Abstract
Former News of the World reporter Graham Johnson's book does for Britain's one-time biggest-selling newspaper what Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street has done for unscrupulous US stockbroking. Originally published just too late to be more than a minor sideshow at the Leveson inquiry, Johnson's story of moral corruption and obsession bordering on psychosis makes one wonder how an out-of-control bunch of executives could run amok for so long without proprietorial or management intervention. All human pond-life was there, yet presumably nobody noticed.
Johnson is no Jordon Belfort, the prince of greed played by Leonardo diCaprio in Scorsese's film. Belfort enjoyed vast wealth and a lifestyle fuelled by excess before a relatively modest jail term for fraud was followed by new riches from books and the movie. In contrast, Johnson sailed close to a nervous breakdown after two years as a Screws reporter and then followed one of the paper's maxims, “Do it to them before they do it to you”, by resigning in the wake of a botched spoof in which he and a photographer ‘found’ the Beast of Bodmin Moor. He was a mere aircraftman second class on a flying kite where many of the officers were “like Spitfire pilots with tombstones in their eyes”, as he recalls with one of his nicely turned phrases. Astonishingly, so hyped-up and driven were the bosses that initially they were prepared — anxious even — to believe a crudely stunted picture of a puma was proof that the Beast was no urban myth.
“Stunt-ups” — i.e. inventions — and bullying and deceit were all part of the paper's culture, according to the writer, with reporters constantly terrified of not delivering enough salacious stories to satisfy the continual demands of section editors (one of whom, I recall, seemed affable and straight enough years before when I edited a rival Sunday red-top where he was a reporter). Drugs were “rife”, Johnson alleges, meaning among the staff as well as in the columns of the paper, and in describing his day-to-day purgatory he names lots of names, with features editor Ray Levine and managing editor Stuart Kuttner emerging the most tarnished (Kuttner, in passages similar to the Scorsese movie's expletive-littered script, is referred to more than once as a cunt).
Kiss-and-tell tales were also a part of the paper's staple diet, with reporters driven to ethically unacceptable lengths to obtain them. “Footie players, soap stars and movie types all went through the sausage factory,” Johnson recalls. “These were the good times — no privacy laws, no super-injunctions, before phone hacking when we could get away with anything we wanted.” And then he sees the irony, observing, “And finally, now I'm doing the ultimate one on myself. I'm blowing the lid on me … Pulp culture eating itself. Madness.”
Johnson now claims that his Screws experiences left him with a deep sense of shame — [looking back] “I feel depressed, deceitful and dirty … But at that time I felt nothing. I'd become desensitised and selfish to a murderous degree. The philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius said that lying damages the soul — a portion of mine definitely shrivelled up into nothing …” Having bounced back from ignominy at the NoW, he had a run of success with investigations at the Sunday Mirror before reading more philosophy and lots of Noam Chomsky books, and deciding that all red-top journalism is largely disreputable.
If it wasn't so terrifying to those in the business, Hack could be described as a good read. Somewhere along the way Johnson learned how to write entertainingly — for example, his recollection of when his Bodmin Beast co-conspirator refuses to go quietly and, “What followed was a mini-Enron corporate cluster-fuck of underhand chicanery that half made you think that 9/11 might have been an inside job. Even though it hadn't happened yet”. But there is no disguising the seriousness of the NoW's savage moral decline. Unless self-confessed rat Johnson's book is just one gigantic stunt-up, of course.
Bill Coles’ Red Top, published only last summer, is very much the carthorse shedding its dung in the wake of Johnson's more revelatory and better-written mount. Coles is an Eton-educated former Sun New York staffer, political correspondent and royal reporter who writes short sentences and paragraphs, and professes pride in being a “tabloid hack” — “And, just by the by, I think most red-top hacks could wipe the floor with their broadsheet colleagues”. Maybe, but I'm not sure this one could unless he stops the bluster and avoids such claptrap as, “One of the peculiar joys of our trade is that if you sit by the riverbank for long enough, you will see the rank, swollen bodies of your enemies float by”.
He is handy with a cliché — all often “goes pear-shaped” and identification is avoided with “no names, no pack-drill” — which wouldn't best please his tutors at Eton. But his time there certainly wasn't wasted, for early in his Sun career his contacts “were mainly Etonians … I would meet them at one of the cafes at Waterloo Station and hand over an inch-thick wedge of £20 notes … I drilled the boys on how not to get caught. Above all, I reminded them of Eton's unofficial school motto: ‘Deny, deny, deny”’.
He has a pop at Kelvin MacKenzie (a “ranting despot”) and The New York Times (“I have never come across a newspaper whose editorial staff are quite so up themselves”), and laces gossip into a series of short chapters illustrated by unfunny cartoons and containing such soppy advice as “The key to an interview can be summed up in one very simple word: charm”, and “Whenever you're talking to a stranger on the phone … you are going to start exerting your immense charm-skills to see if you can forge a connection and MAKE THEM LAUGH”. I forgot to mention that he really likes capital letters.
Red Top takes only a few hours to read and gives every impression of not having taken much longer to write. It's not all triviality, though. He deals with phone-hacking early on, making such profound comments as how boring it must have been listening to all those tens of thousands of droning messages, and asking: “Call that journalism?” Er, no, William. We call it disgraceful.