Final Society of Editors’ Keynote Speech

Sunday 4th November 2018

SUNDAY 4 NOVEMBER

Ian, Ladies and Gentlemen,

It was 10 years ago this week that I made my last speech to the

Society of Editors annual conference. And what a tumultuous –

and, in many cases, distressing – decade it has been for all of us

here tonight.

In those years, two newspapers have closed, the right-wing Daily

Express and left-wing Daily Mirror have become corporate bed

mates and national daily newspaper sales have halved – I repeat

halved – down from just under 11 million copies a day to 5.4

million.

National Sunday newspapers have fared even worse falling from

11.5 million to 4.8 million. Meanwhile, more than 200 local papers

have closed.

And yet, we’re here still, still punching way above our weight. Still

setting the news agenda for the broadcasters, who rarely miss a

chance to denigrate our industry.

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Yes, still here. Still causing trouble and controversy. Still

infuriating politicians, mandarins, quangocrats, local authorities

and, of course, the rich and powerful who, as we’ve recently seen,

are still being aided and abetted by a judiciary that, sadly, doesn’t

seem to understand the pure silliness of granting gagging

injunctions in a digital age.

Two great issues, I would suggest, have dominated – tortured

might a better word – the minds of our industry over the decade.

First, the internet. Relentlessly, its algorithms plunder our hard

earned journalism and advertising. Relentlessly, we’re told how –

in that hackneyed cliché du jour – it poses “an existential threat”

to our industry.

Academics flounder as they attempt to define what constitutes

news and journalism in a digital age while in the real world

newspaper reporters carry on doing the real work of trying to tell

the truth and sometimes dying for it.

The other great issue of the past decade has been the Leveson

Inquiry – that massive misjudgement and over-reaction by a

Prime Minister trying to save his skin after his insistence, against

all advice, on taking a crooked, disgraced News of the World

Editor to No 10 as his media adviser.

Today, it is not fanciful to suggest that Leveson – in which an

entire industry was judged guilty and had to prove its innocence –

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was a calculated attempt by the Establishment to control the one

sector of the media it couldn’t regulate either through licence or

statutory body: a bloody-minded and occasionally profoundly

irresponsible newspaper industry.

Nor is it fanciful to suggest this was pay-back time. Pay-back by

a political class badly scalded in the expenses imbroglio. Pay-

back by an increasingly politicised Whitehall constantly assailed

by the press for its incompetence and unaccountability.

And pay-back by a newly activist judiciary smarting over constant

press attacks on their often controversial interpretations of the

Human Rights Act prompting charges that judges, not Parliament,

were creating a privacy law.

Now, let’s not forget that one of Leveson’s proposals to deal with

the press was to involve OFCOM – a crass idea that was rightly

quickly rejected by the politicians.

But his most controversial recommendation was that a form of

extortion be used to force us to sign-up to what was effectively

statutory regulation.

The notion that newspapers, which didn’t comply, would be forced

to pay exemplary damages if they lost a libel action and faced

paying the other side’s costs even if they won was, in retrospect,

a preposterous inversion of justice and I never imagined I would

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live in a country where the Second Chamber would back such

nonsense.

But the greatest indictment of Leveson – whose remit the Prime

Minister told the House would include broadcasting and social

media – was that he devoted just 14 out of the 2,000 pages in his

report to the internet.

Now, it is truism that generals and politicians always fight the last

war. So do judges…

Leveson, fixated by the press, and like so many of his ilk, out of

touch with the real world, seemed oblivious to the fact that the

newspaper industry – which for centuries had played a significant

part in our democratic process and was already subject to 50 bits

of law affecting media freedom – was terminally ill.

Its very life blood was being sucked out by an utterly unregulated,

defiantly anarchic, arrogantly unaccountable, awesomely

ubiquitous digital monster which regarded itself as above the law,

churned out fake news, tried to rig elections, invaded citizens’

privacy on a cosmic scale, provided succour to terrorists and

paedophiles, devastated our high streets, and, oh yes, made

billions but paid barely any taxes.

