Examination of Witnesses (Questions 960
- 979)
WEDNESDAY 21 NOVEMBER 2007
Mr Andrew Marr and Mr Dominic Lawson
Q960 Chairman:
In 1992.
Mr Lawson: ... and it changed dramatically because
of what happened. You might argue whether it should; you might
say that it was too much on one side and then too much on the
other, but I think it was circumstances which dictated that as
much as anything.
Q961 Lord Inglewood:
Andrew Marr was talking about the agendas that newspapers are
going to have in the run-up to the next election and they are
not quite sure which way they are going to jump. Who would make
the decisions in that context? Secondly, in a similar direction,
is there not quite a lot to be said for a newspaper backing winners?
Mr Marr: Absolutely. No proprietor wants to
be advocating the losing side. So, as I say, it is a complicated
relationship between the polls, the public, public opinion and
the newspapers and so on. Most of those decisions will be between
the editor and the proprietor but prior to that it will be between
the editor and the editor's journalists. Whoever is editing the
big papers at the moment will settle down with their political
editor and senior executives and say, "Do we think that Gordon
Brown is in such trouble, has made so many mistakes that we really
have to withdraw our historic backing at this point?" A decision
will be taken there and then I am sure there will be a discussion
with the proprietor. But a lot of these things will probably come
from the belly of the newspaper and will be passed up to the proprietor
rather than just be simply plonked on the editor's desk.
Chairman: Lady Howe.
Q962 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
Looking rather more at whether there should be other forms of
editorial and journalistic protection in the future, and going
back to what you wrote, Andrew Marr, about the time of Harry Evans
when he was at the Sunday Times, that was an interesting
point because that was a contract and therefore rather different
tactics, as you have described them, had to be used by Mr Murdoch
to actually get rid of Harry Evans, which he did, let us face
it. Just thinking about that, should there be more legal protection?
Might this be one of the ways in which the independence of editors
and indeed of journalists would be protected?
Mr Marr: I think not. I do not think you can
come into the intimate relationship between an editor and a group
that are working for the proprietor and put in legal protection
beyond the contractual protection that any sensible editor would
have insisted on being there before sitting down.
Mr Lawson: I agree with that and you have to
accept they own the damn thing. There are rights that accrue to
the owners of something. You simply cannot ignore that and it
would be very unreasonable to say, "I know you spent £600
million on this but actually it is nothing to do with you."
I also agree with Andrew that even if you did have some kind of
legal structure it would be a nightmare if you had a situation
where there was a complete falling out between the proprietor
and the editor and it was in the hands of the lawyers.
Q963 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
Continuing on that line, Harry Evans' point in his autobiography
was that internal freedom cannot be acquired by external rules.
Presumably that means from what you have both said that you would
agree with that?
Mr Marr: Absolutely.
Mr Lawson: Yes.
Q964 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
Thinking more widely than that, are there other models that might
make it rather more certain that editors do not get frightened
too much, so where we the public are not getting the independence
that we require also to make our judgments?
Mr Marr: There is the trust model, of course.
We have not talked about the Guardian, but there is the
trust model which has been used by different newspapers over the
years. But even there I would suggest that the Guardian's
relative success at holding a circulation over a long period of
time has as much to do with what Dominic was talking about, which
is the stability of the editor and the editorial team for a long
period being able to plot a strategy, change a design and then
follow it through and be there for a long time, than the trust
structure. Even in a trust there are dominant characters who in
fact are listened to—not as proprietors but more than anybody
else. And of course there are plenty of examples of trusts which
have been pretty catastrophic in newspaper terms. So the Guardian
is a rarity but that is the obvious other example.
Chairman: We have taken evidence from the Guardian.
Q965 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
Let us move into the time when there are no more papers left and
it is all on the Internet. Are there any ways that either journalists
or indeed editors can and need protection under those circumstances?
Mr Marr: I fear that time a lot because it seems
to me that the point of a newspaper or any proper news organisation
is the culture, the inter-relationship between individuals and
the standards that they set each other and expect of each other
and the common beliefs that they hold—the body of the newspaper.
