Abstract
It is hardly Henry Porter's fault that in the 30-plus years since his chastisement of the press – mainly that of the so-called popular variety – for misdemeanours such as political bias, fibbing and bending the truth, elements of the fourth estate moved into villainy's big league.
Handheld mobile phones were rare in 1984, even though the first had been announced by Motorola more than 10 years previously. (They hadn't figured in the vivid imagination of George Orwell either.) The prototype was bigger than a house brick and weighed in at more than a kilo, making it more suitable for throwing through a jeweller's shop window or mugging an old lady than hacking for information. By 1984, the first generation of what were to become both a communications boon and a worldwide irritant were around, but only just. How dismal to think that there was as yet no method of informing absent family and friends of one's whereabouts from a moving train.
Compared with the wholesale looting of mobile messaging that followed, much of the misbehaviour attacked by Porter now seems small beer and some of it even larky. Indeed, the first page of a volume subtitled “Fleet Street Exposed” tells how in the 1970s the name of one Raphael Dunvant appeared with increasing frequency in the pages of The Daily Telegraph.
Dunvant's right-wing views and peripatetic activities revealed that he had a military background and owned a modest estate in Gloucestershire. What they failed to reveal was that he did not exist, being the product of a Telegraph journalist's fertile brain, and his fictitious career continued, according to Porter, even after the publication of a story about how the leg-iron he wore was struck by lightning while he was umpiring a cricket match. Although eventually rumbled, he was, and is, a movie waiting to happen.
Such tomfoolery is dealt with swiftly before Porter embarks on his true mission – “assembling examples of less than accurate journalism from 1983”, having monitored a year in which “Fleet Street newspapers excelled themselves in their lack of concern for such simple matters as truth”.
It's a fair cop. The Sun's invention of a “world exclusive” interview with the widow of the Falklands hero and winner of a posthumous VC, Sergeant Ian McKay, designed to spoil a genuine Daily Mirror scoop, was condemned by the Press Council as a “deplorable, insensitive deception of the public” and is still remembered by many as a shameful episode.
The author supplies other examples of unacceptable chicanery, although fewer than one might anticipate. Especially notable is the Daily Express's “Red Mole Shock”, which “revealed” how women protestors at the Greenham Common cruise missile base were being fed secret information by a red mole. Sources were not named and overall the evidence for the story was so transparent that it would not have protected the modesty of the Greenham Common activists for peace that the Express claimed were washing “while naked in full view of married quarters at the base”.
A Press Council investigation concluded that the story was untrue, prompting editor Sir Larry Lamb, knighted when running The Sun for services to journalism, to insist it was accurate and sneer in print that the Press Council could not be taken seriously. This was “abusive and unjustified”, said the Press Council, recoiling like an errant schoolboy who had had his ear lobe tweaked. No wonder Porter was to conclude his chapter on the regulatory body by observing that “while there is not even any professional stigma attached to appearing in front of the council, there seems little point to its existence”. Inside a decade it was to be replaced by the Press Complaints Commission, itself in turn to attract similar criticism.
Political topspin was rife in 1983, as it has been throughout the history of the national press, and Porter has recorded several examples, concluding that “crude and unsophisticated” distortion of political issues in favour of the Conservative party “had a very real affect on the outcome of elections”. But his use as an example of the misinformation published about an eye operation performed on Margaret Thatcher proves the gullibility of the press, rather than wilful distortion. The Downing Street press office misled the papers by minimising what was a serious health issue facing the prime minister, illustrating, Porter believes, the contempt in which the political establishment held the press. Nothing has much changed there in 30 years, then, even if pre-Leveson the contempt was increasingly accompanied by fear.
Overt political bias infamously included the continuous traducement of Labour leader Michael Foot and the wholesale creation of scare stories, leading Foot on his subsequent resignation to observe of this debasement of journalism: “The bad drives out the good, the evil drives out the shoddy, the 10th rate drives out the second or third rate.”
More recent events, in which deplorable elements of the trade have plunged it into ignominy worse than any other in its history, prove exactly that.
Porter cites other examples of a press in which the truth is often a foreign country including the bizarre story of how Times Newspapers were hoodwinked into publishing the alleged Hitler Diaries – embarrassing for everyone concerned, but arguably not deliberate deception – and various scams, including the News of the World's insistence, with no genuine evidence, that a spacecraft had landed in Suffolk – “AND THAT'S OFFICIAL”.
Pleading for “some benign influence” from proprietors, Porter perceptively warns that “unless newspapers improve their standards they will at some time indubitably become the subjects of legislation which will permanently injure the freedom of the press”. A warning bell that should have been deafening, yet it took more than a quarter of a century for a new breed of chancers to realise the bell was tolling for them.