What their papers say (1982)

From the August 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is a popular belief that certain newspapers report things "the way they really are" — without bias. In fact, there are no such things as neutral news items, recognisable entities independent of journalists. Rather, there are those incidents and issues which are perceived by editors as "newsworthy".

Journalists are trained to spot particular aspects of social affairs as suitable material to report on with a bias or “angle". Although we find a slightly different point of view in the liberal, "quality" press from that expressed in the rest, all newspapers have a common standpoint on the profit system — they support it. It follows that what they tell us about the world cannot help but be politically slanted. Last year thirty million people died through lack of food while mountains of beef were produced; thousands were slaughtered in wars while the combatants wished for peace; and millions remained homeless while palatial accommodation stood empty. The press was unanimous in ignoring these contradictions and reserving its astonishment and critical analysis for royal weddings and trying to detect a "new" SDP policy.

Before it is represented in the press, reality is put through the great distorting process. The four main journalistic devices are to personalise, trivialise, historically fossilise and moralise.

They personalise

Society is presently organised on the basis of minority ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth. Production is geared to profit for the few, not for social need. Problems like industrial disputes, unemployment and wars are consequences of our social system but the press encourages us to look at them in terms of individual responsibilities. Hence, Margaret Thatcher is portrayed as the demon who has somehow personally engineered the unemployment of over three million people, or else a triumphal heroine who will put "Britain" back on its feet. Strikes are blamed on the personal irresponsibility of reckless trade union leaders. Even self-proclaimed non-revolutionaries like the former Longbridgc shop steward Derek Robinson and the GLC leader Ken Livingstone come in for prolonged campaigns of abuse in which they are reduced to being known as "Red Robbo” and “Red Ken". A variation on this technique of masquerading social issues as personal is to actually personify territories and to speak of "Britain fearing the proposed EEC policy" or “France will be taking steps to ensure that . . .". The persons created by this linguistic trick embody the interests of various sections of the ruling class, so that "Britain’s overseas investments” are in reality the investments of a small minority of wealth owners associated with Britain.

They trivialise

The papers are always littered with inconsequential revelations. We are prompted to turn our heads away from the condition of the world, our poverty and insecurity and busy our minds with matters such as “Why the Duke of Kent is to visit Darlington”, the new rhinoceros at a famous zoo and a thousand other inanities. Socialists are sometimes accused of being killjoys for not wishing to participate in discussions on such matters. But stop to consider why. As they are sliding the neutron bombs into their launching positions are we really expected to open a copy of the Daily Express, read about the man who fell into a vat of custard and still be slapping our thighs as the radioactive dust descends upon us?

They historically fossilise 

Society is in a constant state of change. The institutions, social relationships and problems of today have not always been with us and are only transitory. Journalists give us a misleading vision of society because they have a “photographic” perception of affairs rather than an historical one. They try to present an accurate picture of “the way things are” but they tend to freeze what they look at without seeing each situation as part of a much wider set of social relations which are not only changing all the time, but which we are capable of shaping for our own requirements. Thus, nation states, armies, managers, police and the wages system are all regarded as part of the fabric of society which is beyond any critical comment.

They moralise

On many issues that they examine, journalists pass moral judgement. They try to persuade us that something is good or bad, but the point is that the morality which they peddle is one which favours our social superiors and flies in the face of our own interests. Their moral precepts contort to keep us in place. So strikers who seek a paltry addition to their wage to try and make ends meet are greedy, while business tycoons who acquire additional companies have praiseworthy initiative and enterprise. If a man murders people in North Yorkshire for no reason he is an anti-social wretched villain. If the same man, trained by the SAS, commits the same acts for H.M. Government with a uniform on he will be hailed as a hero. When wealth producers reclaim goods from the wealth owners without paying for them this is theft and is morally reprehensible, but when the capitalists steal from us the fruits of our labour this is making a profit and is seen as morally virtuous.

The press like any other industry is owned by a few privileged people. Three major companies (News International, Reed International and Associated Newspaper Group) own three-quarters of all British newspapers and each company has similar interests in book and magazine publishing concerns, television companies and independent radio stations. In 1948 Lord Beaverbrook said to the Press Commission: “I publish my paper (Daily Express) purely for the purpose of making propaganda and for no other motive”.

Earlier this year. Rupert Murdoch sacked The Times editor Harold Evans because he resisted pressure to take a more right-wing editorial line supporting Thatcher and Tory economic policies. According to Anthony Holden, the features editor, “Mr. Murdoch wants a poodle as an editor” (Guardian, 13 March 1982). The press barons still like to enjoy control over exactly which arguments, about how capitalism should be run, are put in their papers, but there is not a conspiracy of newspaper magnates and most of the time connivance in capitalist propaganda is less explicit.

Nevertheless, the propaganda is always there. Take June 28 this year when there was a brief strike by the National Union of Railwaymen. All the papers were against the workers and with varying degrees of openness took the side of the bosses. Reports were brimming with comments and views from David Howell, the Transport Secretary, Peter Parker, the BR chairman and cabinet ministers, but no report came anywhere near presenting an adequate account of why the workers were dissatisfied with what they had been offered. The Daily Mail displayed a headline “Britain WILL Get to Work” and listed the ways in which workers should attempt to get in to produce profits. On 7 May 1926 the same paper had a similar message for suffering workers: “If you must go about walk as far as you can . . . don't buy more coal than usual. Keep a stout heart and smile at your troubles”. The Sun headline on 28 June was “STRIKE RABBLE" while the Daily Mirror (the paper which claims to stick up for the workers!) spoke shyly about the urgent need to end the strike and for “increased productivity”. The tirelessly liberal Guardian was also urging the railwaymen to “give reality a chance” — in other words “get back to work and stop complaining”. The Times and the Daily Telegraph had identical lines, only couched in more stilted language, whereas the Star took a similar line but with a bare minimum of written language.

Apart from imparting news, the papers also vie with each other to cultivate and cater for a popular culture for their markets. They reinforce ideas about desirable lifestyles, from the adverts in the Financial Times for special credit cards “for people who travel and entertain around the world. People whose lifestyle and income requires and justifies an additional range of financial services" (28 June 1982), to the crude horoscopes and cheap, brash “lighthearted" pages in the gutter press. Pleasure is promoted here as a spectator sport, something you need to get with cash, something where you are “being entertained". The lowest common denominator of interest among an estimated readership is exploited to the hilt to maximise sales. This converts the paper into another type of mass entertainment to be mechanically produced for profit on one side and passively consumed for gratification on the other. As Richard Hoggart observes in his book The Uses of Literacy:

These productions belong to a vicarious spectators' world; they offer nothing which can really grip the brain or heart. They assist a gradual drying-up of the more positive, the fuller, the more cooperative kinds of enjoyment. in which one gains by giving much (p. 340).

The only paper which represents the interest of the working class, because it stands for socialism and nothing else, is the Socialist Standard. The press and the other means of communication can only be used for their proper function — the unrestricted dissemination of ideas and other information — when they, along with everything else, are commonly owned. Raymond Williams approaches this point when he observes:

The irony is that the only practical use of communication is the sharing of real experience. To set anything above this is quite unpractical. To set selling above it may seem normal, but it is really only a perversion to which some people have got used: a way of looking at the world which must be right and normal because you have cut yourself down to its size (Communications, p. 26).