In his book, Breaking News, the former Guardian Editor, Alan

Rusbridger, describes in homeric terms, his and his reporter Nick

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Davies’s role in exposing phone hacking which he declares was

our industry’s Enron, our Volkswagen, our sub-prime crisis.

But is that fair?

Countless people didn’t lose their life savings because of the

News of the World. Thousands didn’t die prematurely from diesel

fumes because of the Sunday Mirror. And Britain didn’t suffer

eight years of financial distress because of the Sun.

Now let’s be unequivocal: phone hacking, though restricted to

only two newspaper groups, shamed our whole industry. It was

disgusting, immoral and unethical.

But more than anything, phone hacking was illegal. It should

have been dealt with forcibly by the police and the fact that it

wasn’t is, I have always believed, far more worrying than the

criminality itself.

But hacking, terrible as it was, was not a reason to jettison press

freedom. Nor was it a reason to justify the drip, drip, drip

denigration of the British press, that is still so prevalent in the

liberal media today.

I have referred before to my school English master’s loathing of

one of my favourite authors, Graham Greene. “If Greene saw a

lamp post”, he would declare, referring to the Catholic writer’s

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obsession with sin and fallen man, “he would only see the dog dirt

at the base and not the illuminating light at the top.”

And today, one of the greatest problems we have in restoring trust

is that when it comes to the mainstream press, the liberal Brexit-

hating media – and, let’s be frank, in their eyes, the Referendum

result was further proof of the malignancy of euro-sceptic

newspapers – only ever see the bottom of the lamp post and

remain determinedly, and I would say self-interestedly, oblivious

to the good newspapers do.

Now, giving the Hugh Cudlipp Lecture some years ago, I outlined

the dangers of what I dubbed the “subsidariat”: that section of the

media which seems to take great pride in being economically

unviable – the vast BBC with its compulsory licence, the Guardian

with its bottomless Scott Trust coffers, and the Independent with

its ex KGB boss’s billions.

Freed from the obligation of having to connect with enough

consumers to turn a shilling, such media organisations lose

contact with the real world, and have little idea how money works

(and, indeed, are suspicious of profit). Often hijacked by

ideologues, invariably from the Left, they almost always regard

with contempt the mass selling papers which need to appeal to

large audiences in order to survive commercially.

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Today, with the contraction of print, that subsidariat is more

powerful than ever.

And an exquisitely telling insight into its mindset – and its

obsession with the bottom of Fleet Street’s lamp post – is

provided by Alan Rusbridger’s just published memoir.

Now much of the book is a thoughtful, if somewhat prolix, analysis

of the tectonic changes – some exciting, others deeply disturbing

– that the internet is effecting on journalism.

But its real message – and how insidiously it drips through the

pages – is that virtually every national newspaper in Britain is

scurrilous, corrupt and amoral with one iridescent exception. Yes,

you’ve guessed it …The Guardian.

Now Alan is a very gifted journalist with huge achievements to his

name – achievements, incidentally that he’s not reluctant to dwell

on. So how sad that the defining tone of this tome is sanctimony

and self-justification.

Unedifyingly, it manages to combine rather cloying self-

glorification and moral superiority with an almost visceral

contempt of and disdain for the rest of the press.

A somewhat chilling lack of self - awareness fuses with a hyper-

sensitivity to the flaws of others. Indeed, its sine qua non is that

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only Alan and the Guardian are capable of producing what he

calls “worthwhile” journalism.

And before you say “play the ball – not the man”, you should

know that this book contains some of the most unpleasant ad

hominem attacks on individuals that I have ever read in a work

about Fleet Street.

In it, the red tops have a business model based on invading

people’s privacy and are beyond redemption.

For the Mail’s journalism there is a sliver of begrudging respect,

but the paper itself and I are beyond the pale.

