Press
Press cutting
Bill Grundy
I am a broken man. I have just learned the staggering tact that ostriches do not bury their heads in the sand in the hope that whatever is troubling their tail feathers will go away. You can imagine just what damage has been done to my sensitive soul by the destruction of a belief that has been built into me for more years than I care to remember. You can imagine how my heart bleeds for all those Fleet Street wordsmiths who are suddenly deprived of one of their most cherished cliches. But it reminded me of some other inhabitants of The Street — those practitioners of the Black Art who persist in behaving in the way I now know ostriches don't, by burying their heads in the sand
and hoping that the crisis in Fleet Street will go away. For away it certainly will not go.
Even as I write this I hear on the radio that Mr M. J. Hussey has uttered the unthinkable words that the Times may soon disappear. In front of me is a copy of the UK Press Gazette in which no less a person than Mr Bryn Jones of the Daily Mirror is quoted as telling the National Union of Journalists that the Daily Express is likely to fold by the end of the year and that the days of Fleet Street in general are numbered. Two gentlemen from the Leicester University Centre for Mass Communication Research (try saying that when you're drunk) write in the current issue of Neu) Society that while there is certainly a Beaverbrook crisis, for the Press as a whole it is less a crisis than a disease. But the implication is clearly that you can die of a disease, and Fleet Street has got to recognise that it is very seriously sick. Action must be taken now. Antibiotics are splendid, but only if administered before death.
Assuming all these chaps are right, what can be done? Lots of things, although I would have thought that the setting up of a Royal Commission on the Press was not one of them. Mr Heath was surely right when he said in the House of Commons the other day that "by the time this royal commission, with an agenda such as the Prime Minister has set out, has completed taking evidence and made recommendations, the problems of which we are all aware of some sections of the Press will not only become acute but possibly sections of the Press will have disappeared altogether by the time the report is oublished." Not perhaps the clearest peice of English prose there has ever been, but it is just possible to see what Mr Heath means and to agree with him.
Deciding what must be done depends on diagnosing what is wrong. You do not cure pneumonia by swalling indigestion tablets. Mr Wilson said in the House last Thursday that "there is not agreement in the industry on what the facts are." Well, here are some to be going on with: newsprint, which accounts for about one-third of the total production cost of newspapers, has rocketed in price; advertising, which accounts for about fourfifths of newspaper revenue, is particularly sensitive to industrial slump; overmanning is still rife; restrictive practices are even rifer; newspaper printing operatives are remarkably well-paid (at 60 per cent above the national average they are the highest paid of all major industrial groups); and as Mr Heath said some time ago, a lot of the people who work in the industry do not seem to realise that "at a comparatively fast rate they are putting their own industry out of business."
What about a subsidy for newsprint? A lot of newspaper men are agin it, arguing that you'd have to subsidise pretty heavily to make papers as profitable as property speculation (which many of them suspect is what many proprietors would rather be in), and a heavy subsidy would reduce the independence of the press. On the other hand, as NUJ general secretary Ken Morgan recently observed, there is nothing morally wrong in a government and a nation recognising that a flourishing press is an essential part of a democracy; newsprint subsidy might therefore be the answer.
But it cannot be the complete answer. The industry has got to put its own house in order first. And this is what it will have to do: papers will have to become more realistically priced. Restrictive practices will have to go. Overmanning will have to stop (the Economist Intelligence Unit estimated in 1966 that there could be manpower savings of 50 per cent in the machine room and in processing, 30 per cent in foundry, and 10 per cent in publishing; that is still broadly true). God knows when all this will happen. But if it doesn't happen soon, it won't happen at all. Because there won't be a national press for it to happen to.
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