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 on to 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 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, 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 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, How the TUC Killed Workers’ Paper, September 1973
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’
Everyone believes in a free press. But very few people in high places believe in the free circulation of information to that press. Paul Foot, Judges Rule Against a Free Press
How much of a right do we have to know celebrities’ most exciting secrets? And how much they be able to keep hidden? ... How much would you feel if they hacked into your phone? Sex, Lies & Gagging Orders, BBC 2011
Gossip could be mutating into something darker and more dangerous. ibid.
Digging up scandal has never been easy. ibid.
Publishers of News of the World shut the whole newspaper down for good. ibid.
The magic of the super-injunction. ibid.
The press is ferocious. It forgives nothing. It only hunts for mistakes. Diana Princess of Wales, Le Monde 27th August 1997
We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets, and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows. Katherine Graham, Washington Post publisher, Council on Foreign Relations
Nor ever once ashamed
So we be named
Pressmen; Slaves of the Lamp; Servants of Light. Edwin Arnold 1832-1904
The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm. Thomas Babington Macaula
The press too has to reconsider its role as a social force, tempering its freedom with a sense of responsibility. Only by confronting this challenge can we fully pay our debt to those who died for us in Vietnam. Charlton Heston
You’ve got someone sitting in New York who is a foreigner who has enormous influence over parliament, enormous influence over the government, enormous influence over the police force ... That really is a subversion of democracy. Max Mosley
No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will. Thomas Jefferson
Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe. Thomas Jefferson
Anybody who has had the pleasure of reading an article about themselves in the press knows that, on the whole, there is a huge amount of inaccuracy, value judgment and the use of a crowbar to insert editorial bias that reflects the current political leaning of that particular paper. Jo Brand
I was called fat and ugly in the press almost my entire life. I understand that being judged by others comes with the territory, but it broke my heart and ruined my self-esteem. Kelly Osbourne
The press is still investing itself, it seems to me, in a sort of cynicism. It comes out better for them if they can predict hard times, bogging down, sniping, attrition. Christopher Hitchens
The freedom of the press works in such a way that there is not much freedom from it. Grace Kelly
What the right wing in the United States tries to do is undermine the press. Stephen Colbert
Never worry about bad press. All that matters is if they spell your name right. Kate Hudson
The American press exists for one purpose only, and that is to convince Americans that they are living in the greatest and most envied country in the history of the world. The press tells the American people how awful every other country is and how wonderful the United States is and how evil communism is and how happy they should be to have freedom to buy seven different sorts of detergent. Gore Vidal