Remember knowledge is power, and every new reader of the Socialist Standard makes the movement for socialism stronger.

Gary Jay

Voice From The Back: Worldwide genocide (2001)

The Voice From The Back Column from the October 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Worldwide genocide

Under the headline “Scientists to probe worldwide genocide” The Observer gives yet more proof about how awful modern capitalism is. “The world’s first centre for the investigation of genocide is to be set up by British scientists with experience of working with some of the most appaling war crimes of modern times. The International Forensic Centre of Excellence for the Investigation of Genocide (Inforce) will use expertise gained in excavating mass graves in the Balkan conflict to provide independent evidence of war crimes and state-sponsored killing from across the world … The new centre, which could be up and running by the end of next year, plans to investigate atrocities in Sierra Leone, Central Africa and Indonesia. It is estimated that about 170 million people have been murdered by their own governments in the past century.” A hundred years of political reformism, thousands of “peace” conferences and this is what capitalism produces. Inside a socialist system we will have no need for an organisation called The International Forensic Centre of Excellence for the Investigation of Genocide. Who knows? We may even have one called The Global Centre for the Understanding of Diverse Cultures.

Sour notes

Rupert Murdoch’s Times has been sponsoring a long running campaign against the British government adopting the Euro currency. Now it seems they have another reason to be anti-Euro – it offends their aesthetic sense. “The euro banknotes are stark, bland and dead. With no recognisable building and no friendly humanity, they look as though they have been designed by committee, as they have … The design principle could not differ more from those of the pound. On the £20 note an imposing portrait of the Queen dominates. Flip it over and there is Sir Edward Elgar, with Worcester Cathedral in the background. There is nothing so bold on the euro notes.” The Times, 31 August. But all those lovers of bits of paper depicting parasites and monuments to outmoded institutions should not despair. Inside socialism you would still be able to see them in the Museum of Ancient Artifacts alongside such displays as the flint axe and the suit of armour. Who knows, it may even be housed in Worcester Cathedral.

Freedom of the press

Shock, Horror, Probe, Startling Revelations and all the other stupid cliches of the media. The Guardian of 6 September astonished us all with its findings. “Rupert Murdoch’s influence over editorial policy at his most prestigious British title, the Times, is so great that journalists are censored by executives frightened of offending their proprietor, according to a former member of the paper’s foreign staff. In a stinging attack in the London Evening Standard Mr Kiley wrote that Mr Murdoch’s friendship with Ariel Sharon, Israel’s prime minister, and Mr Murdoch’s extensive Israeli investments led executives to extensively rewrite copy.” Of course, the proprietors of The Guardian never interfere in the dissemination of truth. That is why you often see articles in that journal attacking private property and advocating World Socialism. Don’t you?

Another brilliant ‘Marxist’

The Socialist Party has always insisted that China and Russia were never socialist, had nothing to do with Marxism and were in fact examples of state capitalism. The recent antics of the Chinese leadership show how correct we were. This piece of nonsense was reported in The Guardian (13 September) under the heading “China’s leader tries to wed Marx and Blair”. “President Jiang Zemin of China has stolen the mantle from the late Mao Zedong in a new press campaign that suggests he is a brilliant Marxist as well as a great leader. Mr. Jiang has made a “new contribution” to Marxist theory which should be studied throughout the country, the Communist party’s official newspaper, People’s Daily, said this week. And according to Hong Kong reports of a recent top level conference, Mr. Jiang and his supporters now wish to study the experience of European social democracy: “Many in our party believe that the Third Way is not such a bad idea,” a party theorist, Yan Shuhan, told Asiaweek magazine, referring to the credo with which Tony Blair is most identified.”

A mad, mad world

Amidst the millions of words pumped out by the media on the hijacked aircraft carnage in the USA, the following short letter in the Guardian (13 September) contained probably the wisest. “Shortly after 3pm British time, as the events in the US were unfolding, BBC News began analysing how the situation would affect share prices – surely yet more proof, as if any were needed, of what a sick world we live in.”

Report on the press (1949)

From the October 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

In this second article dealing with the Report of the Royal Commission on the Press, we give details of some of the useful information obtained by the Commission in the course of its enquiries. It is not intended to be a comprehensive survey, but consists of various items of evidence submitted to the Commission which we think will be of some interest and value to readers of the Socialist Standard.

Ownership

One of the first tasks of the Commission was to make a survey of the ownership of the Press, with particular reference to the existence of large groups, or “chains” of newspapers. They discovered five groups which could be classified under this heading. Three of these were comparatively unimportant, their newspapers were found to be printed mainly in the provinces, most of them were “weeklies,” and in no case was the total daily circulation more than a million. The other two, however. Associated Newspapers, Ltd., and Kemsley Newspapers, Ltd., were very different and deserve more detailed treatment.

Associated Newspapers, Ltd.

This company owns the Daily Mail, London Evening News, and Sunday Dispatch. Through subsidiary companies it owns various evening and weekly papers and has minority interests in several others. It is itself a subsidiary of another company, the Daily Mail and General Trust, Ltd., of which Viscount Rothermere is chairman. He holds 21 per cent. of its Ordinary shares. There are 9,000 other Ordinary shareholders, but none of them holds more than 1 per cent. As chief shareholder and chairman he therefore has virtual control of the Mail, News, and Dispatch as well as the following provincial “dailies”—Gloucestershire Echo, Derby Evening Telegraph, Citizen (Gloucester), Evening Sentinel (Stoke-on-Trent), South Wales Evening Post, Hull Daily Mail, and Grimsby Evening Telegraph, plus various “weeklies.”

Kemsley Newspapers, Ltd.

This is the other important “chain.” It owns directly, or through subsidiary companies, the Daily Graphic, Sunday Times, Sunday Chronicle, and Sunday Graphic, as well as the following provincial “dailies”— Newcastle Journal and North Mail, Newcastle Evening Chronicle, Glasgow Daily Record and Mail, Glasgow Evening News, Aberdeen Press and Journal, Aberdeen Evening Express, Northern Daily Telegraph (Blackburn), Middlesbrough Evening Gazette, Sheffield Telegraph, Sheffield Star, Western Mail (Cardiff), South Wales Echo (Cardiff), and Yorkshire Evening Press (York). In addition, it owns numerous “weeklies” and sporting papers. Chairman of all the companies is Viscount Kemsley, and his son, Lionel Berry, is vice- chairman. His wife and two other sons are also directors, and the number of Ordinary shares held by the family amounts to almost 50 per cent., sufficient to give it complete control.

Both these “chains” have wide ramifications, but their importance should not be over-emphasised. Judged on the basis of circulation they are not outstanding—the “non-chain” Beaverbrook Press, for example, has a bigger morning circulation than either of them, and the Daily Mirror had a much bigger circulation than one and must now be running the other fairly closely. Their greatest proportion, in terms of circulation, is to be found in the evening press—here Associated Newspapers accounted for about 21 per cent. of total circulation, and Kemsley Newspapers 13 per cent. (1947 figures). On Sundays neither can touch the “non-chain” News of the World.