But it saves its real venom for the Telegraph which, with its

blurring of the boundaries between editorial and advertising, did,

at one stage, behave deplorably, but I suspect for Alan its real sin

is to be a quality paper that actually makes good profits.

Inevitably, Rupert Murdoch is the devil incarnate.

But what a pity that the book can’t summon the generosity to

admit that the Times today is an excellent, highly respected,

profitable serious paper. More pertinently, its subscription

package seems to have cracked the internet conundrum –

something the Guardian has so conspicuously failed to do.

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But then the book is a masterclass in the art of sly omissions.

It makes much of the author’s heroic courage in defeating

Jonathan Aitken in a libel court while virtually ignoring the fact that

it was relentless work by Peter Preston’s Guardian that broke the

original story.

It delights in letting us know that Preston anointed Alan as his

successor but fails to reveal that the younger man then conspired

to oust as Editor-in-Chief his former boss – a giant of our trade

who, in 400 odd pages, gets scant mention, as does Kath Viner,

Alan’s successor.

In the same mean-spiritedness, it fails to give a single mention to

Roger Alton, one of the architects of the brilliantly innovative G2

supplement and editor for ten years of a courageous and creative

Observer, the Guardian’s stablemate that punched way above its

weight.

It dwells at huge length on the Barclay brothers’ off-shore tax

arrangements but, oh dear, only makes a glancing mention of the

Guardian Group’s own use of tax avoidance schemes in tiny 6

point type in notes at the back of the book.

It glories in the Pulitzer Prize given to the Guardian for its Edward

Snowden coverage but fails to mention in the text that it was

shared with the Washington Post.

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And, of course, while it devotes pages to justifying publishing the

Snowden revelations, fails to mention that the Prime Minister, the

Home Secretary, the leader of the Liberal Democrat party, a

former Labour Foreign Secretary, a Minister of State for Security

and the Deputy National Security Adviser all publicly deplored the

damage that this had done to Britain’s intelligence capabilities.

Indeed, it is over Snowden that the book is most agitated with the

Mail, a paper that, incidentally, loudly opposed extraordinary

rendition, Guantanamo Bay and the Iraq War.

The Mail’s offence is that it had dared to criticise the Guardian’s

recklessness in publishing such sensitive intelligence information

in an age when ISIS and Russian spies were to murder citizens

on the streets of Britain.

What Alan – who betrays flashes of paranoia in this book – seems

incapable of understanding, is that the Mail took a principled

stand, one that had the support of our leader writers, our top

commentators Max Hastings and Stephen Glover and,

incidentally, of other editors and columnists.

It had nothing to do with a vendetta against the Guardian.

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Yet what seems to have shocked the Guardian most is that the

Mail broke the Fleet Street convention that dog doesn’t bite dog.

Ye Gods! This from a paper that over nearly two decades rarely

missed a day to flick vitriol over my and other Fleet Street papers.

But, of course, this memoir’s greatest omission is that it ignores

one of the most fascinating media stories of the past few years:

how a dramatic putsch by an utterly demoralised staff, deposed

an incoming Scott Trust Chairman after the once-profitable

Guardian had been reduced to an economic basket case, by

vanity, hubris and eye-watering financial misjudgement.

That Chairman, of course, was Alan but in his book he is eerily

silent on all this. Nor does he begin to explain why, at the very

time when, to use his own words, “printed newspapers were on a

perilous slide to eventual oblivion”, the Guardian took the

economically insane decision to move into lavish state-of-the-art

offices – complete with specially designed bespoke desks – and

to buy expensive new presses when a diminishing newspaper

industry was awash with cheap, spare, rentable, printing capacity.

Was the reason for the latter, perhaps, that the Guardian, piqued

at the Independent stealing a march on it by becoming Britain’s so

called first quality tabloid, had to go one better with the slightly

larger size Berliner?

