IS it just me, or is EVERYONE singing a different song these days?
Thanks to a pair of M&Ms (Formula 1 boss Max Moseley and Commons Speaker Michael Martin), chequebook journalism is back in favour, celebrity buy-ups and kiss ’n tell are as dead as the Daily Sketch and the public suddenly loves Us and hates Them!
How do I know? I was in my local pub trying to mollify the splenetic rage that was vented every time the soundless rolling news show on telly ticker-taped the words “MPs’ EXPENSES SCANDAL…LATEST” across the screen when a strange thing happened.
Deep in my cups, I moaned that the only loser following the Telegraph’s daring payment to a criminal (£300k if you believe the tabloids, £120k if you listen to Lobby gossip, £70k according to Tele ‘insiders’) was the Press.
“How so?” I was asked. To which I replied that a damaged and vengeful Commons, led most probably by Sports and Media Committee chairman John Whittingdale (Cons. Maldon, and inveterate Olympic traveller, according to the Telegraph) and cranky old Sir Gerald Kaufman (Lab. Gorton, £1,851 for a “second-hand rug”), would certainly seek retribution by way of pressure for privacy legislation and Big Brother controls over newsgathering methods and payment for information.
The reaction of my drinking buddies was as startling as it was instantaneous.
“No bloody way!” roared the lumpen proletariat at this lumpen prole in his cups. The general feeling was that the Press, at its worst, had never behaved as outrageously as the House at its sleaziest.
O! Boundless joy! Max Moseley’s obsession with truth and honour and bondage beauties may have knocked saucy capers in the Sunday papers on the head (for the time being) but Michael ‘Gorbals’ Martin has opened another door through which the Telegraph has discovered there is circulation to be gained.
It’s called news. Hard, investigative, important, revelatory and (in the scale of things) not-all-that-expensive . . . NEWS!
At time of writing circulation increases were still being assessed but early returns promised an average daily increase of 60,000 copies, which should certainly give the Sun’s Rebekah Wade (“Not at THAT price, guv!”) and those ditherers at The Thunderer pause to ponder what might have been had they not turned down what will unquestionably sweep the board for Scoop of the Year.
So who needs randy vicars, three-in-a-bed footballers or even Katie Price and Peter Andre when Real News, the stuff that puts hairs on your chest and readers within reach of attention-seeking advertisers, has suddenly become so easy to find and profitable to publish?
Reality Newspapers are back. The cult of celebritism – and the team of PRs often, scandalously, led by ex-editors who stay close to their contacts books to harvest the love lives and purvey for profit the love LIES of the unscrupulously famous – may well be drawing to a close.
The two great M&Ms, Max and Michael, might well have done the Press industry a huge favour.
Goebbels meets Gorbals, you might say. . .
Hugely different in character and circumstance, both have things in common: both were gluttons, one for punishment and the other for riches. Both suffered at the hands of the whips. And cries of “Order! Order!” are not that indistinguishable from shrieks of “’arder! ’arder!”
So where does the Press go from here? What lessons have we, as well as Rebekah and The Ditherer, learned from events of the past three weeks? My suggestions:
THAT we, the media, are in danger of letting the REAL culprits off the hook: ministers, shadows, MPs of ALL parties as well as the ramshackle system of reimbursement that made millionaires of some of them and mugs of all of us. All have disappeared behind the smokescreen they created by pushing Mr Speaker Martin (surely soon to be Lord Gorbals?) out front to face you, the lynch mob.
THAT the Mirror, Express, Associated and Indy groups ask themselves why they were never offered the goodies,
THAT News Limited’s twin tyros ask themselves why, if some nightclub stripper stripper shtupping a soccer star is worth a hundred grand or more, the comparatively modest price of exposing a gigantic cash free-for-all that blackens Britain’s reputation as a decent democracy was thought to be too great?
And THAT the national Press, without exception, raise a collective glass and give thanks for the Daily Telegraph’s courage and dedication to what journalism used to be and, if it is to have any substantial future, must always be about.
Ladies and gentlemen of the Press, the toast is . . . the Return of Real News!
From Press Gazette, June 2009