Other Companies

There are three other daily newspaper companies which, although they cannot be called “chains,” are similar in one respect, namely that they are controlled by an individual, or a small group of individuals. First of these is London Express Newspaper, Ltd., which owns the Daily Express, and by means of subsidiary companies also controls the Sunday Express, London Evening Standard, and the Glasgow Evening Citizen. The controlling interest in the main company is held by Lord Beaverbrook, and his son. Max Aitken, is a director of all four companies. The actual extent of Beaverbrook’s holding was not divulged to the Commission.

The Daily Telegraph, the second of this type, is controlled by members of the Camrose family, who between them own all the Ordinary shares (£1,199,997), and most of the Preference shares. By the articles of association which control the running of the company Lord Camrose may, if he so wishes, remain chairman and editor-in-chief for life.

Finally, there is the Times, owned by two people, Colonel J. J. Astor and a Mr. John Walter in the proportion of nine shares to one. The articles of association provide for a committee whose function it is to approve of any move to transfer shares to anybody other than the two present shareholders. This device, in effect, makes any change of ownership very unlikely. 

The Other" Dailies”

As far as the other well-known “ dailies ” are concerned, ownership and control cannot be linked with an individual or group. This applies to the Daily Mirror, and its companion, the Sunday Pictorial. There are more than 9,000 shareholders in the Mirror company, and 4,000 in the Pictorial. No individual in the Daily Mirror holds more than 4 per cent. of the Ordinary shares, and no one in the Sunday Pictorial has more than 1 per cent., but the Mirror holds 25 per cent. of the Ordinary shares in the Pictorial, and the Pictorial holds 22 per cent. of those in the Mirror. Each, therefore, has the controlling interest in the other. What this means in practice is that the directors of both companies can exercise absolute control.

The Daily Herald has a position all its own in that the majority of its shares are owned by Odhams Press, Ltd., which also controls the People and the “weeklies ” John Bull, News Review, and Illustrated. This peculiar state of affairs dates back to 1929 when the Herald found itself hard pushed to compete with the other big “dailies” through lack of finance, and joined forces with Odhams to get it. Thus we have the position where Odhams Press holds 51 per cent. of the shares, and nominees of the Trades Union Congress hold the rest.

The company has nine directors, five nominated by Odhams, and four by the T.U.C. The present T.U.C. nominees, by the way, are A. Conley (Tailors’ and Garment Workers’ Union), A. B. Deakin (Transport and General Workers’ Union), H. V. Tewson (Gen. Sec., T.U.C.), and F. Wolstencroft (Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers). A further interesting point is that the articles of association provide that the political policy of the paper shall be laid down by the Conferences of the Labour Party, and its industrial policy by the Conferences of the T.U.C.

The case of the Daily Worker is also rather confused and complicated. . Until 1946 it was owned, through nominees, by the Communist Party itself, but on 1st January, 1947, ownership war transferred to the People’s Press Printing Society, in order to raise more money. This society is stated to have about 29,000 shareholders, of which 756 consist of organisations (395 of them trade union branches). Shareholdings are limited to £200, and each holder is entitled to one vote, irrespective of the size of his holding. The society first elects a Committee of Management which in turn elects the Editor and a supervisory body called the Editorial Board. The Management Committee, in effect, has control of the paper. The control, however, is not absolute, as die Worker has to go every now and then to the People’s Press Fighting Fund for loans and grants, but as the trustees of the Fund (in the true Communist Party tradition) in 1947 were all, with one exception, also members of either the Management Committee or Editorial Board, or both, we think it can be considered as a purely technical point.

One national newspaper, Reynolds News, is owned by a group of co-operative societies through the Cooperative Press, Ltd. Of the 845 shareholders, all are co-operative societies except for two Trade Unions, the National Union of Railwaymen and the Union of Shop, Distributive, and Allied Workers. Management is in the hands of a Board of Directors elected by the Shareholders. None has sufficient votes to control the Board. 

Trust Ownership

Lastly, there are three well-known newspapers which are owned by Trusts. The objects of Trusts, in the words of the Commission, are one or all of the following: —

“To prevent the control of the undertaking from falling into unsuitable hands, to perpetuate the character and policy of a paper, to avoid the crippling effect of death duties, and to ensure, through the limitation or the ploughing back of profits, the preservation or the expansion of the undertaking.”

The first is the News Chronicle which, with its London evening companion, the Star, is owned by the Daily News, Ltd. The majority of this company's shares are held in turn by the Daily News Trust. Two- thirds of the trustees are members of the Cadbury family.

The other two Trusts own the Manchester Guardian and Observer respectively. The Guardian is completely in the hands of the Scott Trust, who now number eight persons, mostly members of the Scott family. The Observer Trust consists of six trustees, one of whom is Lord Astor, holder of most of the company’s shares. Each Trust is hedged in with detailed and complicated provisions, of which little need be said except that they comply with one or more of the objects mentioned by the Commission and quoted above.

The Political Weeklies

A few words should be said about the political “weeklies,” The New Statesman and Nation, Tribune, Time and Tide, and Truth.

The New Statesman is controlled by the Statesman Publishing Co., Ltd., which has a capital of about £17,500 in Ordinary shares and 436 special Management shares. Only Management shareholders are allowed to vote; they number 19, and among them are Low, Malcolm MacDonald, Kingsley Martin, and Bernard Shaw. There are six directors, G. D. H. Cole, Low, Kingsley Martin, J. B. Priestley, a Mr. J. H. Roberts, and a Mr. R. G. E. Willson; all except the last-named are also on the Board of the company that actually owns the paper. Shares in the company may. not be transferred to anyone outside if a member is willing to purchase them at a fair value.

Tribune has an issued capital of only £183, in £1 shares. No holder has more than 10; the best-known shareholders are Sir Stafford Cripps, Michael Foot, Victor Gollancz, J. F. Horrabin, Harold Laski, Jennie Lee, Ian Mikardo, and J. Platts-Mills, each with 10 shares. It was disclosed to the Commission that subsidies totalling £3,597 were received during the period between 1937 and 1946 (mainly in the early years). Most of this money was contributed by Stafford Cripps and G. R. Strauss (the present Minister of Supply).

Time and Tide is leased to Viscountess Rhondda, who holds over 90 per cent. of the shares, and is chairman and editor of the paper.

Truth has a capital of £29,000 in 2,900 £10 shares. There are three directors, one of whom is Collin Brooks. He holds 1,500 of the shares, of which 500 are as nominee for Lord Perry (of the Ford Motor Co.) and 500 for a Mr. Garfield Watson. It was disclosed that the paper received contributions of £17,000 towards expenses between 1939 and 1946, mainly from the late Lord Luke, Lord Perry, Mr. Garfield Watson, and Lord Queenborough.