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And, as its balance sheets dripped with red ink, was it perhaps

hubris that persuaded Guardian Online, with no plausible

business or journalistic model, to expand so recklessly and

expensively into America, a country already awash with great

liberal papers and media outlets?

The result of this madness quickly became all too apparent.

Hundreds of millions of pounds down the plug hole! Countless

brilliant journalists made redundant! And those Berliner presses?

Ignominiously ditched after a few years as the paper was forced

to reduce its size in order to rent cheaper printing!

So there you are! What a cautionary saga! And what a flesh and

blood rendition of the belief – so endemic at the BBC and in much

of the British public sector – that money grows on trees.

And this cuts to the quick of the dangers of a subsidariat that is

out of touch with the real world and its financial exigencies.

How can a newspaper, that has shown such profligacy, be

editorially objective about the financial activities of the City or the

State, or the NHS or local authorities?

How, when it has been so financially feckless itself, can it call for

ever more state spending or question a government’s need to

balance the nation’s books?

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These are serious questions.

It’s the country’s worst kept secret that the Guardian is the in-

house newspaper of the BBC, that subsidised behemoth.

If the Corporation, Britain’s main news provider and its thousands

of journalists – far more than employed by Fleet Street – hold the

same financially irresponsible views as its in-house crib sheet,

then Britain has a huge problem if it is ever going to return to

economic solvency.

No, this sad tragi-comedy should be a text book case for

journalism schools on how not to do things. It should be a primer

on the dangers of merging Church and State, Editorial and

Managerial, in newspapers and of allowing an Editor who will

always want to expand the journalism to also have the powers of

a Chief Executive who should always be responsible for

controlling costs.

The two roles are mutually incompatible and I would suggest that

a pusillanimous, weak and naïve Scott Trust should never have

allowed such a conflict of interest or one man to hold such power.

But, of course, none of this will figure in journalism courses. The

mainly left-wing Professors of Journalism – is there, by the way, a

more ludicrous subject for academic study – will order box loads

of this book to demonstrate to their students how appalling Fleet

Street is.

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Meanwhile, they’ll continue to churn out graduates for non-

existent jobs which is why so many idealistic youngsters end up

disillusioned and working in public relations, leaving us with a

Britain where there are now more PRs than journalists – another

depressing and insidious contribution to the democratic deficit.

And today, my heart bleeds for those dedicated young journalists

who were lucky enough to get jobs, yet are being denied, by our

industry’s belt tightening, the opportunities I enjoyed.

Which makes me realise how very lucky I’ve been. You know I’ve

had a fabulously privileged life in journalism. Yes technology has

transformed our industry but to my dying day, I shall remember

the pots of bubbling lead, the clatter of linotype machines and the

printers’ ink-stained fingers as I watched my first news story being

set on the stone in the bowels of the Manchester Daily Express in

the seventies when the paper sold 3½ million copies.

I cut my journalistic teeth in Belfast at the height of the troubles. I

spent six glorious years as a Washington and New York

correspondent. I have dined at top tables on both sides of the

Atlantic, had a front row seat at some great moments in history

and worked with some of the most brilliant journalists of my

generation.

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So sorry Alan, I’m proud of having worked all my life in Fleet

Street as did my father before me.

I’m proud of editing a paper for 26 years, that didn’t hack phones,

kept rigid boundaries between Editorial and Advertising, and, with

a brilliant management team, made billions in profits enabling me

to employ superb journalists, commission costly investigations

and launch new products like Metro and Mail Online, creating

countless new jobs for journalists.

I’m proud of having worked for the Rothermere family who, while

often disagreeing with my views, granted me that inestimable gift

– the freedom to edit without interference – thus giving the lie to

Alan’s repeated claim that, apart from the Guardian, newspapers

are used by ruthless proprietors who dictate editorial policy for

their own ends.