In a wilderness of individual voices out there, controlled by
nothing more than remote commercial organisations trying to bundle
them together, you are not just going to have no newspapers you
are not going to have any journalism as we understand it. Someone
has to pay for people to get up every day to go out, find things
out and then write them down in relatively clear English.
Chairman: Lord Maxton.
Q966 Lord Maxton:
In your book, Andrew, you say: "What, for the reader, are
the consequences of the rule of press barons?" What is the
answer to that question?
Mr Marr: Variety up to a point; eccentricity,
surprise and I absolutely agree with what Dominic Lawson said,
a greater quantity of journalism than you would otherwise have
because it is un-commercial.
Q967 Lord Maxton:
That is the next question, in a sense, to you, Mr Lawson, which
is are now owners more driven by competition and editors now more
concerned by commercial success than they were in the past?
Mr Lawson: One looks at newspaper proprietors
and says are they ideologues? They are more money-logues than
ideologues. I think that Andrew's point about competition is a
very good one. We have an extraordinarily vibrant, competitive—maybe
over-competitive newspaper market. If you compare it to North
America and you look at the New York Times, virtually unchallenged,
unbelievably complacent—can close a restaurant, can close
a theatre, there is virtually nothing else—and you compare
that incredible complacency and dullness, which Murdoch is about
to challenge, by the way, with the Wall Street Journal,
with what happens in this country, which I think does have the
best journalism in the world because of competition, because of
very aggressive proprietors, I think for all its scandal and excesses
our own model is a better model and more to be admired.
Q968 Lord Maxton:
Yet you have described the ownership by the Barclay Brothers of
the Telegraph Media Group as reminding you of "a chimpanzee
that has captured a Swiss watch and in its clumsy attempts to
try to and understand what makes it tick the brute completely
destroys it".
Mr Lawson: Yes. The whole point about competition
is that there are those who fail and those who succeed. People
win in competition and people lose and the best proprietors, the
best managers in the end will see it out. So you have something
like, say, Associated, where it is essentially controlled by one
family and has been for generations, but there is a remarkable
division between ownership and editorial—there is no interference—that
has been a very successful model. So any proprietor starting should
look at that and learn from it and say, "In the long term
that is a good model," and if people trash the newspaper
in a way they will in the end suffer commercially—it will
hurt them as much as anyone.
Q969 Lord Maxton:
So the chimpanzee will learn?
Mr Lawson: The chimpanzee will learn. It may
need electric shocks.
Q970 Lord Maxton:
Can I just take that further? Is not one of the dangers, however,
that in the drive for commercial success there is a danger of
making sensation always of a story or of trivialising?
Mr Lawson: It is a very good point but I do
not think that comes—and maybe I have misinterpreted the
implication of your question—from the ownership. It is the
editor himself who desperately wants a front page which makes
the reader say, "My goodness me! Wow." That is what
the journalists want. There is no particular pressure and I did
not sense any particular pressure from the owners on me to make
it more sensational; that was the natural energy of the journalist.
Mr Marr: I think there is an almost philosophical
question about the point at which the shouting becomes so loud
that the customer ceases to hear it any more, where you have so
much of sensation and excitement. I cannot be alone in looking
at the Sunday tabloid celeb-fest. I no longer know who these people
are or care about them and actually if you look at what is happening
in the market you must begin to wonder whether any of this is
successful. This form of sensationalism seems to be losing them
more readers in many cases than more austere newspapers are losing
at the other end. That is a big commercial question but the proprietor
is not going to come in and say, "Be more sensational"
to an editor.
Chairman: I will bring in Lady Eccles at this
point.
Q971 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
I had some questions to ask more on the commercial end of the
business but they have been pretty well covered. So if I could
turn to this brief experience that Andrew had when you returned
to the Independent and you were, as it were, the editor
but Rosie Boycott came in to look after the news. I think I have
it the right way round, or is it the other way?
Mr Marr: I think I was editor in chief and she
was editor; I still do not understand quite what the relationship
was supposed to be.
Q972 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
Was the split really between the editorial part of the paper and
the news part of the paper, or was that not the split between
you and Rosie Boycott?