Finally there is the Economist. Lord Layton (also of the News Chronicle) is its chairman, and there are four other directors, one of whom is Geoffrey Crowther, the editor; and another, Brendan Bracken. The Financial News, Ltd. (which also has interests in the Banker, Investors’ Chronicle, and Financial Times) holds 50 per cent. of the Ordinary shares, and the other 13 shareholders appoint a majority of the Board and nominate the chairman. Transfer of shares and the appointment of the chairman require the consent of four trustees, of whom Sir Charles Hambro, the banker, and Lord Beveridge are the most well known.

Stan Hampson

(To be continued.)

Press Exposure: Who's in Charge? (1995)

The Press Exposure column from the April 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Peter Jay is regarded by many people including himself—as one of the cleverest men in Britain, if not the world or perhaps the entire history of the human race. So what part of his historically wonderful brain malfunctioned when he accepted the job of chief of staff to Robert Maxwell, who also had a pretty high opinion of his own intellect and who subjected Jay to years of harassment and humiliation?

For example: in 1989 Jay had to get Maxwell to sign a cheque, a contribution towards the support the Mirror boss had promised to the Commonwealth Games. Maxwell loved this kind of situation. "I will decide when that cheque is paid," he told his cerebral chief-of-staff, “Now fuck off out of here."

The longer Jay stayed on Maxwell's payroll the more harassed and ragged he became, the more he drank and smoked. Hardly a week went by without him having to sack some secretary, receptionist or telephonist—until it was his turn to be fired. In spite of all this he could later say about his time with Maxwell: “Nothing happened that was outside what I expected or regarded as legitimate." (At the time Maxwell was alive: after his death Jay described him as “this crazy guy".)

Sarf London boy

Flamboyant characters are what the newspaper industry is notorious for. While Maxwell was terrorising the staff at the Mirror (if he asked what time it was the wise response was "What time would you like it to be, Bob?") Kelvin Mackenzie was imposing a similar regime at the Sun, where office life was a continual turmoil of abuse, threats and humiliation. Mackenzie took a delight in playing up to his self-image as a Sarf-London-boy-made-good or -bad, depending on whether you were on the receiving end of his ranting temper. He seemed unable to speak a sentence which did not have the word "fuck" in it at least once. He seemed unable to get through a day which did not involve the ritual reduction of some hapless staff member to a trembling, stammering wreck. With all this Mackenzie turned out a newspaper whose circulation climbed up and up, far above its nearest rival. So behind the shrieking and the swearing and the abuse there was a diabolically shrewd journalist—which not everyone would regard as a compliment Mackenzie was very different from the press lords who once dominated the British newspaper industry, passing the ownership from one generation to another to protect what they thought was the highest standards of journalism. This meant (didn't it?) that newspapers always told the truth, always respected privacy, never resorted to salacious exploitation of their readers’ sadder repressions.

Screws of the world

For over 70 years, until it was taken over by Rupert Murdoch, the News of the World was owned by the Carr family. During that time the newspaper became famous, not for its reporting of international events but for its rollicking exposure of vicars (the older the better) who had affairs with their secretaries or parishioners (the younger the better). When the paper was losing so much money that it had to be sold or put to sleep Robert Maxwell tried to take it over, resisted by the editor who claimed that his tawdry conglomeration of sensationalism and juvenile smut was "as British as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. . . this is a British newspaper run by British people. Let’s keep it that way". But then money spoke louder than jingoism and the Carrs sold out to Murdoch, who was as Australian as a kangaroo meat barbie on Bondi Beach.

The Berry family are another lot to have been ousted in recent years—in their case from ownership of the Daily Telegraph. This paper always had a shrewd eye for its market, apart from its small ads for jobs which were combed through regularly by ambitious managers, it appealed to the tea-shop regulars in places like Cheltenham and Tunbridge Wells. This gave a certain allure to its letter columns, which were rather like a primeval mental swamp. Such a distaste for ideas meant that generally the Telegraph’s news coverage was better than average—which included regular in-depth reporting of any scandal or sexual misdemeanour, especially if they involved members of the ruling class whose behaviour had let the side down.

A bit of a con

One family to hang on has been the Harmsworths. associated with the Daily Mail whose politics, they say, have not changed for over 80 years (they must have forgotten that in the 1930s the Mail supported Mosley’s British Union of Fascists). The Daily Mail is not famous for an addiction to the truth. A few years ago they eagerly joined in the Bingo war with rivals like the Sun and the Mirror, claiming to make some lucky people Mail Millionaires. In fact the statistical chance of a millionaire emerging from playing the "game" in the Mail was once in about 400 years. This impressed even Lord Rothermere, who admitted the whole thing was "a bit of a con”.

And that really sums it up. Newspapers are not there to inform us but to be sold, to make profits for the likes of Murdoch and the Rothermeres. The important issue is what is implied by the market they operate in. Do the readers of the Sun, the Mail, the Telegraph and the rest really want nothing better than the world as presented to them in the newspapers? Reading the press should be enough to change the mind of anyone who doubts the urgent need to change society.

Ivan

Between the Lines: All the news that's fit to finance (1987)

'What did the Socialist Standard say about us, luv?'

The Between the Lines column from the October 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

All the news that's fit to finance

Brass Tacks (BBC2,8.30pm. Wed. 26 August and 2 September) devoted two programmes to investigating the question of whether Britain has fair, decent, honest, free newspapers. Now. these adjectives are not ones which immediately spring to mind when one thinks of the press. Distorted, debased, dishonest and unfree are the more appropriate words which offer themselves as descriptions. Surely there can be few people in Britain who are unaware that if your name is Murdoch or Maxwell the press is just as free as you want to pay for it to be, but if you are looking for information you will be wasting your time sifting through most of the outpourings of Wapping Lies Ltd. and the other millionaire mouthpieces which constitute the illusion of the free British press.

In the first of the programmes Brass Tacks looked at four new newspapers and the editorial problems faced by the men who control them. Being commodities — like cans of dog food (but more tasteless) and strippergram girls — the newspapers have a principal aim to sell more copies, regardless of the journalistic standards which have to be abandoned in that sordid pursuit. So, as the newly appointed editor of the News on Sunday pointed out, despite the left-wing claims of that newspaper before and when it was established, the dictates of the market meant that vicar-beat-choirgirl-with-elephant-trunk type stories had to give way to exposes of brutality by the Greater Manchester police. You don’t make profits out of principles. The programme looked at the Today newspaper which has recently been pocketed by Rupert Murdoch, the man who has done for journalistic freedom what Adolf Hitler did for community harmony. David Montgomery. Murdoch’s editor of Today, summed up the answer to those people who stamp their feet with anger when it is suggested that the handful of capitalists who own the press are the dictators who decide what will go in it: "Clearly there’s bound to be a coinciding of Rupert Murdoch’s philosophy and the philosophy of his editors, but we have disagreements with him about style and content and we argue our corner. I suppose if the difference becomes so great then someone’s got to leave and it probably won't be Rupert Murdoch".

