THE PRESS Murdoch & Sun
BILL GRUNDY
Nobody in his right mind would dream of judging a paper after only two issues, but nobody in journalism is in his right mind anyway, so I'm going to.
But before I do that, let me give you my personal reactions to Mr Murdoch himself. First impressions are that he is a very like- able man. He has a directness of appfoach that is like a breath of fresh air. He also seems to be a very open man. At a small party he threw on Friday night he was asked how much he'd spent on advertising the new Sun. 'I'm not able to reveal that,' he said, and then went on to detail it—a full page here, a full page there, and a spatter of fif- teen-second commercials all over the place. When we did the sums and suggested a total of £50,000, he admitted straight out that that was just about right.
Then there was the question of the size of the initial launch—how many copies they were going to print on Monday night. 'I'm not going to tell you,' he said. But I can tell you that we're not going to fall into the trap the old Sun fell into, which printed about four million and lost most of them overnight. We'll get into the black at about a million and there's curiosity sales to cater for.' Does that mean he'll be printing about two million initially? Again the straight answer. 'Yes, that's just about the size of it.' In the event, of course, 'teething troubles' reduced the print to about 1.6 million.
There is also a streak of naiveté about him. Since this is perhaps the other face of open- ness, one shouldn't be surprised by it, how- ever shrewd Mr Murdoch may seem in many ways. For example, he thinks he was conned on to the David Frost programme. He thought he was promised that there'd be many questions about publishing papers and so on, and that they wouldn't concentrate on Christine Keeler's conies. Mr Frost indi- cated the straightforwardness of his inten- tions by telling him that Cardinal Heenan would take part in the programme. Mr Mur- doch took all this in good faith, he said. When it was suggested that, surely, he didn't fall for that guff, really, did he, a man as experienced in journalism as he is? Mr Murdoch gave a rueful grin and admitted that he'd done exactly that.
He was strangely naive, too, about the decision to start off the new Sun with a serialisation of Jacqueline .Susann's book, The Love Machine. When asked why he was doing it he replied 'Why not? This could be the greatest-selling book of the century. Therefore it must have reader-appeal. As a book it's not at all bad'. The thought that as a book it is perhaps very bad indeed, that Miss Susann writes like a pit-prop, and that he is laying himself open to charges of sen- sationalism by serialising it, does not seem to have occurred to Mr Murdoch. Or, if it has, he doesn't care.
If this is true, it is probably because he differs so completely from his competitors. Just how much he does was exemplified in a tiny way by the guests he invited to Friday's little launching party. There were only about ten of us, including three people from the BBC, two from the Financial Times, one ex-editor, and two or three more. As a guest list it was as different from those which other proprietors might have drawn up as the News of the World is from the Sunday Telegraph. It is only a tiny symp- tom, but even tiny symptoms can reveal a lot.
The truth is surely that the reactions Mr Murdoch has aroused spring largely from the fact that he is as strange an animal on the British newspaper scene as, say, the first young Max Aitken was in his day. This alone would account for the 'open letter' to him appearing in the Sunday Telegraph over the signature of its editor, Mr Brian Roberts. In it he chides Mr Murdoch for what he is doing with the News of the World. Has Mr Roberts not looked at the People lately? And if he has, is Mr Hugh Cudlipp to expect a similar missive soon?
The answer to that one is undoubtedly 'No'. Because Mr Cudlipp is no stranger in this particular paradise. But Mr Murdoch is. Nobody trusts him, because nobody knows what he's going to do. Not having learned the rules which the more-or-less self-per- petuating proprietors have drawn up, he is quite likely to find himself declared off-side frequently. But I don't think it will worry him or stop him.
One thing is certain. All newspapers now are in for a lively time. The chips are down. You might even say the clothes are off, too, for Mr Murdoch is said to be a supporter of the 'bosoms and bottoms' formula for selling a paper, according to the Observer. Myself, I think his formula is broader based, if you'll pardon the expression. I think it will have a double emphasis—on sex and sport ; or tits and tips, as the vulgar insist on putting it. This was certainly borne out by Monday's opening issue. But is it enough? No quins, no Springbok riots, no upping of school meal prices. Surely these interest and affect a lot of people?
In fact, the new Sun didn't arrive at all at my home on Monday morning, nor at many other homes in the north, presumably because of Sunday night's blizzards. So much for not printing in Manchester. Given a hard winter no one up north will see it, let alone buy it. When I did get to see it—in London —I thought it looked like Sunday's paper a day late, and an Australian Sunday paper at that. Or a week late. Lots of stories were undated. I'm not surprised.
Nor was the new Sun's first issue in any way eclipsed by its second: 'across the wires the electric message came, this week's paper it is much the same'. The same date- lessness, the same curious feeling that it could be any day's paper, and particularly any Sunday's paper. The same centre page spread of boys with a nude girl, the same incomprehensible cartoon from Rigby (I never knew `so many good judges' could be such bad judges), the same old-fashioned layout. No wonder the Times said on Tuesday that `Mr Murdoch's new Sun has done its best to resurrect the Daily Mirror of the 1930s in order to compete with the Daily Mirror of the.1970s'.
What is a little disappointing is the way the old wine is being put into a new bottle. The Sun's 'Forward with the people' was the slogan of the Daily Mirror, 'there always something new in the Sun' is the old Express slogan with the name changed. The strip cartoon hero is called Scarth: the Mirror's man is Garth. Even the letters column is placed above the strips, just as it is in the Mirror. It is almost as though they are trying to make people who pick the Sun up by accident believe that they are reading the Mirror, the thinking ap. parently being that in fact there is nothing new in the Sun to make them realise they are not.
But it is early days. The paper's editor has said that the first issue of the Sun would be their first 'dummy'. To quote the Times again, the paper 'has been put t gether at great speed, with insufficient ti for preparation, and with a small staff'. I shows. But it should mean that the pape can only improve. It has got to. For th sake of the newspaper business in genera I hope that what we have so far seen not a real sunrise, but a false dawn.
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