I’m proud of the way the Mail has held power to account, leading

the charge against greedy bankers and the Sir Shifties of this

world. I’m proud of the way that the Mail operated without fear or

favour and was often as critical of Tory as Labour politicians.

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I‘m inordinately proud of the Mail’s countless great campaigns:

Dignity for the Elderly… Stephen Lawrence… Plastic bags…

MRSA … Sepsis… Prostate cancer… Omagh bomb victims…

Iraqi translators… Guantanamo Bay inmates… Liverpool Care

Pathway… Fixed odds betting machines… Marine A… and many,

many, many more that prove you don’t need to make a loss to

produce worthy journalism.

I’m also proud of the rest of Fleet Street.

Yes, the Telegraph made mistakes but it’s still a fine paper with

brave investigations and some of the best commentators in the

business.

I am also proud that the Times is now such a first-rate paper and,

incidentally, the Wall Street Journal is immeasurably better since

Murdoch paid through the nose to acquire it.

And, yes, I’m proud of the Guardian which, when Alan was a fully

engaged editor rather than a visionary business strategist, was a

great paper and is still a great and important paper as its new

editor – if I may be politically incorrect – struggles manfully, to

restore economic coherence.

And I’m proud of the red tops, the Mirror’s rumbustious

campaigns and its loyalty to Labour and the Sun’s anarchic, bad-

mannered irreverence for the Establishment.

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Both papers employ gifted, highly creative and empathetic

journalists who possess considerable skills – skills that should not

be allowed to die out – in using words, pictures and headlines to

tell complex stories in simple eye-grabbing ways.

And, as I speak in what still is a great newspaper city, I’m hugely

proud of the regional and local press whose journalists heroically

work long hours for risibly little reward as they fight against the

odds to represent their communities. The closest to their

readerships of all Britain’s media, they are the country’s true

popular newspapers.

Yes, all these papers sometimes make mistakes but they are

sustained by dedicated journalists who care deeply about getting

it right and doing good by their readers whatever the zealots of

Hacked Off and the Priapic Three – Messrs Coogan, Grant and

Mosley – might say.

And we should remember that Fleet Street papers have always

been owned by rogues. Beaverbrook was a pretty rackety

character but Arthur Christiansen’s Daily Express was the world’s

best middle-brow paper.

Conrad Black was a shyster but his Telegraph was a first class

paper. Robert Maxwell was an egregious conman but his Mirror

was still a force for good.

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And Alexander Lebedev once worked for the KGB but his

Independent was a fine paper and an elegant voice for liberal

values.

And, of course, there are rogues on the other side. One-time

Maxwell henchman, Roy Greenslade, Editor of the Mirror during

the “Spot the Ball” game scam, has reinvented himself as a

Professor of Journalism. That such a mountebank teaches ethics

is a satirical commentary on academia that the combined talents

of Jonathan Swift and Evelyn Waugh would struggle to do justice

to.

Now I’m not defending these proprietors but I am saying that they

are a fact of life – as is the fact that Britain, unlike other countries,

still has a richly pluralistic and immensely vigorous free press.

Above all, we should never forget that press freedom means the

freedom to get it right and the freedom to get it wrong. The

freedom to do great things and, in the exhaustion of producing

100 page papers six days a week, the freedom to make mistakes.

I don’t agree with the Guardian’s decision to publish Snowden

who now skulks in the murderous kleptocracy that is Russia. The

man was a traitor who should have been arrested and not

sanctified.

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But I also passionately believe the Guardian must have the

freedom to carry such stories. The sadness is that Alan cannot

see that the Sun should have the freedom to write about the love

lives of celebrities and footballers who are of such interest to their

readers. In order to act in the public interest, they need to interest

the public.

Equally, the Mail should have the freedom to write a headline

about judges being the enemy of the people. The title of an Ibsen

play, it was meant to be a distillation of the views of Brexit MPs

angry that the High Court was becoming involved in the political

process. In retrospect, the Telegraph’s banner “The Judges

Versus The People” was, to coin a phrase, a tad more judicious.

