Then one day in 1984 the awful figure of Robert Maxwell wrote out a cheque for £100 million and bought the whole enterprise. He called me and John Pilger up. We thought we were going to be sacked. Maxwell promised that he wouldn’t interfere with anything we wrote. I replied that was an academic question, because if he did, I wouldn’t go on. He called me a ‘space imperialist’; he couldn’t bear the thought of anyone controlling anything he owned. I wasn’t afraid of being sacked – I didn’t have much to lose. I put up a list of his friends in the office, which was an invitation to other journalists to attack them, though we had to be sure of the facts because they always phoned Maxwell to complain.
I held onto the column for seven years under Maxwell, with the backing of the editors. Maxwell died in 1991, and from November 1991 to October 1992 we had real halcyon days without any management or proprietor. For the first time we gained in circulation on the Sun. Everything worked very well, but it was in contradiction to the rules of capitalist society, so they had to smash it up. Significantly, on the day of the big march against pit closures they moved. Most unions in the print industry were wiped out in 1986, but an active NUJ chapel at the Mirror had survived, even managing to avert threatened redundancies through a sit-in. They brought David Montgomery in from Murdoch’s stable with the sole intention of smashing the unions and the whole culture we had built up. The editors were sacked and replaced with clones. We hung on for six months because they didn’t dare sack me, but it became impossible. I left by publishing a column exposing what was going on, called Look in the Mirror, which got some publicity. Paul Foot, article ‘Tribune of the People’
In 1961, the TUC sold out. When IPC took over Odhams, it also took over the Herald completely. The paper continued to decline.
In 1964 it was re-named the Sun and rejigged to get rid of its ‘cloth cap’ image. It lost its working class readers too. Finally, in 1969, the Sun was sold to Rupert Murdoch, who has turned it into mass-circulation pornography. Paul Foot, article September 1973, ‘How the TUC Killed Workers’ Paper’
The wretched history of the Daily Herald since its takeover by the TUC 50 years ago proves how self-destructive is reformist, social democratic propaganda. A workers’ paper is useless unless its propaganda is backed and enriched by organisation and agitation. Unless workers see their paper as a guide to action and organisation as well as arguments against the Tories and their system, the paper is bound to lose out to the big battalions. ibid.
Horrified by disclosures in the newspapers about David Mellor and an actress, not to mention pictures of a near-naked Duchess of York, the government has resolved to ‘do something’ about the excesses of the press. The job itself has been farmed out to the Ministry of Heritage where the Secretary of State (and the man who masterminded John Major’s campaign for the Tory leadership) was the aforesaid David Mellor.
This has caused some embarrassment so the new ‘Privacy Bill’ (or whatever else it is called) has been passed over to Mellor’s junior, an apparently ‘safe’ gentleman from the shires called Robert Key. As Key drafts his bill, he gets plenty of helpful advice from the Labour Party, whose front-bencher on these matters, Clive Soley, is writing his own bill to protect the general public from the ravages of the gutter press. Soley makes it clear that his aim is not the same as that of the government. Their bill will protect only the rich and famous; his bill will concentrate on protecting ordinary folk who are treated by the media like dirt.
All these efforts are widely supported almost everywhere. Everyone hates the tabloid newspapers, especially the 12 million people who buy them every day. The capitalist press is rotten and corrupt. It breeds a specially nasty type of human rottweiler whose peculiar quality is to be as offensive as possible to anyone at all who might in some way assist towards ‘a good story’.
It is this offensive behaviour – bursting into peoples’ houses to seize photographs of dead relatives; making up quotations; tapping phones, half-kidnapping children and generally trampling over people, that earns for editors and journalists such universal contempt. It seems obvious that the media do have too much power and that the more preposterous manifestations of that power need to be cut down by law.
But what law? As soon as detailed proposals start to be spelt out, the doubts arise. Consider a law to protect privacy. Would it ban any photograph which had not been taken by permission? How would that apply to some of the great pictures – action pictures such as the man defying the tank in Tiananmen Square, or (from the sublime to the ridiculous) pictures of Fergie prancing with her financial adviser in a rich man’s garden? If no photographs are to be published unless they are taken with permission, the whole world would be a duller place. Certainly, the high and mighty (especially royalty) would much easier be able to maintain the consistency of their family values. If such a law is accompanied by a rider insisting that any without permission pictures be ‘in the public interest’, the question arises at once ‘what is in the public interest?’ ...
