell's efforts to bring the X Factor to the United States managed to annoy both Cowell's mentor Philip Green and News Corp's Fox studios, which led to a full bollocking the next day. The story was about right, but I had made mistakes in handling it too.
As luck would have it, after the detour of running a media news website, a job covering media at The Guardian beckoned. It would have been impossible in any event to remain at The Times covering the subject, not least during the three extraordinary weeks in July 2011 where it all unravelled. It will probably be impossible, too, to top for sheer journalistic shock that moment when I called Wapping to ask, not very seriously, whether the company would knock on the head an unlikely rumour that the News of the World was going to close. “I can't,” came the reply. “It's true”. Too stunned to tweet or report, the only option seemed to be head into the editor's office – still on the call – to repeat the same question and answer all over again. Even the normally unflappable Alan Rusbridger felt it necessary to rise from his chair.
So what was it Andrew Neil said about journalism? It was the best fun you could have with your clothes on. Well, who knows about the other specialisms, but as long as you can withstand the slings and dodge the arrows coming from the corporate fortresses – he should have confined his line to media reporting.