On the Richter scale of blatant deception it does not come up to George Orwell’s Newspeak but it is a pretty impressive misnomer, for a newspaper which carries very little proper news and which pays scant attention to what goes on outside these shores to be called the News Of The World.
Not that that has ever worried the people who own it or edit it. Their yardstick for the success or failure of the paper is how much it is talked about in the pubs on a Sunday. And as it has a circulation approaching five million—which means a probable readership of nearly 15 million—it is a fair bet that whenever people are in alcoholic bondage on Sundays there will be some discussion of the News Of The World's latest account of the roller-coaster sex lives of the royals or TV soap stars or famous sportsmen or obscure clergymen.
Of course it might be that the people leaning up against the bars will find other things to interest them. Like the recent WHO report that every year 12.2 million children under five die "because they are poor". Like the training now being given to Job Centre staff to deal with an expected upsurge of violence from claimants made even more desperate by cuts in benefits. Like the revelation that since peace broke out in 1945 there have been three crises in which America and Russia were on the brink of all-out nuclear war. But that is the real world of capitalism, in which the News Of The World has only a limited interest.
Getting close
The paper was born in 1843 and has always been noted for peddling the more sensational style of journalism, giving the full treatment to the likes of Jack the Ripper and Dr Crippen. Aristocratic divorces were a convenient way of catering for its readers’ assumed need for respectable sexual titillation. All of this was driven by the paper’s belief in itself. Emsley Carr, who edited it for 50 years, once asserted that it was ". . . always right. Nothing we did could ever be wrong".
This confidence had something to do with the News Of The World’s knack of getting close to its readers. Free insurance was one way of doing this; another was a missing person’s service (often aimed at funding someone who stood to gain from a will). Most famously of all. it ran the John Hilton Advice Bureau (Hilton was a professor of industrial relations at Cambridge) which helped with readers' problems on pensions, insurance, rent and the like and took up many cases. The spin-off was not just in publicity and higher sales but the fact that the Bureau sometimes opened up an avenue of investigation which could lead to a tasty story. For the News Of The World being close to its readers paid off; in the 1950s its circulation exceeded eight million.
But the readers need to be not only titillated. They had also to be shocked, frightened, amused, outraged—if possible all at once. Too often this has been manipulated by the selective exposure of someone who has been through the courts for sexual offences. It matters little that in so many cases the offender has themself suffered sexual assaults; in the columns of the News Of The World they are less than human— "fiends" or "beasts" or "perverts". And when they leave prison the paper continues to pursue them, protesting hysterically at wherever they live or whatever job they find.
Making excuses
The paper’s preoccupation with crime, the pornography of which they pretend to legitimise, has led it into some contradictory stances. On the one hand they make a lot of denouncing criminals, at times offering rewards for information leading to the conviction of a murderer. On the other they can befriend the notorious "acid bath" killer Haigh and pay for his defence in court after he had given them exclusive rights to his memoirs. More recently this preoccupation has reached the pitch of an obsession to including “dole scroungers’’ who must seem, to the News Of The World readers in the pubs, to be infesting the country and threatening to bring down the Stock Exchange. Lloyds and the money market with the rest of capitalism's class structure.
This obsession might be taken more seriously if the paper had a stronger reputation for respecting the truth. For example in 1991 it ran a story about Clare Short, the Labour MP who was campaigning against the cult of Page Three girls. This story was about a classified advertisement in Tribune which suggested that readers might like to send for a selection of "granddad’s naughty pictures"—the nature of which can easily be imagined. The News Of The World presented this boring, insignificant item—it could hardly be called news—as if Clare Short was in some way responsible for the advertisement when in fact her only connection with it was that she was a Tribune reader.
The sort of "exposures" the paper excels in are normally of some type of prostitution—the wilder and more bizarre the services on offer the better. So carefully have these investigations been arranged and reported that they have added a new phrase to the usage of English. The story begins when a reporter poses as a punter and. as what might be called the crunch approaches, has to extricate himself, complete with hidden tape recorder, from a potentially embarrassing—even dangerous—situation. Breathless readers are told how it is done: "I made my excuses and left."
Since 1968 the News Of The World has been owned by Rupert Murdoch, who is not renowned for upholding high journalistic standards, especially when the lower the standards the higher the sales. Before Murdoch took over, between 1891 and 1970 the paper had six editors. After Murdoch arrived, from 1970 to 1993 there were 23. Perhaps this is part of the paper’s proud boast (it was, after all, an advertising slogan) that All Human Life Is There.
But—all human life? The poverty, famine. fear and disease which is what human life is under capitalism? The futile, posturing leaders who the News Of The World urges us to support according to the whims of its proprietor? The corruption and cynicism of a social system which exploits and degrades its useful people and assumes that they will suffer it all. provided they have a weekly helping of malicious rubbish to wash down with their booze on Sunday?
Time to leave. And no excuses.
Ivan
Blogger's Note:
The News of the World finally shut up shop in 2011 after the fallout from the phone hacking scandal.
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