Examination of Witnesses (Questions 905
- 919)
WEDNESDAY 21 NOVEMBER 2007
Mr Andrew Marr and Mr Dominic Lawson
Q905 Chairman: Good
morning and welcome. Thank you very much for coming. As you know,
we are looking at the state of the media and in particular ownership
and the concentration of ownership, and essentially the impact
that owners—and I mean not just proprietors but Chairmen
of Boards, Chief Executives, even Managing Editors—can have
on the papers that we read. I am not going to go through both
your biographies; you are both very well known journalists and,
in particular for our purposes, you have both edited national
newspapers: Dominic Lawson 10 years editor of the Sunday Telegraph
and before that the Spectator; and Andrew Marr the Independent
and of course a very extensive career now in broadcasting. Mr
Marr, you have written a book, "My Trade"—and
it is always said, is it not, "My enemy should write a book",
and that is a great advantage of not being regarded as an enemy—and
it was an extremely enjoyable book, but your description of the
way that editors perish is pretty dire—Harry Evans, Charlie
Wilson, David Montgomery, and I suppose at different times both
of you. It made me rather glad that I changed from journalism
to the gentler pursuit of politics. I wonder how are editors judged;
are they judged essentially by circulation and what has happened
to circulation?
Mr Marr: These days they cannot be judged by
circulation alone or there would not be any editors, I suppose
is the first thing to say. Of course circulation is the crucial
yardstick. Circulation relative to your rivals, not only relative
to your own paper's position historically because all newspapers
are struggling in a narrowing market at the moment, but how your
obvious rival papers are doing; beyond that not causing your proprietor
massive and repeated legal embarrassments and libel costs—that
is pretty important—and beyond that producing a paper that
your proprietor or owner enjoys reading him or herself matters
too. The other thing of course, as I discovered rather to my cost,
is that any editor these days is also a business leader and so
therefore things like ensuring that you do not fight too hard
when it comes to the quantity of advertising in your newspaper
and being prepared to make redundancies from time to time that
the organisation requires, those sorts of things. So you have
to tick quite a number of boxes.
Q906 Chairman:
Thank you. We will come to quite a lot of these issues. Do you
agree with that, Mr Lawson?
Mr Lawson: I would not disagree at all; it is
a very good summary. I would say that there is a slight distinction
because the advertisers look at something called readership, which
is not the same as circulation, and there are very arcane ways
of measuring it. So you might find a situation in which the circulation
is going down but the readership is going up. Do not ask me to
explain it, but it is just a strange fact.
Q907 Chairman:
Which do you regard as more important?
Mr Lawson: I would regard circulation and the
advertisers would regard readership; that is just the way the
business seems to work.
Q908 Chairman:
But you do not disagree with any of this analysis?
Mr Lawson: No, I think it is a very good summary.
Q909 Chairman:
What we are really interested in is the influence that an owner
can have on the editorial views that are set out and, as I say,
"owner" is an umbrella term which can include quite
a number of other people as far as the proprietor is concerned.
Mr Marr, the Independent, when you were editor, was owned
by The Mirror Group.
Mr Marr: It was a complicated structure to start
with, which was part of the problem; 48 point something per cent
was owned by The Mirror Group, 48 point something per cent was
owned by Dr Tony O'Reilly's independent newspaper group of Ireland,
and then there were slivers of small holdings from the original
founders, but in effect through most of my time it was being fought
over by two different groups.
Q910 Chairman:
Then the outcome of that?
Mr Marr: The outcome of that was that there
was a takeover bid by the O'Reilly team and it is now wholly owned
by him or his newspaper company.
Q911 Chairman:
In that time was there any pressure put on you? It is, as you
rightly say, slightly unusual to have two owners jockeying for
position. The Mirror is a well known labour supporting
newspaper; were they putting pressure on you to become a Labour
supporting paper as well?
Mr Marr: I never had political pressure of that
kind at all, and I was probably quite unusual in that. The paper
had always been independent; it has moved quite a long way to
the left of its original definition of independence now, but there
was not that kind of pressure on me. There was an intense pressure
about what sort of paper it was going to be in terms of what it
covered and its news agenda and all those sorts of things from
the Mirror Group side and much less pressure from the O'Reilly
side beyond a very, very close attention to rugby reports!
Lord Maxton: Quite right too!
Q912 Chairman:
What kind of paper did The Mirror Group want it to be?
Mr Marr: My view, which I have put on the record
already, was that David Montgomery wanted to create another go
at the Today newspaper, which he had edited for Rupert
Murdoch, unsuccessfully, for quite a while, and he believed that
the niche was for a mid-market, small "l" liberal, pretty
environmentalist paper, but heavily targeted at high end consumers.
"We want lots of stories," he would tell me, "about
being mugged for their Rolex watches in Mayfair, and we do not
want too many dead black babies." That is a slightly brutal
way of putting it, but that was it, more or less. Of course, I
was somewhat resistant to this and there was constant warfare
on the subject. For instance, one could never disentangle what
was his genuine belief about where there would be a good market
niche for such a paper and the opportunistic enthusiasms for sacking
people—for instance, if we were going to be that kind of
paper we clearly did not need lots of foreign correspondents and
bureaux and all those expenses and we could just get rid of those.
So it was always economics and newspaper ideology and probably
his own past history as an editor jockeying.
Q913 Chairman:
It is quite interesting what you say. David Montgomery's position
at that moment was?
Mr Marr: Chief Executive of Mirror Group Newspapers.
Q914 Chairman:
So in fact was he acting, in effect, like the old fashioned proprietor?
Mr Marr: Trying to, yes.
Q915 Chairman:
Trying to, but that was his aim.
Mr Marr: Yes.
Q916 Baroness Thornton:
You have described him as your landlord.
Mr Marr: Yes, he was physically our landlord
because we were in Mirror Group premises and printed on Mirror
Group presses.
Q917 Chairman:
Mr Lawson, you served two owners; you served Conrad Black for
most of your time as an editor.
Mr Lawson: Yes.
Q918 Chairman:
Then the Barclay Brothers took control.
Mr Lawson: Yes.
Q919 Chairman:
Did either of those owners wish to exercise an editorial influence?
Mr Lawson: No. I had virtually no interference
whatsoever from Conrad Black. He was fascinated by newspapers
and by the Telegraph Group. It is not widely known, but his great-great-grandfather
was one of the founding shareholders in 1855 and so he had a peculiar
affinity to it, which made things very easy. But, no, he was remarkably
un-interventionist. I think he liked occasionally to create the
impression that he was and he would tell people that he did but
it was not actually the case.
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