WHAT DO THE WORKERS WANT?
The press: Paul Johnson
on the difficulties of setting up a new left-wing paper
THE struggle for control of the News on Sunday, made inevitable by its complicated structure of authority, has broken out even sooner than I had expected. As might have been predicted, it centres round the peren- nial left-wing newspaper conundrum: do you give 'the workers' what they want or what they ought to get? According to the editor-in-chief John Pilger, who has now departed, the effective editor, Keith Sut- ton, simply wants to dress a few left-wing thoughts in Sun clothes. Writing his angry post-resignation piece in the New States- man, Pilger expressed particular distaste at Sutton's praise ea great front page') for the Sun's Falklands spread UP YOURS GAL- TIER'. Actually, Sutton replied, it was not quite that: STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA was what he admired.
I have some sympathy for Pilger but Sutton is more likely to be right. It is one of the oldest and saddest illusions of the liberal-minded that the workers can be educated into the right (i.e. the Left's) notions by the spread of a properly- conducted popular press. In October 1815, shortly after steam-printing made large- circulation newspapers theoretically possi- ble, one of the Utilitarians, writing to James Mill, argued that popular newspap- ers and education went hand in hand: `To support a free press, and to give the whole mass of the people the capacity of profiting by it, is to prepare the triumph of truth and liberty.' Sounds ironic today, doesn't it? But at the time, the Tories seemed to agree: two of the notorious Six Acts of 1819 were designed to restrict the freedom of information and for some decades the Tories sought to retain the stamp duties which made papers too expensive for the poor to buy.
However, once mass-circulation news- papers arrived in practice, as opposed to theory, a generation after the start of universal compulsory education, the actual tastes of the workers began to operate in what soon became a consumer-led market. This produced a subtle change in political attitudes. The more intelligent Tories quickly realised they had nothing to fear from a popular press. The success of such papers as the Mail, Express, Mirror, Peo-
pie and News of the World revealed the British masses as basically conservative and constitutionalist, law-abiding, un- revolutionary, patriotic, with a powerful dislike for obvious and remediable injus- tice, which the Mirror exploited brilliantly in the 1940s, but at bottom not much interested in politics at all. The circulation figures proved again and again that what most working people wanted was highly- personalised news, not necessarily sensa- tionalised but presented in a noisy and striking manner; and they wanted their hard news mixed with glamorous entertain- ment and fun. Only two papers tried systematically to bring political uplift to the masses. The News Chronicle never really broke out of its middle-class constituency and died of inanition. The Herald flourished only during the period when it resorted to circulation-building stunts of the crudest kind. It gave the workers more politics than they wanted and no product in history was rejected more decisively by those for whom it was designed: not once, remember, but twice, for the Sun Mark I, a left-wing popular launched by Hugh Cud- lipp, also bit the dust. Not until Rupert Murdoch gave the workers his idea of what they fancied did the Sun Mark H take off.
What this really amounts to, I think, is that the masses do not want middle-class left-wing political culture foisted on them, unless it is doled out in strictly digestible quantities — a proviso the old Mirror was always careful to observe. John Pilger,
according to his resignation article, rejects this evidence. He thinks that people are `desperately keen for information' of a highly-political kind. But the suggestions he puts forward do not strike me as likely to sell papers. Thus he commends in the dummy of the Scots edition of the News on Sunday 'a fine story by Rob Edwards about the transport of nuclear warheads from Scotland to England'. But BBC television constantly shows shots of missile-stuff being trundled around, usually with a few bedraggled protesters on hand. A news- paper must revolve around news — that is, what is new, what we didn't know before. Pilger's other ideas — an 'Adult and Child' section which 'would discuss children's rights' and 'what to do about nursery cuts'; interviews about neglected United Nations resolutions; 'radical' articles on 'the scan- dalous neglect of youngsters by the Foot- ball Association', and 'the banning of forty-odd programmes about Ireland' — do not seem new either; standard local Labour Party discussion fodder, I'd say.
All the same, it is a shame that Pilger's ideas will not be put to the test. A popular Sunday paper edited on his lines would have been a fascinating phenomenon while it lasted, at any rate to the media-watchers. As for Keith Sutton's alternative solution of a left-wing Sun (or however he may describe it), its chances are not much stronger since the system of editorial con- trol will not allow him to apply it with the reckless gusto it will certainly need. In any case, it is unclear whether the Sun formula can be made to work on the Left. If it could, the Mirror would already be doing it. The best the Maxwell papers can man- age is the Sunday Mirror, which is a fair shot at combining intelligent comment by people like Julia Langdon and George Gale with popular presentation. Even so, its front page this week did not exactly compel admiration: a strangular mess of Win This Fiesta', 'Elton's Secret Torment' and a near-naked female crying 'Hey, Look Me Over!' The trouble with imita- tions is that they make one appreciate the genuine article. The only hope for the News on Sunday is to create its own special mix and develop faith in it. Self-confidence is the key to a successful newspaper.
'What have you got in here, then, a body?'
Previous page
