O TEMPORA O MORES!

SENSATIONALISM IN THE PRESS

It’s always good for perspective to read about times just before a catastrophe. Right now, I’m going through a richly-illustrated well-written coffee table book called The Edwardians, the era from 1901 roughly to the First World War named after Britain’s King Edward VII.

The book is authored by J.B. Priestley, a British Labour Party stalwart during and after World War II who was a literate leftist not wholly taken with politics as a life or death obsession.

His chapter on the British press is illuminating as to how popular taste has evolved and perhaps devolved since the turn of the Twentieth Century. Back in the 1890’s an enterprising fellow named Alfred Harmsworth brought out a morning paper called the Daily Mail for a half-penny. This was the birth of English popular journalism and precipitated a deluge of competitors, one of which, the half-penny Daily Mirror, was also started up by Harmsworth, by this time Lord Northcliffe, in 1903. The Mirror was an illustrated version of the Daily Mail, which in turn was a popularized version of the London Times, which in that period was the newspaper of record, much like the NYT recently was. Like Rupert Murdoch, Harmsworth bought The Times to give his operation a touch of class.

Priestley blames Northcliffe and his American contemporaries Hearst and Bennet for creating news that the mass media employed to inflame the public imagination. This in itself would be neutral and not necessarily harmful, but the political class and their attendant public opinion experts began, according to Priestley, to believe the press actually represented in some way the voice of the people.

Or rather, that the politicos could influence the press lords like Northcliffe to sway public opinion one way or another.

There was a big problem. Lord Northcliffe was a notorious flibbertygibbet, changing his mind so often that the hilarious Lloyd George described a conversation with Northcliffe “like taking a walk with a grasshopper.”

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

Flash forward to about ten days ago when Charlie Rose had an interview with Pinch Sulzberger, NYT czar and a scatterbrained populist. Pinch should stick to riding his Harleys and stay away from trying to run a serious newspaper.

And anyone listening to Ted Turner for more than ten minutes must wonder how in the world this nitwit ever stumbled into success. Bill Richardson told me once that Ted Turner got so excited in Richardson’s Congressional Office that the Georgian fell to the floor and began to gator vigorously to make his point. Maybe Bill was pulling my leg, but somehow the image of Turner gatoring is not outlandish.

Nor is reading the NYT’s latest illegal leaks and watching CNN gyrate and purvey happy horseshit to the hip-hop generation very uplifting and edifying.

Priestley’s jeremiad about the Edwardian press could be written today; but for adjectival assurance, 100 years of entropy, backsliding and degeneration would need to be added to the mix.

Oh yeah, and a total disregard for national security and the safety of American citizens.

When I lived in France, French politicos could not understand Watergate and how the Washington Post kept attacking Nixon with almost no retribution.

The French assured me that when the Canard Enchaine had caught President Pompidou's cabinet using a table d'ecoutes, the government threatened to raise the price of newsprint.

Voila, in the tradition of French cowardice, the press folded.

The British Official Secrets Act would have a nitwit like Pinch Sulzberger behind bars if he'd done his leaking in the UK, or so I am told by a knowledgeable British friend.

Let's hope the DOJ can come up with the leaker[s] in the NSA and CIA who are endangering our national security just to settle scores with Porter Goss or the new NSA chief.