Too much news
THE PRESS BILL GRUNDY
During the last ten days every news editor in the world has looked remarkably like the Jew of Malta, as he tried to 'inclose/Infinite riches in a little room.' For, as the Sunday Mirror said: 'There can be little doubt that the week of March 31 to April 6, 1968, has etched its passing in the books of record.'
Faced with this overwhelming torrent of material, how did the papers respond? Like most human institutions, they varied. Their varying responses reminded me of something Donald McLachlan said in his valediction a fortnight ago. He was going, he told us, to join the ranks of those who read only one paper a day. Well, I doubt it. Newspapers are hard drugs and the withdrawal symptoms can be something shocking.
But suppose Mr McLachlan (and you and 1) did achieve the impossible, and decided that from now on it was one paper and one paper only. How do we choose? It would always be difficult, of course, but at least the events of the last week or so provide some fairly depen- dable criteria.
Obviously the first to go would be the tab- loids, even the serious tabloid Mr McLachlan reckons is just around the corner. For they just don't have enough column inches to keep us high and dry when the news really comes flooding over the top of the dam: which is a pity, because the Daily Mirror, for ex- ample, is a good paper getting better. Inside Page, Mirrorscope, the new, readable George Gale, and the constant hot and cold running dialogue between C. H. King and HM . Government (E. Heath intervening)—all these normally add up to a paper well worth reading.
Next, how did the bigger populars look at the week that was? Surprisingly—because they usually rise to a challenge—I• thought they were very patchy, especially in their failure to react quickly. What, for example, did the Sun do with Geoffrey Goodman's world ex- clusive about Hanoi's willingness to talk? They stuck it at the bottom of page 2—a clear case of an inability to understand its significance. And when did the Mail leading article on Martin Luther King appear? On Monday, four days after the event, with the inevitable result that it seemed that we'd heard it all before, which we had.
The Express was far and away the best of the three but, as usual, was filled with so much tinkling ice that there was nowhere near enough room for the hard stuff. I wanted lots more background, and I didn't get it, and usually don't.
Which leaves, obviously enough, the bigger, more serious papers. The Daily Telegraph was full, fast and very good value, and the only r :son I wouldn't pick it as my one paper is, I am afraid, that I don't like its habit of Politically colouring its news stories.
There was little to choose between The Times and the Guardian. Both were immedi- ately sound on Hanoi, quickly appreciative of the Johnson declaration, quickly elated by the Test match, properly shocked by the Luther King murder, and, beyond all that, managed to convey far more of the smoke-stained flavour of the subsequent American riots than any other paper or even any television I saw. They did this with the aid of that old-fashioned invention, the writer. In the case of the Guardian they did it with the aid of that old- fashioned writer, Alistair Cooke.
Mr Cooke's piece on Monday was worth a thousand feet of TV film; and yet I'm pre- pared to bet The Master hadn't stirred far from the screen for days. If I'm right, the result ought to have been terrible: in fact, it was wonderful. For one reader at least, Cooke made sense (and sensibility) of the whole sick scene. The same could also be said of Joe Rogaly's leader-page article in Monday's Financial Times, another splendid piece of atmospherics, this time seen through the eyes of a South African living in Washington. Some of his comments really tell: 'At four o'clock yesterday afternoon our neighbours across the street called their child home from his games in our front yard and shut the door behind him. It was the middle of a glorious spring afternoon, with cherry blossoms in full flower, but the curfew began at four so that the streets could be cleared and then made safe by 12,000 armed soldiers or more.'
No wonder, as he says, 'People are afraid, so afraid. They make little jokes—school- children in a bus saying "See you on Monday if I'm still alive." ' His final, calmly terrified sentence points out that the larger repercussions are still a long way off: 'But the blackened streets are just a couple of dozen blocks away.'
One other way in which the papers beat Tv was with their pictures. Certainly it was moving to see King making his last speech (talking, as Cooke noted, with 'uncharacteristic emotion'). But nothing equals that brilliant Time-Life picture by Joseph Louw of Luther King's body on the motel balcony and his bereft disciples pointing desperately upwards to the assassin's window. The Mirror rightly used it as its centre-page spread on Monday, the Sunday Times headed page 1 with it and also printed others so immediate and moving you could hear the bang and taste the horror.
The Sundays are, of course, not really part of this 'which paper' game. With more space and usually more time they are in a class by themselves. But more does not necessarily mean better; in fact Mr Robert Markham, as he then was, once declared that more means worse. This weekend, and not for the first time, he has been proved wrong. Nobody could read the weekend papers without experiencing the frightened feeling: '1 was there.' Of course there were differences of emphasis: of course there were contradictory interpreta- tions (Michael Davie in the Observer and Peregrine Worsthorne in the Sunday Telegraph, for instance, diametrically opposed about Johnson), but it all added up to men saying. 'This is what I saw; this is what I think.' That, surely, is what newspapers are about. And as long as they continue to do it I for one am not following Donald McLachlan's example.
Finally, in a week of catastrophe it may help to remind you of the resilience of the human
spirit. I quote from The Times Business Supplement: 'The Tokyo stock market today went down in shock and confusion by forty- eight points over President Johnson's North Vietnam bombing halt statement but recovered considerably on the strength of an earthquake report.—AFP report yesterday.'
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