The second “Brass Tacks” analysis of the press took the form of a studio discussion. Facing the four editors who sat as a panel were people who had been victims of press distortion and manipulation. Predictably, the discussion divided into liberal sentiments about fairness in opposition to the real voice of capitalism: if it sells print it, if lies sell better make them big ones, if they will buy soft porn why give them news? Mike Gabbert, who was then editorial director of the Sunday Sport and is now editor of the new, "lustier" Daily Star, participated in the debate with all the elegance and eloquence of a football hooligan with a word processor. In response to women who objected to selling newspapers by displaying naked female flesh in between editorials moralising against rape, Gabbert blurted that they only held those views because they were too fat. This oaf needed a free education, not a free press. 

Speaking of press distortion 

While we are on the subject of the gutter press, let us turn our attention to The People (a nasty little Sunday rag) of 16 August. In it Ian Brandes writes a column headlined TV SOAP IS JUST A PLOT BY THE STATE!’ The article purports to be about comments made about soap operas, and Crossroads in particular, which appeared in this column in the August Socialist Standard. This party was not contacted by Brandes before he wrote his distorted nonsense. Despite letters from this journal to Brandes and to his editor insisting that the lies in The People article be corrected, we have not even received an acknowledgement, let alone a published correction. So. let us look at Brandes' article with a view to showing just how honest the dear old British press is. The article begins as follows: "The loony Labour left has launched a blistering attack on TV soap operas as the modern opium of the masses'." But the article deals only with comments made in this column in this journal which is published by The Socialist Party of Great Britain, a party which was formed two years before the Labour Party and has no connection with Labour or its left-wing. Brandes need only to have contacted us to find this out — or, easier still, he need only have read the August issue of this journal in order to find at least three articles referring explicitly to The Socialist Party’s opposition to the Labour Party. Second lie: The People article's headline suggests that we are claiming that soaps are a conspiracy or plot to fix workers' minds: in the article Brandes writes that "It (The Socialist Standard) claims that the nation's weekly favourites are just part of a sinister capitalist plot to keep viewers docile, while the bosses exploit their power." Compare this to what the Standard article actually stated: "It is not being claimed that soaps are a conspiracy to make workers accept capitalism". Third lie: in The People's account of our article it is said that we assert that "There would be no need at all for TV soaps" in a socialist society. What we printed was rather different: "Will there be soap operas in a socialist society? Who can tell? It is not for a small minority of socialists in 1987 to lay down a blueprint for how the socialist majority will decide to live”. In no sense can that be interpreted as stating that soap operas will not be shown on TV once we establish a socialist society. And lie number four: The People falsely claims that we were saying that there will be no soap operas in a socialist society: "There would be no need for TV soaps at all, the journal claims, if Britain would only embrace socialism". This column has never advocated the absurd, nationalist notion of "British socialism". If Brandes had taken the trouble to read the inside cover of the August Standard (as in this one) he would have read a series of clear questions and answers about what we stand for; in answer to the question. "What is the meaning of socialism?" we state in terms which are clear enough for even a People journalist to comprehend: "Socialism does not yet exist. When it is established it must be on a worldwide basis, as an alternative to the outdated system of world capitalism". So. in a newspaper article of less than two hundred words Ian Brandes and The People make four erroneous. dishonest statements about the contents of this column. What are they going to do about it? We'll be letting you know.

An after-dinner ramble 

UK Late (C4. Friday) is described as a programme of witty, punchy, after-dinner discussion. Quite who finishes their dinner at 11.30pm is uncertain, but we might suspect that if they take as long to cook the kebabs as they do to get to the point in these witty, punchy intellectual rambles they were lucky to have had dinner at all. On 4 September the collection of witty, punchy (rather dull, actually) conversationalists included a judge and a second-hand car dealer who had served a sentence or two for fraud. "We really think alike on most things, us two" said the judge, after an hour of exuding gas about crime and punishment. The criminologist, Jock Young, who is about as witty and punchy as a 1953 Boys ' Own annual, tried in vain to persuade the assembled guests to understand that criminality is a label usually placed by the state upon poor people, while at the same time City robbers (sorry, "entrepreneurs") are raking in millions as a result of their fiddles. What he did not mention were the millions more pounds being accumulated by the capitalists in the City, not as a result of illegal dealing, but due to good old honest robbery called making a profit, i.e. exploiting wage labour. The witty, punchy, after-dinner discussion about the meaning of class on 21 August was no more satisfying. The TV audience (that is. those of us who don't have after-dinner shouting matches of our own. so have to resort to the telly for a bit of genuine, semi-pissed prejudice) were treated to a collection of people who were able to say all kinds of punchy and witty things except a) what class means, b) why it exists, and c) how we can get rid of it. For answers to those questions read The Socialist Standard - as opposed to the half-witted, punch-drunk Sunday People.

Steve Coleman

The Newspaper Industry (1967)

From the June 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Fleet Street is a jungle”. That is not the most original and penetrating comment ever made by Cecil Harmsworth King, chairman of the International Publishing Corporation, from the safety of whose mighty ramparts he could boast “I shall survive”. Which is more than can be said of the one national daily paper, one London evening, four national Sundays and over one hundred local papers which have perished in the jungle since the war.

Perhaps the most famous of these were the News Chronicle and The Star, which collapsed overnight in October 1960. There was a great deal of fuss over this, but the fate of the two papers was inescapable. Although they both had a circulation of over a million, during the last nine months of their lives they showed a combined loss of £300,000. In typical style, the Daily Mirror composed the most pointed of their many epitaphs: “A commercial failure is a commercial failure. However sad. However regretful.”

There have been no comparable deaths in Fleet Street since then but this is not to say that all the papers are bursting with health. A recent report by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) fore, cast that four national newspapers will close by 1970; five dailies and two Sundays are making losses amounting to several million pounds a year. What the Manchester Guardian said ten years ago is still true:

Between the upper and the nether millstones of limited revenue and rising costs some units of the industry are being ground into oblivion.

Today, one of these units is The Guardian itself, which is losing around £1 million a year and which last December warned the printing unions that production costs had to be cut by a quarter by the end of the year.

Just as in other industries, production costs are a persistent worry to the newspaper managements. In evidence to the 1961 Royal Commission on the Press, the Daily Mirror said that its total variable costs had increased 4.2 times between 1937 and 1960, and fixed costs 2.2 times.

In this situation, wages are bound to be under the microscope; in Fleet Street they have always tended to be above average, although none of the printing workers is yet able to employ quite as many servants as some of the shareholders:

When the EIU reported last January, it pointed a disapproving finger at Fleet Street’s wages and commented that the industry “. . . is almost unique in the degree to which control of labour is in the hands of the unions.” The printing unions might well take this as a back-handed compliment to the efficiency with which they have done their job—which was, after all, what the EIU was supposed to be looking for.

Apart from their efforts to hold down production costs and wages, the newspapers are locked in a battle with each other, for circulation and advertisements. The losers of the battle find themselves in a descending spiral; a low circulation, or a high circulation in the wrong places, does not attract revenue from advertisements. This usually means cuts in quality (one of the troubles of the News Chronicle was that it could not afford to run as many pages as its rivals), which mean lower circulation and therefore less advertisements . . .

