The press
Fit to print
Patrick Marnham
What is the point of a newspaper? According to our Ambassador in Washington it is `to find out what is going on and print it'. This week several papers have carried out the first of these tasks with great success only to fail completely in the second. Indeed the Sunday Times has apparently discovered a new aim of journalism — `to find out what is going on and then inform the Director of Public Prosecutions'. Its front page 'Exclusive', illustrated by the photographs of seven characters in 'the Jeremy Thorpe/Norman Scott affair', was inspired by 'material gathered in the Bahamas and Jersey by two Sunday Times reporters'. What was this material? Readers were not told. Instead the two faithful newshounds, having snuffled around in the reeds and recovered their birds, proceeded to carry them off to a neighbouring shoot.
Sunday Times readers were assured that the reporters who had spent weeks gathering— no, 'amassing' — 'new evidence' (whatever it was) on a 'fresh aspect of the case' (what case?) had only agreed to take it over to the DPP after they had been told that charges were due within a few days. 'It is current practice that once criminal charges are imminent newspapers refrain from comment on a case', the Sunday Times droned on. Quite, but is it Exclusive to mention this? To what extent can a statement of current practice be termed Exclusive?
Monday brought little new. The Times discovered that the DPP was upset about how much of the Thorpe affair was already public knowledge, and contented itself with a dark reference to Private Eye. And the Mail discovered that there would be 'no nightmare wait for a knock on the door', just an invitation for 'each man' (which men?) to pop around to the police station. Two things are quite clear. It has all got something to do with Jeremy Thorpe and it has 'been going on' for sixteen years.
Other MPs had a happier week. Led by Andrew Faulds who won a libel case against the publishers of the Crossman Diaries for the suggestion that he might have been drunk in the House of Commons (Crossman on Drunkenness might eventually be published in an appendix to the Diaries), eight other Members secured damages from the Daily Mail for the suggestion that they were less than assiduous in performing their parliamentary duties. The Daily Mail seems to pay out more libel damages than other papers, but this does not necessarily mean it is less conscientious about finding out what is going on and then printing it. The Daily Express was very conscientious about reporting the Mail's apologies, and presumed unreliability, but this may be a tac tical error. There are such things as Mail readers who would rather have both the original story and the apology in the conviction that they would end up better informed than Express readers who had been protected from the original story. Few items are more intriguing than the court report which mentions libel damages without explaining the libel. For many Express readers the message must be, `If you want the full story buy the Mail'. Certainly when Dempster of the Mail apologies there is no question of missing the original allegation. 'On July 25 I said that Sir Harold Wilson was to be found in the Westminster Lobby area in circumstances which have been misunderstood to impute that he may have been the worse for drink. Insofar as my remarks have been so read, they are unreservedly withdrawn. I acknowledge that there would be no foundation for any such suggestion and I would like to express my regret to Sir Harold for the offence my remarks have caused.' Dempster has recently replaced his own picture with a drawing of an ink pot and quilled pen, and insofar as this device has influenced his grammar in the matter of apologies it must be counted an additional pleasure.
It would by now be absolutely clear that no MP was ever less than one hundred per cent sober and assiduous were it not for John Pardoe, Liberal MP for North Cornwall, who in Monday's Daily Telegraph was reported to have announced that 'drink is now the main cause of crime in Britain and throughout Western society.' Pardoe called on politicians to lead the way in changing this. Are we to believe that Mr Pardoe's experience of life in his constituency, rather than in Westminster, has led him to this conclusion?
Outdoing even the Sunday Times in responsibility, the Daily Express devoted the whole of Monday's front page to the world's first bone marrow transplant patient, who is seven yeas old and whose mother has just died. Express readers have long known that their paper was 'The Voice of Britain', but on Monday they learned that they had also purchased 'The Paper that Cares'. The Express launched a trust fund for the child and devoted two more pages to 'a Father's Torment'. Amid all this feeling one relevant fact got lost, and it was left to Tuesday's Guardian to report that the child was once again seriously ill.
Perhaps the pleasantest contrast of the week was provided by two men in swimsuits. First, in the Mail, Lord Brooke, 'the sell, sell peer', emerging from the sea in Bermuda. Lord Brooke, aged forty-four, looked quite exceptionally beautiful, brown, lithe, relaxed and almost immortal. But as Mr Bad he could only be persuaded to reproach the Mail man for causing him to miss a taxi. Second, in the Express, another swimmer aged about twenty-eight, tired, sallow, sick and distressingly overweight, gazed down into a swimming pool fully of happy girls playing with a large ball. It was a full-page government advertisement placed by the Health Education Council and the headline was 'Is your body coming between you and the opposite sex?' So that's what all this medical science is for, united at last in common purpose with the acquisition of the fruits of artistic genius.
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