Blogs and journalism (1)

Teresa Nielsen Hayden has a piece up about the tendency of media elites to conspire against the general public. It’s full of penetrating good sense, as you would expect, but it misses a couple of points which seem obvious from over here. The first is that many of the people who rise to the top in newspapers don’t want to be journalists. In particular, they don’t want to be reporters, who are the only real journalists. There is always a battle, inside any worthwhile newspaper, between the leader writers and the people who actually know what is going on. I watched one of these at quite close quarters at the Independent in the summer of 1992, when Britain was pushed out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, a forerunner to the Euro. This may sound obscure, but it mattered. If any one event led to Labour’s thirteen years in power, that was it.

Essentially, the pound had been pegged to the Deutsche Mark at too high a rate, so that the exchange rate had to be defended by interest rates which were far too high for domestic needs. This was obvious to many economists – and to George Soros, who is said to have made a thousand million pounds betting on a devaluation. But there were powerful factions within the government determined to hang on. Both those in favour and those against were talking to favoured journalists – presumably the same thing was happening on every other paper at the time, but I know only what I saw, as the jobbing summer leader writer.

On the night before the crisis, I was ordered to write a leader saying that it was imperative that Britain stay in the ERM, and that we should ignore the counsels of despair. I said, of course, fine, but shouldn’t we have a back-up plan in case the Italians were driven out of the ERM, because in that case our position would clearly be ludicrous and untenable, and we should not insult the readers. I was told not to be silly. What was needed at this moment was a clear and forthright statement of support for the government’s wisdom.

The man who gave me this instruction was the deputy editor, who had been lunching with the Prime Minister. He wanted to go on lunching with the Prime Minister. Therefore there was no doubt in his mind that the newspaper should say what the Prime Minister thought the country needed to hear. The point, contra TNH, is that if he had really felt himself a secure part of the governing élite, he would have used his perfectly adequate brain to see what was blindingly obvious. But his position was an equivocal one, both socially and politically. It’s not just that he took for granted that politics is a conspiracy against the common people. In the specific case of exchange rate policy, of course it is, and it has to be. More, he wasn’t sure whether he was in or out of the inner ring of conspirators, and it was that which made him most vulnerable to pressure.

So, I wrote the leader. Later that night, Italy was forced out of the ERM, and the next day Britain went too. I was not asked to write the subsequent leader explaining how this, also, would turn out for the best.