For the winners the spiral works in the opposite direction; with the exception of The Times, the cost of advertising in a national newspaper is tied to its circulation:

Advertising revenue is, and has been for some time, vital to a newspaper’s survival; without it it simply could not make ends meet. The Daily Express told a PEP enquiry in 1955 (Balance Sheet of the Press) that 39 per cent of its revenue came from advertisements; the EIU found some "quality" daillies getting 70 or 80 per cent of their incomes from the  same source and the “populars” about 40 per cent.

To attract the advertisements, the papers must themselves advertise, in campaigns aimed at industry’s sales directors. The Daily Telegraph says that on Fridays, when its colour supplement comes out, circulation goes up to 1,450,858—“. . . at just the right time for the peak weekend spending period.” (The whole idea, in fact, behind the colour supplements was to attract advertisers—as is obvious from the most casual glance through them.) Then there is “. . . the advertising medium that sells best” (News of the World, circulation 6,184,000) and “The Religious Weekly With National Appeal” (Methodist Recorder, circulation 69,568.)

The accepted formula for survival in Fleet Street’s jungle is size and diversification. Two giants out-top the rest—the International Publishing Corporation (IPC) and the Thomson Organisation. Both have big investments in newspapers and publishing overseas and in commercial television. Both received EIU's admiration for being “operated as a commercial business” (Daily Mirror) and “profit orientated” (Sunday Times).

Thomsons own the Sunday Times, the Scotsman, the Western Mail and now, after the Monopolies Commission had given the necessary approval under the Monopolies and Mergers Act, The Times—a takeover which in itself showed up the plight of the newspaper industry. Thomsons also own exhibition companies, a package tour firm and an airline.

IPC, in the words of the Press Council (Report 1966), is the ". . . largest and most comprehensive publishing and communications empire in the world.” It owns the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, The People, The Sun, and something like ninety weekly magazines and 123 which come out less frequently, among them Autocar, Country Life, Everywoman. The weekly total was recently reduced by one when IPC put The Statist, after a long and painfully unprofitable iillness, to sleep.

A long way behind these two groups are Associated Newspapers (Daily Mail, Daily Sketch, Evening News, National Opinion Polls, a stake in Southern Television and in the North Sea explorations) and Beaverbrook Newspapers (Daily Express, Sunday Express, Evening Standard, a share in ATV.) Then there are the smaller, sometimes private, companies like the Daily Telegraph Ltd. and the Manchester Guardian and Evening News Ltd. This was how the three biggest groups made out in 1965:

Correction: It should read 'Profits Before Tax'

For the future, Fleet Street’s barometer is not set fair. The competition from television will not grow any weaker; the decline in advertising revenue will probably continue; production costs will not fall. The big groups have the resources to ride the storm and to put in labour saving equipment; in 1965 Thomsons invested £2.7 million in equipment and a new paper of their’s — the Evening Post in Reading—is composed with a computer. The small groups will be hard pressed to compete with this; their papers are especially vulnerable.

The suggested remedies are not original. The EIU advised an all-out war on costs, saying that in London alone the industry could sack enough workers to save nearly £5 million a year. Lord Thomson wants the unions to cooperate: “We have to learn to use these new tools of our trade, and I hope the efforts to do so will not be hamstrung by restrictive practices . . .” (Fleet Street, the Inside Story of Journalism — Macdonald 1966.)

And of course someone had to suggest the State stepping in like a fairy godmother to save it all. Richard Brightshaw, joint general secretary of SOGAT (one of the printing unions) has “. . . called for a National Printing Corporation, backed with large Government resources, which would . . . take over ’commercial projects and ailing publications’. . .” Lena Jeger, Labour M.P., “. . . is a strong supporter of outright nationalisation.” (Sunday Times, 8/1/67).

Like most of the lamentations about the state of Fleet Street, these are based on the assumption that newspapers are sacred. In fact, they are commodities, like the rest of capitalism’s wealth. When it is applied to other industries, the newspapers always support the principle that if something is unprofitable it should not be produced. If Fleet Street is a jungle, it is capitalism’s profit motive which has made it so. 

Ivan

Murdoch at The Times (1981)

From the March 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is a fact of life under capitalism that the capitalist invests only where there is a prospect of making profit. As Marx put it, from the capitalist standpoint a worker who does not yield a profit to his employer is not a productive worker. Newspapers are no exception; when they continue to show losses, they are closed down. The London Evening News is only the latest of a large number that have disappeared in recent years.

There is, however, a widespread belief that The Times is different. Because it has been in existence since 1785, was for a long time a government mouthpiece, and has a certain reputation for reliability and avoidance of sensationalism, the claim is made that it is a “natural asset" which must be preserved at all costs. The belief has been supported by the fact that at times wealthy newspaper proprietors like Lord Northcliffe and the late Lord Thomson have been prepared to own it for prestige reasons and lose a certain amount of money. So when the present Lord Thomson announced that unless he found a buyer for The Times, the Times Literary Supplement and two educational supplements, he would close them down, the media reported that the nation was stunned and it had to be debated in the House of Commons.

Adulation of The Times is not however shared by some of the rival newspapers. Reporting the House of Commons debate, Andrew Alexander (Daily Mail, 28 July) took a distinctly critical attitude:

MPs on both sides spoke of The Times and the Sunday Times, especially the former, with a mixture of awe, reverence and admiration. Those newspapers play a really tremendous part in British public life, MPs kept stressing until one was finally left wondering how it was that “public life" did not grind to a halt altogether during the eleven months that the two papers were off the street. Actually, of course, MPs were discussing a couple of newspapers of modest distinction, as prone to vulgar error, inaccuracies and unconvincing arguments as much of the rest of Fleet Street, except that when The Times, for example, talks twaddle it does so in polysyllables and charges you 20p for the privilege of reading sophisticated nonsense (as opposed to unsophisticated nonsense available elsewhere for less)!

As was inevitable in the long run, the future of the Times group of publications is being decided on the question of profitability. The Thomson company is reported to have lost £50 million through the eleven months’ strike. It is not that the company could not afford to go on running the newspapers at a loss, but the shareholders have no intention of seeing their profits from oil thrown away on this loss-making branch of their activities.

When publication was resumed it was the expectation, on the employers’ side, that the unions would agree to the introduction of new technology and reductions of staff, which would turn losses into profits. The unions had still not agreed when another strike took place, this time by the journalists. Lord Thomson then announced his deadline; failing the receipt of a satisfactory offer for the whole group (or for the separate journals), together with agreement by the unions to accept big changes, all the journals would cease publication in March.

The Thomson company provisionally accepted an offer by Rupert Murdoch, who owns Australian newspapers as well as the Sun and the News of the World. Objection was raised to this on the ground that it would create an unacceptable monopoly but the government refused to refer it to the Monopolies Commission.

Two other objections were raised regarding Murdoch; that he would not allow his editors independence in matters of policy, and that under his ownership The Times would never be the same again. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Observer and Telegraph) was horrified:

With Murdoch at The Times, the whole ecology of Fleet Street is changed, for the worse. The master of the most disreputable and successful of the “populars” is now to be master also of the principal “qualities".

On the strength of Murdoch’s assurances the unions concerned, both printers’ and journalists’, dropped whatever objections they may have had on these aspects.

