JN812 week 12, course conclusion

Channel 4’s Secret State

• Channel 4’s series Secret State Autumn 2012 offered an interesting departure from the stereotypical image of the sleazy hack

• Ellis Kane is a serious female investigative journalist. She’s freelance so not beholden to any newspaper proprietor and, in the words of Prime Minister Tom Dawkins she’s ‘One of the Good Guys’

• Ellis Kane is an old-fashioned reporter, ploughing through documents to get the truth

• Is neither glamorous nor scruffy, but measured and professional; rather like Cameron Colley in Complicity, Mattie Storrin in House of Cards and Nick Mullen in Defence of the Realm she initially gets on the wrong story thanks to a ‘deep throat’ but then finds the right one and pursues it, at considerable personal risk

• The message of the series – which comes out far more clearly than the 1983 novel A Very British Coup that it is based on – is that we still need journalists to shine a light in dark places. Ultimately the corporate coup works, but Ellis Kane’s story still gets out.

Image

Russell Crowe’s Cal in State of Play• Extracts from interview with director Kevin Macdonald:• ‘It’s an interesting time. Newspapers are dying throughout the world, and what it will

be like when there are no more reporters running around is interesting to contemplate

• ‘All the President’s Men was the highwater mark of idealism in journalism. The newsroom in that film was all crisp, clean and modern. Ours was a similar space, but 35 years on when nobody’s tidied up.’

• Abbott’s [BBC] series was only incidentally about journalism. The film is all about journalism

• ‘It’s a conflict between blogging and old-fashioned print journalism’• Macdonald makes the central relationship in the film the one between Cal and Della

Frye• ‘Della is all sharp suits, laptops and Blackberries; Cal is all crumpled rags and scraps of

paper. The threat of sharp-suited bloggery and the internet to real, grubby journalism is at the heart of the drama.’

• Handout: Bryan Appleyard’s interview with Kevin Macdonald

Quotes from State of Play• Cal to Della: “This is a real story, not open to interpretation. It does not require an

opinion.”• Editor of Della: “She’s hungry, she’s cheap and she turns out copy every hour.”• Cal to Della: “I’m just trying to help you get a few facts in the mix next time you

decide to upchuck online.”• Della: “Did we just break the law?” Cal: “No, that’s what I call damn fine

reporting.”• Editor: “Our new owners have this odd idea that we ought to be turning a profit.”• Della to Cal (who has just asked her why she isn’t blogging their scoop) “With news

this big, people should probably have print on their hands when they read it.”• Cal to Collins: “In the middle of all this gossip and speculation that permeates

people’s lives, I still think they know what’s real news and bullshit and they’re glad that someone cares enough to get things on the record and print the truth.”

• Clips: first 20 mins• Then scene 19 from bullshit speech to closing credits

What State of Play and Secret State have in common

• Both films made in the post-crash economy. • Instead of the conventional ‘manufacture of consent’

idea that journalists cosy up to politicians to protect the interests of the elite, in both these, journalists work with politicians to expose the secret network of banks and big business that want to run our democracies.

• Both present an idealistic and nostalgic view of ‘Fourth Estate’ journalism; other recent films such as George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck and The Soloist starring Robert Downey Jnr play on the romantic side of journalism.

Enquirer, 2012• A National Theatre of Scotland production in 2012, Enquirer poses

the question: ‘Are we seeing the dying days of the newspaper industry?’ and archives the opinions of 45 newspaper journalists meditating on their trade. John Tiffany, associate director of the National Theatre of Scotland explained the impetus behind the project: ‘Before we drown in some festival of tears abut the exploits of a few terrible hacks, corrupt editors, and cynical proprietors, let us hold on to that greater tradition…journalism is one of the parents of democracy and it needs looking after so that it can look after us’.

