The press
No holds barred
Patrick Marn ham
Fleet Street's failure to predict the date of the general election was a diverting spectacle, particularly in the case of the Daily Mail, which was struck by an editorial apoplexy. Monday's leading article accused Mr Callaghan of funk, loss of nerve, hollowness and cowardice. In the same edition a frontpage story reporting the latest opinion poll started with the words: `Mr Callaghan would probably have lost an October election'. The Mail did not however accuse the Prime Minister of good judgement.
The joke was that the press's failure was self-inflicted. As Anthony Howard pointed out in the Observer, the explanation for it lay in 'the nature of British political journalism. It relies on official guidance — and is lost when it does not get it'. The same article revealed that a solitary French journalist who had been interviewing ministers in the course of writing a story about PeugeotCitroen had gained a more accurate impression of the election decision than had the entire apparatus of lobby correspondents. The device of the lobby flatters journalists into believing that they are trusted insiders and so ensures their silence. In the circumstances the contemptuous amusement of Mr Callaghan and his colleagues seems understandable. Not only does the lobby bear dance obediently, not only can the politicians stand around and laugh at it, but the creature will even take flattering pictures of them doing so. Lobby journalism is not of course confined to politics, it tends to break out wherever two or three 'specialist' correspondents are gathered together. British journalists suffer from an unfortunate inferiority complex about their professional status. One means of resolving this is to form associations or lobbies of 'experts', such as motoring writers or industrial correspondents. Then they can have neck ties and offices and rule books and statusboosting relationships with the men in Whitehall who decide things or the bigwigs in Dagenham who give away goodies to well-behaved reporters. A further advan tage is that information comes in the form of pre-digested handouts which are embargoed to some later date. Consequently for most of the time nobody beats anybody else on a story and disruptive outsiders who do not wear the right tie can be excluded from information. This is what official information managers call 'making things more convenient for everyone'. The sports writers are no exception, as the story about Tony Greig's epilepsy shows.
If there is anything to match the anguish of political lobby correspondents who have been conned into printing an item of nonsense it is the fury of sports lobby correspondents who have agreed not to print some news, only to discover that it has somehow got out despite their efforts, This week the Sunday Mirror serialised part of a forthcoming book about the Packer affair, written by Henry Blofeld, a freelance sports writer, which revealed that England's former cricket captain was an epileptic. This 'so-called revelation . . will come as no news to anybody within the game', said the Sun. 'It was one of those things everyone knew about. But in the world of professional cricket they are not discussed.' That must have put readers in their place. It certainly put the Sun's reporter in his, right there in 'the world of professional cricket' which he was supposed to be reporting. The Times's comment was less smug but more pompous. 'A great many people in the cricket world knew of Greig's problem but there has always been a tacit agreement among the media not to make it known .. • Every sphere of activity has its trade secrets'. Sports reporters could have justified their failure to report Greig's condition on various grounds. They could for instance have claimed that it was a splendid example of responsible behaviour and respect for the privacy of the individual. What a scenario that suggests. The anguished debate in the beer tent over the lofty principles involved; on the one hand the duty to inform and the potential encouragement for other sufferers, on the other hand the understandable preference of the individual concerned and the desire not to be kicked out of the club dressingroom. But, perhaps wisely, they have not ventured into the choppy waters of privacy. They have just explained that they did not print the news because they had all agreed not to print the news. Epilepsy, according to the Dictionary of Symptoms, is 'the only disorder where the sufferer is more handicapped by the attitude of society than by his disability'. It would be hard to think of anyone in the country whose known affliction with this condition would do more to emphasise Its unimportance than a six-foot seven-inch blond sports hero — as The Times admitted. But owing to its correspondent's eagerness to explain his own silence that same report somehow became a model of how not to achieve this objective. First, according to The Times, Mr Blofeld's original motives were said to have been based on the need to explain `Greig's impulsive behaviour and nervous mental energy', which is exactly what epileptics do not suffer from. Second, the Times man backed this up with a medical judgement (apparently his own) that any illness 'connected with the brain has emotional undertones' (whatever that means). And finally he disposed of Grog himself by suggesting that the cricketer 's disappointment at Mr Blofeld's revelation was due to the fact that it frustrated his own plan to write a book about it next year. Not that sports journalism is only a matter of getting the facts and hugging them tot yourself. There is also the 'public education aspect, which again is very soothing to the inferiority complex. Here the Sunday TimeS is currently giving the lead with its 'National Fun Run' jogging campaign. This reaches its climax with a mass jog in Hyde Park on 1 October in aid of the British Heart Foundation. The Daily Mail has now joined in with a double-page feature informing us that jogging is 'a cross between walking and running that originated in New Zealand some years ago'. That will surprise anyone who remembers reading Scouting for BOYS which Baden-Powell first published circa 1910. As a matter of fact, jogging 'as a way of hoodwinking newspaper readers into buying more copies' originated in the USA some years ago. And the latest news from over there is that it causes infertilitY in women. Stand by for a no-holds-barred Sunday Times investigation early next year.
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