From the start Murdoch made it quite clear that his priority is profit he had no intention of taking over the group on any other basis. He demanded that by February 12 the unions had to agree to reductions of staffing ranging from 9 per cent for journalists to 50 per cent in the composing room, with compulsory redundancies if necessary; a wage freeze until October 1982; and printing the supplements outside London. This, of course, was an opening gambit and he cannot have been surprised that the unions’ immediate reaction was to reject the lot.

The other big issue concerns unofficial lightening strikes. Newspapers are particularly vulnerable to such stoppages, which lead not only to loss of income from sales and from advertising, but also to advertisers permanently taking their publicity elsewhere. Murdoch asked for union guarantees of continuous production, with penalty clauses that unofficial strikes would lose their pay immediately and that from the second day other members of the same union would have their pay reduced to basic pay, as also would all printing workers from the third day.

The unions eventually agreed to give guarantees, but without the penalty clauses, and to some redundancies. They are carrying on parallel negotiations with the other national newspapers.

It is not only The Times group that is in difficulties financially. Most sections of the British printing and publicity industry have their problems, partly due to the depression, but also to competition from cheaper production abroad and a feared permanent decline in book sales. Many British companies now get their printing done outside this country. Cassels have given up their general list and the British Printing Corporation, faced with heavy losses and indebtedness to the banks, has come under the control of Robert Maxwell’s Pergamon Press. In the printing machine industry American and European markets are being invaded by the more modern and efficient products of a Japanese company.

So far the unions have been fairly successful in resisting new processes which mean loss of jobs, but in the long run they cannot escape capitalism’s inexorable law that companies which continue to make losses go out of business.

Edgar Hardcastle

Editorial: Shall We Mourn? (1922)

Editorial from the September 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard

On August 15th the newspapers displayed large headlines announcing the death of Lord Northcliffe, the newspaper magnate. It is an interesting sidelight on the sham hostilities of the papers, that those who were lately his bitter enemies—on paper !—are now deploring his loss as that of “a great national figure and a prince of journalists.”

Working men who ponder over the actions of such “great men” are not moved to deplore his loss. It is to them but the loss of one who has climbed upon their shoulders ; a member of the privileged class ; a staunch supporter of the evil that Capitalism signifies—the havoc of wars and the miseries of peace.

The daily Press, without exception, exists in the main, not merely to give news “calculated to attract at the moment the legitimate interest of a reasonable man or woman,” as one paper would have us believe, but to provide a source of income to the proprietors. In doing this, it endeavours to gloss over the worst features of Capitalism and keep the workers satisfied with the present system of wealth production, which brings ease and comfort to the propertied few, and overwork and misery to the property-less many.

A large slice of the revenue of a newspaper comes from advertisements. A paper that cannot command a large circle of advertisers stands little chance of surviving.

Broadly speaking, those who advertise in the newspapers (we are referring to large advertisers, of course) favour the paper having the largest circulation among those interested in such advertisers’ wares; at the same time, being Capitalists, they will fight shy of a paper publishing information likely to harm their enterprises. Consequently the proprietors of a newspaper have two points of prime importance to bear in mind in the conduct of their journals—to obtain as large a circulation as possible, and, at the same time, to avoid, if possible, publishing anything that may offend their advertisers. The importance of the latter point many an Editor has learnt to his cost.

From the above we can see what attitude a flourishing newspaper must of necessity take towards the workers. It must side with the masters in keeping the workers in servitude. The news we are favoured with is selected with this end in view, though the papers dare not keep back some matters without risking a fall in the circulation upon which largely depends the quantity and value of the advertisements received.

Lord Northcliffe was a successful newspaper proprietor because his papers were conducted with a careful eye to these points ; in other words, he was an enemy of the working class.

How much the Press is concerned about the workers is illustrated by the statement of one paper (Daily News, 15/8/22), which, in an editorial, makes the following reference to Northcliffe’s death :—

“Next to the war, it is probably the most important fact in the history of this generation.”

What a callous lie ! The most important fact in the history of this generation is the fact that hundreds of thousands—ay, millions—of human beings are dying of overwork and underfeeding in presence of wealth, and means of producing wealth, accumulated in quantities undreamt of in the world before. Beside this the death of a newspaper magnate sinks into insignificance.

The Daily News (15/8/22) whilst commenting on Northcliffe’s death, made the following significant remarks :—

  “His judgment of men was sound, with the result that he surrounded himself with a band of able colleagues and assistants, who did much to aid him in establishing and carrying on the manifold undertakings of which he was the founder.”

The above remarks may excuse us for making a little digression.

Turn, to the life of any of the so-called “Great Men” produced by Capitalism, and it will be found that the tale is nearly always similar; they climbed to wealth and fame by appropriating the product of other men’s brains.

In this connection two men in particular may be mentioned—Andrew Carnegie and Pierpont Morgan. Both acquired huge fortunes, and both accomplished this end by using the genius of others.

Carnegie, the “great” ironmaster, knew nothing of metallurgy, but employed those who did, and rose to affluence on the results of their genius. He successfully took the fruits of others’ toil from the time he got control of Woodruff’s invention of the embryonic Pullman car until his mills turned out steel made by the Bessemer process, the process discovered by a genius whose name is unknown.

Pierpont Morgan acquired much of his “fame” in connection with the organisation of combinations in the American railway industry. He is spoken of as having had a marvellous head for taking in the position of the affairs of a company almost at a glance. How did this “great” man do the trick? The following quotation from “The Life Story of J. Pierpont Morgan,” by Carl Hovey (Heinemann), gives the key :—

  “All credit for this series of railroad rehabilitations is by no means his alone ; to one of his partners—the late Charles H. Coster—was assigned the task of solving the intricate and interwoven relations of railroad obligations, bonds, underlying bonds, collateral trust mortgages, and every other artificial form of securing a loan—and determining the amount fairly represented by each. Coster was a kind of rare genius, a sort of financial chemist, and possessed a gift of analysis in this new and difficult field; it often happened, when everyone else was baffled, that he alone was able to lay before his chief solutions clear and sound, which made it possible for Mr. Morgan to go ahead with his plans for a new structure” (p. 233).

That is how the trick was done ! And that is the way the “prince of journalists” did the trick.

When the workers of the world own the product of their labours, there will be no need for one to steal the work of another. Each will take his part in the production of needful things, and each will share in the enjoyment of such things.

Media moguls and tabloid hacks are old news (2011)

From the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tabloids and ruthless reporters pre-date Murdoch’s era by many decades.

Rupert Murdoch and his sleazy crew of phone-hacking journalists are easy to hate. But even if Murdoch’s media empire crumbles, other media moguls and conglomerates will simply pick up the broken pieces. And tabloid reporters will continue to write titillating stories about celebrities and crime with or without recourse to phone hacking. Murdoch, of course, is hardly the first to build up a newspaper empire. One way to put the current scandal in some historical perspective, is to watch two classic Hollywood movies: Citizen Kane (1941) and Ace in the Hole (1951).

