Propaganda and the free press

Contemporary Review, July, 2004 by George Evans

Press Gang: How Newspapers Make Profits from Propaganda. Roy Greenslade. Macmillan. [pounds sterling]30.00. 787 pages. ISBN 0-333-78311-5.

'No paper', Lord Beaverbrook said back in 1947, 'is any good at all for propaganda unless it is in a thoroughly good financial position'. Beaverbrook, who freely admitted running his newspapers for propaganda, had no cause for concern on that score. Most papers, as Roy Greenslade writes, emerged from the war flush with profits and steadily rising circulations. The dailies which sold 10.4 million before the war had risen to 13.4 million by May 1946. Sunday sales went up by nine million to 25 million over the same period. The Daily Express, Beaverbrook's flagship which had a circulation of four million in the 1950s, has dropped to under a million. The News of the World's sales of eight million at their post-war peak, have been halved. The continuing slump in advertising has affected all titles, broadsheets and tabloids alike. They may still make propaganda but profits, like sales, have plummeted.

Roy Greenslade, a Fleet Street veteran and a former Daily Mirror editor, brings all this sharply into focus in his comprehensive survey of the national newspaper industry since 1945. It is a compelling, well-documented history of the press over the past fifty years, notable for its sharp, revealing profiles of the papers, their owners and editors. It calls to mind the whims and idiosyncrasies of many of these men such as Beaverbrook throughout his long reign. What is clear beyond doubt is that the relatively stable though far from trouble-free eras of powerful press lords such as Camrose, Rothermere and Kemsley is well and truly over. The economic downturn which has forced swinging cuts in advertising budgets, is a major cause of present ills but it is the long-term failure of managements to control the unions, or what Greenslade calls printer power, which is the real source of past and present chaos in an ill-regulated industry.

Industrial anarchy by the print unions closed The Times and Sunday Times in 1978 for nearly a year, costing the Thomson organisation [pounds sterling]46 million. Within months of publication being resumed the threat of a strike by journalists in pursuit of an inflated pay claim closed The Times again for another week. It was more than enough for Kenneth (Lord) Thomson who saw it as an act of betrayal. He sold out six months later to Rupert Murdoch who in due course led the retreat from Fleet Street to a new start in Wapping in defiance of strong union opposition.

Since then owners and editors of all the national papers have come and gone at a bewildering rate. The Daily Telegraph, to take a recent example, is in the process of changing owners for the second time inside twenty years. The turnover in editors, likened by some to that of football managers of losing sides, set a new record in the 1990s. In one five-year period the Daily Mirror had five, the Sunday Express and Sunday Mirror four each, followed by the Observer, Sunday Telegraph and four others with three each. It is no way to run a national industry as their financial and political pundits would assuredly say of any other large industry exhibiting the same degree of built-in chaos and inefficiency.

The impact of television, which is now the principal source of news for many, and the growing disenchantment of the public with its newspapers is reflected in recent circulation figures which show that sales of the daily papers have fallen by more than a million over the past ten years. The Sunday papers have fared even worse with losses approaching three million.

The bad behaviour of newspapers in pursuit of stories particularly by the tabloid press in full cry is, as the author says, a source of the intense distaste of the middle classes for newspaper journalism. Intrusion, muckraking and so-called bonk journalism undoubtedly give rise to periodic fits of public righteousness which have an impact on sales though the impact rarely lasts for long. The 'public interest' which is usually cited in defence of such stories is often no more than what he rightly calls a figleaf for a sales-winning exercise.

Whether the 'tabloidisation' of the broadsheets which is now under way will reverse the downward trend which most of them are experiencing remains to be seen. The Times and The Independent which publish in broadsheet and what they prefer to call 'compact format', distancing themselves from the lower end of the market so to speak, have recorded significant gains in circulation. The informed view, despite official pronouncements to the contrary, is that the others will soon follow them. This will herald the full tabloidisation of all the broadsheets within the next few years. It makes sense if that is what it takes to reverse the continuing slide in circulation and profits now hurting all of them.