But what the hell. The point needed to be made. And it was the

Mail’s headline, not the almost identical Telegraph one, that, as

happens so often, put an issue on the agenda.

And I just hope that their Lordships’ bruised feelings are soothed

by the £60,000 pay rise they are in line to collect.

But then one of the growing themes of our age is the ever

widening gap between the liberalism of the West’s ruling classes

and the social conservatism of the majority of the voters.

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One aspect of this in the British media has been the emergence

of the Metropolitan Echo Chamber, dominated by the

broadcasters, in which politicians, commentators, reporters and

opinion formers – all gloriously liberal and politically correct – talk

only to each other. The result is often a febrile, hyperbolic,

hysterical journalism of a kind that is unprecedented in my lifetime

and I worry that it is not a healthy development.

In Westminster, the Echo Chamber has decided that Brexit is

doomed and that the terminally incompetent Theresa May is toast

which is why the last rites are gleefully read over her every other

day. Earlier this month, she was pronounced so dead that I’m

surprised she was able to get up in the morning.

She is, of course, still here and will, I predict, take the Tories into

the next election.

But the problem with the Echo Chamber is that its inhabitants

increasingly haven’t a clue what real people in Britain, outside the

M25, are thinking.

I’ll tell you what those people aren’t talking about. They aren’t

obsessing about the “Me Too” movement or Transgender rights or

equal pay for BBC women journalists. And they do actually rather

like Mrs May whom they think is a decent woman trying to do her

best in very difficult circumstances.

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It is, of course, because the inhabitants of the Echo Chamber only

talk to each other, that the Referendum result came as such a

seismic shock to them unlike Britain’s popular newspapers which,

I suggest, because they have to live in the real world, are much

closer to their readers’ thinking.

And if I am right about this growing gap between the rulers and

the ruled, there will be increasing opportunities for Britain’s

popular press – speaking, as it does, for a majority that is

disenfranchised by the values of the political class and the BBC.

And while I don’t go as far as James Murdoch in saying that “The

only reliable, durable and perpetual guarantor of independence is

profit”, I do believe that the necessity for newspapers to be

commercially viable sharpens their understanding of their readers’

anxieties and aspirations. And for the damage that subsidy can

inflict, look no further than the sorry state of a French press that is

dependent on government hand-outs.

So, yes, there are signs of hope and, if you’ll forgive the

presumption, I’ll look into my crystal ball and make four quick

predictions for you…

ONE: The BBC subsidariat will diminish in power as the streaming

giants undermine the licence fee. And because nature abhors a

vacuum, a right-of-centre TV network will one day take root in this

country.

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TWO: The internet giants will be regulated and, after all, why

shouldn’t the juggernauts have the same responsibilities as

newspapers. But the ultimate solution – as with the oil barons in

the last century – is to break them up. Their monopolistic power

is too great and that fundamental human characteristic – the need

for privacy against the industrial scale theft of our data – will

reassert itself.

THREE: There will be a turning away from algorithm created

news in favour of authentic, regulated, curated journalism, both

online and in print, that is created by brilliant minds that love

pictures, headlines and words and possess extraordinary

empathy with their readers.

FOUR: Newspapers will have a longer future than the Jeremiahs

predict which is why I worry that there is a danger that repeated

morbid predictions of our death will become self-fulfilling.

Of one thing I am absolutely certain: man’s hunger for news,

information, analysis and, yes, sensation and gossip, is as old as

time itself.

So there. I’ve stuck my neck out and, indeed, with the Guardian,

put it on the block.

Well, frankly, my dears, I don’t give a damn.

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What I do care about is the future of newspapers and how we

improve our image when so many self-interested people seem

determined to bang nails into the collective coffin that is Britain’s

hat image and, yes, confess that we make mistakes but also do

much good which, more often than not, shines a light from the top

of the lamp post and makes the world a better place.