A Pre-Murdoch Mogul

In his film Citizen Kane, Orson Welles plays the role of newspaper owner Charles Foster Kane, who he models on the real-life tycoon William Randolph Hearst. The media empire that Hearst built, beginning in the late 19th century, bears more than a superficial resemblance to the present-day empire of Murdoch.

In the film we see the obscene amount of wealth and power concentrated in the hands of Kane and how he uses his network of newspapers to influence public opinion and politics, to the point of not only cheerleading for war (as Murdoch has often done) but even furnishing a casus belli for the Spanish-American War. Kane tells a correspondent, “You provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the war.”

Even the meddling of newspaper tycoons in politics seems, if anything, worse in the Hearst era as depicted in the film – or at least more blatant. Kane uses his newspapers to build up an image of himself as the people’s crusader, and then to launch his own political career, taking on the corrupt politician, Jim Gettys, in the gubernatorial election. His opponent is no chump when it comes to using the press either and beats Kane in the election by exposing his adulterous affair.

For all of its insights into the brutal reality of journalism, the film may give the profession more credit than it deserves. At times Welles seems to imply that Kane’s tragedy stems from his veering away from the muckraking journalism of his early years when he even exposed economic scandals that touched on his own business interests.

There is an interesting early scene in the movie where Kane, admitting that as a capitalist owner he is just another scoundrel, says his duty as a newspaperman is, “to see to it that decent hardworking people in this community aren’t robbed blind by a pack of money-mad pirates just because they haven’t anybody to look after their interests.” Kane thinks that the fact he has “money and property” makes it possible for him to play this role. And it is hard to tell whether Welles as director thinks that Kane could have looked after the interests of hardworking people, or whether he recognizes the absurdity of a man with “money and property” defending the interests of those who lack both.

Kane may not in fact be as split in two between good journalist and bad capitalist as he claims, for in the same scene he adds, “If I don’t look after the interests of the underprivileged maybe somebody else will, maybe someone without money and property.” This seems to imply that the split between Kane the stockowner and Kane the journalist corresponds to the difference between his narrow interests as an individual capitalist and his broader interests as member of the capitalist class—two different shades of greed. If this is a point Welles was trying to make, he was a bit too subtle for his own good.

Ironically, the campaign Hearst led to suppress Citizen Kane did more to expose the newspaper tycoon’s obscene influence on society than the film itself. Hearst did not succeed in physically destroying Welles’ film as he had tried to do, but he did use the full power of his newspapers and columnists to coerce movie theatres not to screen it.

A Wilder View of Things

The 1951 film Ace in the Hole, written and directed by Billy Wilder, centres on a character far lower on the journalistic food chain, the newspaper reporter Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas).

The film opens with Tatum arriving in Albuquerque, New Mexico and begging his way onto the staff of a local newspaper, The Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin. Tatum’s only hope at this stage in his career, after being fired from a string of newspaper jobs, is to chance upon some sensational story that will land him back at a big-city paper.

His opportunity finally arrives a year later when he is the first reporter to discover that a man, Leo Minosa, has been trapped inside an ancient Indian burial mound. Tatum is quick to realize that each day that Leo remains stuck is another day of exclusive reporting. To elbow out other tabloid sharks and drag out the rescue operation as long as possible, Tatum enlists the services of a corrupt sheriff up for re-election.

Tatum thus crosses the line between simply reporting a story and influencing how it plays out—all the while posing as Leo’s saviour and claiming, “I don’t make the news, I just report on it.” Tatum’s self-interested attitude disguised as compassion is no different from the outlook of today’s obnoxious reporters who feed on human tragedy.

Billy Wilder makes it perfectly clear that Tatum is no exception in the news racket by introducing other vicious journalists who almost make Tatum look decent by comparison. Tatum knows most of them by name from former jobs, and not one of them ever helped him when he was down on his luck. So when they plead, “Hey Chuck, we’re all in the same boat,” his icy response is that he is in the boat and they are in the water, “So let’s see if you can swim, buddies.”

Tatum knows the public’s appetite for “human interest” stories. He digs through the photo album of Leo Minosa to fashion a compelling profile and uses his skills as a writer to transform Leo’s estranged wife Lorraine into the picture of wifely fidelity because “that’s how the story reads best.”

Just as Tatum expects, the public eats up his story, even flocking to the site of the burial mound by the hundreds to take part in what has literally become a media circus, replete with amusement park rides and carnival performers. These onlookers are eager to believe that their own morbid curiosity and craving for entertainment actually constitute a sort of human compassion.

Wilder’s criticism cuts much deeper than the world of tabloid journalism and its readership. Tatum and the other reporters are not the only ones dazzled by money and power. There is Leo’s wife who wants to peddle enough hamburgers and Navajo rugs at her husband’s store to make her escape to New York, the young cameraman working with Tatum who is losing his innocence and dreaming of a world bigger than Albuquerque, the contractor beholden to the sheriff who agrees to the most time-consuming rescue method out of fear of losing his job, and all the carnies, musicians, and other riffraff who flock to the site to make a buck off the crowd. Even Leo, the victim, had gone into the cave in the first place to get his hands on some Native American relics to sell.

Money is the magic substance that brings together this crowd of strangers in the New Mexico desert, forming what a radio reporter there describes as a “new community” which has sprung up. But once the show is over and there is no more money to be made, this community dissolves in a matter of minutes. Leo’s “friends” take off in search of the next new thing, leaving behind his grieving parents.

Although minor characters, Leo’s parents are important: their love for their son contrasts sharply with the selfish and superficial human relations around them. In several scenes we see Mr Minosa refusing any payment from Tatum and others, mistaking them for his son’s saviours. And his devout wife is so lost in prayer for her son that she is almost oblivious to the obscene scramble for cash going on around her. Whenever Mr or Mrs Minosa enters a scene it immediately highlights how crass and downright bizarre the world of commerce is – a world where nothing is sacred, where everything and everyone has a price.

Setting the film in a part of the country where there are still traces of a pre-capitalist society is another way that Wilder makes our familiar money-centred world seem grotesque. The Native American rugs and pottery Leo had sold in his store were not originally commodities for the market but things for direct use or “sacred items” buried with the dead. What a remarkable contrast between that extinct society, where people had not been connected by money and the manic scenes of product peddling in the movie.

Tatum’s brand of journalism is perfectly suited to the money-mad society in which he lives. Wilder does present us with a character who might seem an alternative to Tatum: the upstanding owner of The Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin, Mr Boot, whose motto is “Tell the truth.” But Boot is only able to follow that motto by limiting his reporting to rather inconsequential local stories about soapbox derbies and rattlesnake hunts. When, later in the film, he says that he thinks the sheriff is corrupt and wants to expose him some day it does not sound convincing. A guy like Mr Boot has to stay in Albuquerque because he would not last a week in the cutthroat big-city newspaper business.

The films of Welles and Wilder and the past century of journalistic history are a warning to those who might think the end of Murdoch will mark some qualitative improvement in journalism. Take away Tatum, and another shark swims into his place: topple Kane’s empire, and another tycoon rises up. And the same will be true if Murdoch and his crew one day meet their demise. It is foolish to call for a reformed journalism but leave in place the profit motive that drives tabloid excesses.

Michael Schauerte