tim's experiment

I can’t believe the News of the World is actually going to close. It was a landmark. It should have been declared a piece of Unesco cultural heritage. When I was still at school it was already notorious. The News of the World’s basic idea — often imitated but never surpassed — was that court stories are an endless source of the magic ingredients: sex and violence. In those days the treatment was far from graphic. There would be a good deal on what you might call the foreplay but when you were expecting what is now, I believe, known as “the money shot” you would be fobbed off with something like “he then committed the offence.” Still, this was a good deal more than you got anywhere else — including at school, where sex education had not yet been invented. So the newspaper was compulsive reading for boys of a certain age.

When I was a court reporter it was well known that certain stories would get a warm and lucrative reception from the News of the Screws, as we called it. As our newspaper printed on a Wednesday it had no objection to your selling the same tale to the News of the World for use the following Sunday. Sadly stories of the necessary kind rarely seemed to come my way. I did once send them a story about a man who, arriving home drunk on a Saturday night, accused his wife of infidelity and shaved her eyebrows off to make her less attractive. As usually happened in such cases the wife turned up in court — still without eyebrows — to say that her husband was a good man when sober and deserved mercy. The News of the World’s copytaker greeted the story with enthusiasm but they did not use it. This was rather a relief; on reflection it seemed rather unfair that this particular couple should become nationally famous because he had chosen an original method of wife abuse. They did send me some money though. This was before the paper fell into the hands of Rupert Murdoch, for whom I am happy to say I have never worked.

One cannot of course escape the ogre’s influence completely and I have at various times met and even occasionally worked with people who had been employed in senior posts in the Empire of Darkness. I have to say that I cannot recall any from whom I would willingly have bought a used car and one or two of them were clearly crooks. It seems Mr Murdoch, though undoubtably talented in giving the people what they want, was prone to recruiting the ethically challenged.

However it is difficult to believe that the News of the World was the only British newspaper with ethical and legal deficiencies. I have no idea how widespread phone hacking may be — I left the country before mobile phones arrived so in my day we were not tempted. In the matter of bribing policemen and other people, however, I fear there is plenty of scandal to emerge at other places. All the popular papers do it, and have done it for years. If you talk to them or tip them off they will pay you. You expect it; they expect it. The reporters come equipped with large sums in unaccountable cash for the purpose. Occasionally someone gets into trouble for bribing a policeman or a prison officer, but usually everyone winks. Sometimes it leaks out: during the Falklands War several of the more patriotic popular  paper reporters endeared themselves to the troops by “sponsoring” bombs. This was meaningless and produced no news more interesting than a picture of a bomb with a message painted on it. I think the reporters concerned just did it from habit.  During the handover period, when almost everyone in Hong Kong was interviewed at one time or another, you could tell the British pop press. They were the ones who offered to pay you.

The moral of all this from Hong Kong’s point of view is that people should be more grateful than they are for the press we have got.  Even the popular papers do cover serious topics, don’t pay for stories and don’t make stuff up. Not everyone can say this.