• (Tiffany, John ‘Newspapers are in crisis. But just what have we lost – and what can be saved’ Observer October 7 2012: 29; handout)

Images from the production

Conclusion

• As in the inter-war years, another period when journalistic standards were a subject of intense anxiety, producers of fiction are today subjecting journalism to scrutiny. Now the issue however is not the newspaper ‘Enemy’ (Day Lewis, 1933) threatening the producer of literature, or the ‘perverters of language’ (Pound, 1924) undermining the authority of the written word. Cultural producers are, with dismay, pondering the death of the newspaper itself--a truly literary production and saviour of expressive language by comparison with what appears to be its digital assassin.

Conclusion contd

• For all the criticism levelled at the popular press by early twentieth century writers, it only takes a cursory comparison between popular newspapers of the first four decades of the twentieth century and today, to conclude that earlier papers were of a far higher standard, in terms of ‘news’ subject matter, prose-style and literary and cultural content. With today’s literary classes having removed themselves from the pages of popular newspapers – where can we find today’s equivalent of Rose Macaulay, J B Priestley, Storm Jameson and Evelyn Waugh writing in twenty first century tabloids? – Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote ‘our critics are our best friends, they show us our faults’ comes to mind.

Fiction versus journalism• This study could be seen in terms of writers versus journalists, or

producers of fiction versus journalists. We then need to ask, why in some periods and genres are portrayals positive (eg most Edwardian novels and many American films) and others (eg most inter-war fiction) hostile?

• Was it because the behaviour of journalists was more terrible in some periods than others, or that producers of fiction have felt at times more threatened by newspapers and thus reacted aggressively towards journalists and the press in their creative work? Are these almost nostalgic, idealised portrayals of 2009 – 12 a reaction to the idea that soon the newspaper won’t be around any more? Certainly the last two were made during the Leveson hearings yet are choosing to ignore press bad behaviour.

Novelists and newspapers

• When T H S Escott warned in 1917 that journalism had lost its precious links with literature, he identified the end of a long and productive relationship. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, journalism and literature were two parts of the same discipline of ‘letters’, contributing to the ‘thousand streams’ that irrigated society and both were practised by such great names as Swift, Defoe, Coleridge, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope and George Eliot. Novelists of this period often began their careers in journalism, and learned much from the discipline of observing from life.

Dallas Liddle

• Liddle (2007 and 2009) argues that the sudden proliferation of literary representations of journalists and the Press in the mid-nineteenth century (for example Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1853 – 56), Thackeray’s Pendennis (1848 – 50), Trollope’s The Warden (1855) and Conybeare’s Perversion (1856) was because at that particular moment in British history, there were enormous opportunities for writers in journalism, particularly periodical writing, and a sharp rise in newspaper and periodical circulations after the removal of Stamp Duty. As a result, ‘British periodical discourse seemed to have achieved an unprecedented degree of cultural importance’

Liddle contd• Journalism was part of a broader cultural conversation in which all

mid-Victorian writers participated, ‘and as a matter of economic necessity…most mid-century novelists and poets were…also journalists’. He reads many mid-nineteenth century fictions featuring journalists as attempts by fictional genres ‘to analyze (sic) competing genres’, that is, journalistic ones. The inter-war period, when many writers took newspaper commissions yet wrote novels containing criticisms of newspapers, appears to be a similar moment of tension.

• Paper shortages and financial crises meant that poets and novelists were competing for markets with newspapers – many of whom published short stories anyway. Why if you could buy the Daily Mail for one penny, with articles by Evelyn Waugh, Arnold Bennett and other writers, would you pay 7/6 for a novel?

Film

• Film makers don’t see newspapers threatening their market the way novelists and poets did.

• In fact, with reviews, interviews with stars and general educative role, newspapers are complementary to what film makers do.

• Serious film makers like Kevin Macdonald would rather have a culturally literate audience, otherwise they wouldn’t go and see his films but would just watch blockbusters.

Similarly Edwardian era

• Characterised by an explosion in literacy• More novels sold than at any time before then• Journalism wasn’t a threat to literature – it may even

enhance it by encouraging the ‘reading habit’ in whole tranches of classes that had previously never read

• Mass popular newspapers were in their infancy and had not committed the atrocities they would later commit

• Is that why our period under review is topped and tailed, for different reasons, with positive images of journalists?