But a law to curb the press will not work just one way, just against the moguls and the proprietors. It will work far more savagely against openly challenging and revolutionary papers like this one, and will even further restrict the few independent journalists who attempt to rip the veil away from the secret state and its paymasters.
Can anything, therefore, be done about the vile standards and offensive behaviour of the media? Of course. These matters should be the permanent concern of the workers who work in the media and of those who read and watch the media. They should be discussed and acted on where discussion and action can have some effect.
The trade unions in the media have always given far too low a priority to the content of what they produce. The ridiculously named Ethics Committee of the National Union of Journalists makes itself a permanent laughing stock by sitting in moral judgement over individual journalists, and castigating them for their transgressions. The unions in the media should combine to set up their own standards committee. They should appoint to it people whose judgements would have a wide measure of respect. Where they find against the media they should direct their fire on the people responsible – the proprietors – and punish them where they hurt most, in the pocket. Paul Foot, article October 1992, ‘Press Private Parts’
In devilish dreams the horror show of deep-frozen Saturday nights fronting the gates of Hades at Murdoch’s Wapping. Snorting leviathan lorries smashing down the hill at the barbed wire and the purple-faced protesters, rage-red front covers of The Sun flapping like pirate flags in the windscreens. Bobby-boys in blue finger tenderly their bully-sticks. esias
Biggs escaped. For ten years police hunted the world for Biggs but it was an unknown journalist who tracked him down. Ronnie Biggs: Secret Tapes, Channel 5 2011
One of the great newspaper scoops that never was. ibid.
The two became good friends. ibid.
Vito Corleone Feared Murdered. The Godfather 1972 starring Marlon Brando & Al Pacino & James Caan & Richard S Castellano & Richard Duvall & Sterling Hayden & John Marley & Richard Conte & Diane Keaton et al, director Francis Ford Coppola, Daily Mirror front page
I know that after Vietnam the British government had a very close look at the effect that the presence of television cameras [had] on the battlefield, and the free reporting – the newspaper reporting – of a war could have on the aims of the government in that war. Phillip Knightley, author The First Casualty
Japan may strike over the weekend. Hilo Tribune Herald, Sunday 30th November 1941
The year is 1917 and representative Oscar Calloway enters a disturbing statement into the US Congressional record. The statement reveals why JP Morgan interests hired twelve high ranking news managers. The twelve were asked to determine the most influential newspapers in America. They were to figure out how many news organisations it would take to control generally the policy of the daily press of the United States. The twelve found it was only necessary to purchase the control of twenty-five of the greatest papers ... Soon that policy would be defined by JP Morgan and his colleagues ... The Council on Foreign Relations. Beginner’s Guide to the New World Order documentary
In the middle of the nineteenth century there were some fifty independent newspapers in New South Wales alone. This is the Sydney Monitor, edited and published by Edward Smith Hall. With his eight-page shilling-a-copy paper Hall was the champion of convicts and freed prisoners. He exposed corruption in high places. Fought government censorship. And campaigned for the murderers of Aborigines to be brought to justice. Edward Smith Hall, a journalist, did more than any individual to bring free reforms to Australia – trial by jury, representative government and freedom of the press. John Pilger, Secrets
They do have the power to act together. I think back to the time when Rupert Murdoch moved his operation in London to his fortress in East London called Wapping when everything changed. It was a sea-change. In the process he sacked five thousand people just like that. The journalists almost didn’t go. The vote was lost in the union ballots by about half a dozen. Now, had they voted not to go, I doubt whether that embodiment of everything that Murdoch stands for would ever have got off the ground. So journalists do have power. And it’s really up to them to organise that power. John Pilger, interview Melbourne 2009
It seems that what we have now is a media echo-chamber that gives out broadly speaking the same news, the same opinions, the same message, while those who own and control the media are becoming fewer and their power greater all over the world. John Pilger, Breaking the Mirror: The Murdoch Effect
In 1986 the equivalent of an earthquake hit Fleet Street. Rupert Murdoch had been secretly preparing to move his newspapers to a factory in Wapping in East London surrounded by guards and razor-wire. When he finally made his move he sacked more than five-thousand people. ibid.