Press, privacy and profit (1992)

Cartoon by Peter Rigg.

From the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

When David Mellor’s affair with the unemployed actress suddenly ceased to interest the newspapers it left room on the front pages for such trivial matters as the world economic recession, the fighting in Bosnia, the famine in Africa which threatens to kill three million people, the crisis in the Gulf, the riots in British cities . . . But of course there was more to it than a bit of prurient excitement about a Minister and a woman; for one thing, did Mellor and de Sancha merely drop out of the headlines or were they pushed?

The affair happened when Mellor’s marriage was in difficulty—although it was not clear which came first and whether one caused the other. In any event the Minister might have got away with it— like so many other prominent politicians—had he not revealed in a bugged telephone conversation that after a night with de Sancha he was too exhausted to write a couple of speeches. Some people might have thought that she had done us a favour but to the People newspaper the prospect of thousands of desperate voters being deprived of listening to Mellor was too much. In the national interest, they decided, they must act; we simply can’t have the country run by a lot of weary and wordless Ministers. However it may damage Mellor and the government—and of course with absolutely no regard to whether it increased the paper’s sales—all must be revealed.

Privacy

And revealed it was, in all the detail customary to what is politely known as the “tabloid”—or, in the best of circles, the “compact”—press. To say that this area of the media operates on double standards would be to understate the arithmetic of how they operate. It is commonplace for them to denounce on one page an example of sexual excess— thunderously scourging some alleged sexual offender as a “beast"—while on another page they excite sexual tensions with pictures of a scantily clothed woman whose condition is explained in a succession of soggily provocative puns. This seeming contradiction survives and flourishes through the admitted skills of the newspapers’ wordsmiths. to devalue the whole thing as an innocent joke. This trick is pulled with the help of a specialised vocabulary, in which sexual intercourse becomes “bonking” and, for example, the ex-boss of Burtons is not just another customer of an expensive prostitute but “five times a night Halpern”. That type of vocabulary not only pushes up the sales of papers like the Sun and the Star but gets the readers chuckling, in the bus queues and the works canteens. at the discomfiture of the subjects of the reports.

This situation is so traditional in the press that there has been a long-running battle about whether reporters have an unrestricted right to invade a person’s privacy. Most recently this was scrutinised by the Calcutt Committee, which concluded that the press should be left for a probationary period to mend its ways voluntarily rather than be subjected to any legal restrictions. It is just possible that one of the motives behind the People publishing Mellor’s affair was to re-open the debate over privacy in such a way as to establish their right to intrude, at whatever cost to the victims, whenever they judged it would boost their sales.

The depths

The depths to which newspapers will sink in this quest are as yet unplumbed. Here is how the father of Julie Ward, who was murdered in the Masai Mara in 1988, reacted to the breathtakingly dishonest reporting of the murder by the Sunday Mirror:

David Barritt is a freelance reporter. Tony Frost was the deputy editor. Eve Pollard was editor and Robert Maxwell the publisher. I loathe them all . . . if I could have got my hands round Maxwells or Pollard's necks that morning I would have choked the life out of them.

In 1982 the loudly trumpeted patriotism of the Sun did not prevent it concocting an interview with Marcia McKay— whose husband had been killed in the Falklands war— which had never taken place. In 1989 Peter Bottomley, who was then Transport Minister, was smeared in a Mail On Sunday headline: “Minister in Sex Case Row”—an implied accusation for which the newspaper was later forced to apologise and pay substantial damages. And in 1990 two reporters from the Sunday Sport—which is hardly a newspaper—entered the hospital room where the actor Gordon Kaye lay seriously injured to take photographs of him and attempt to interview him. This kind of hard-nosed and callous intrusion is another tradition; according to Ray Snoddy, who is media correspondent of the Financial Times, “in the old days, dressing up as a doctor to get a hospital interview was just one of the tricks of the trade”.

Mellor’s attitude to all this might kindly be described as ambivalent, although some might prefer the opinion of one Tory backbencher that he had “made an ass of himself’. As a politician who has always been acutely aware of the need to keep himself in the public eye, Mellor did not know whether to plead to be left alone or to set up a series of photo opportunities. So, just to be safe, he did both.

The family

Of course there was the little problem that he was a member of Thatcher’s government when it suddenly began to espouse its peculiar version of “Victorian values”, which included a reverence for the sanctity of monogamous marriage. He was one of the Ministers instructed by Thatcher to go away during a parliamentary holiday and “think about the family”—because the Tories had decided that the supposed stability and protectiveness of the nuclear family was a vote winner. Finally there is the fact that Mellor, like other politicians, has used his family to appeal for votes, as if a conscientious and caring father could be trusted to run capitalism more humanely than one who has an affair with an out of work actress.

The People could hardly have believed its luck when it got the offer of the tapes which exposed Mellor’s hypocrisy. At a time when the newspapers were under a lot of pressure to clean up their act—to stop their reporters dressing up as doctors, to stop concocting and printing stories—Mellor had made his views clear. In a Hard News programme in December 1989 he posed as a fearless defender of truth and probity, saying that he was “almost embarrassed to live in the same society" as the people responsible for press invasion of privacy and for the ghoulish reporting of tragedies like Hillsborough. He moved right into the bull’s-eye in the sights of the press when Major put him in charge of the new ministry responsible for the press.

On the day after the story of his affair broke, Mellor announced that he was reviving the Calcutt investigation, which clearly implied that the press had failed its period on probation and might now expect the laws on trespass and intrusive technology to be tightened. The press responded to this by squealing that any such laws would be used to protect the government of the day, which would have been more impressive if the press itself did not use such disreputable methods to push its own political opinions. For example the support which the Murdoch papers give the Tory government is consistently and hysterically based on distortions of reality.

Hypocrisy

But just as the debate—if that is the word for it—was heating up the Mellor affair suddenly dropped out of sight. Anyone who was disappointed at not getting their daily ration of revelations about de Sancha sucking someone’s toes may ponder that this may have happened because a deal was struck between the government and the press: no more exposure of the Minister’s indiscretions in exchange for a promise not to impose any further restrictions on the press? If such an agreement would be a prime example of hypocrisy on both sides—well, that is what the whole matter was all about.

In a Commons debate in 1989 the Tory MP Julian Critchley said “the truth is that as standards drop circulation figures rise. Such newspapers lie in search of profit". It is all very well—and very convenient—for an MP to condemn some of the nastier effects of the profit system but this is done only by ignoring the fact that those effects are inseparable from the basis of the system, which they accept and support. Capitalism produces its wealth—including newspapers—for sale and profit and its morality is fashioned by that. If truth reticently stated sold newspapers the Sun would be as staid as the "quality" press. As it is, what pushes up circulation into the millions are lurid concoctions about private lives, a distortion of human sexuality, gruesome horror stories, pointless intrusions into grief, . . . None of that is a pretty sight but capitalism and its profit motive, and what that does to human beings, are not pretty either.

The Mellor affair was not pretty, nor was the way the press exposed him for the canting humbug he is; nor was the way the government and his fellow politicians responded. And while we are on the subject neither is this society pretty, with its seething problems beside which the wretched Mellor and his woman friend are reduced to the historical non-entities they are.

Ivan