Mr Marr: Yes that was the split and it was an
attempt to mimic what was perceived to be an American model where
you have one person in charge of the chin scratching parts of
the newspaper and one person in charge of the exciting parts of
the newspaper, as it were, and it did not work.
Q973 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
We found in America that this is still very strongly adhered to
by the newspapers that we talked to. Would you say that quite
definitely it was not a good idea to try and keep editorial comment
out of the news or that it was a good thing for the public to
be able to get the news pure and unadulterated and then the editorial
was kept separate?
Mr Marr: You can produce your news as pure and
unadulterated as you wish with a single editor. The problem of
the double editorship is that on so many occasions the editor
in charge of the news, the front page ... Most of the pages actually
will be pursuing some agenda, some campaign and all the rest of
it, and if you then turn to the comment pages and there is a completely
different world view or perhaps a hostile one—Rosie and
I did not agree, for instance, on the question of cannabis liberalisation—then
it becomes utterly incoherent and the reader quickly spots that,
and of course the two individuals inevitably go to war. It seems
to me that of all institutions that need one person in charge,
a newspaper is right up there.
Q974 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
Dominic, do you have a view on that?
Mr Lawson: I agree with Andrew and I think the
risk is that if you have a notion that the news is somehow some
sort of a self-selecting series of objective facts then every
newspaper's pages would be identical, and they are not, because
the editor has a particular approach and wants to emphasise things
more than others and has, if you like, a world view. I am not
saying it is wrong, you can have a newspaper that has this separation,
but as Andrew says it is not really a very workable model and
I do not think it is necessarily to the advantage of the reader
to have this separation. If they think that the Daily Mail's
coverage on news is tendentious and misleading they can buy another
paper—there is no shortage of alternatives.
Q975 Chairman:
We have gone through newspapers and you have given your views
and your experience on that, but we have rather left out the BBC,
which obviously has a major part in the media of this country—a
vast influence, accused of one part left wing bias, and I suppose
some might accuse it of right wing bias. Is there a difference
in culture that you noticed when you went to the BBC, because
you were the political editor there for some time and you are
still there?
Mr Marr: Yes, Mr Chairman, and every time I
talk about this I get into terrible trouble so I will choose my
words very carefully. First of all, for anyone who has been working
in newspapers the almost hysterical, obsessive attention to not
being biased in party political terms when you go in is very,
very striking—people are literally going at you with stopwatches,
mostly during election campaigns but in the run-up to election
campaigns—and in the BBC you are aware that you are being
watched by the party machines who have real clout in a way that
is not the case with any newspaper. That bit I hope is relatively
un-contentious. The contentious bit, as I have said before and
I will say again, is that all institutions have institutional
biases and the BBC is a very large public sector institution based
in the west of London, disproportionately staffed by young people;
probably more mixed race than other British institutions and with
its own institutional memory of Director Generals and so on. I
think if there is a BBC bias it is a cultural thing, it is not
a party political thing, and the BBC agonises obsessively about
trying to deal with it, sometimes to the point which drives some
of its humbler staff nuts.
Q976 Chairman:
It sounds to me when you define those things that it would not
be unfair to say that there was a liberal tilt, a left wing tilt
to the BBC. Do you recognise that?
Mr Marr: I would say a liberal instinct rather
than a left wing tilt, which is combated by people. It is very
interesting over the last few years, looking at subjects of documentary
programmes coming up, some of the drama subjects that are coming
up, and I think you can begin to see the result of BBC editors
or executives at different levels saying, "We really have
to watch this instinct always to say, we need to spend more public
money on this, always to say that the white majority can look
after itself, as it were." You see these things coming through.
Q977 Chairman:
Mr Lawson was asked at one stage to give examples. Are there examples
where you have been put under pressure to change a story or approach
a story in a particular way?
Mr Marr: Inside the BBC?
Q978 Chairman:
Yes.
Mr Marr: I can think of one example where a
story was killed.
Q979 Chairman:
Which was?
Mr Marr: I am afraid to say that it was about
the drinking habits of a former member of the Liberal Democrats,
the Liberal Democrat leader, where I was absolutely sure I had
a story about the nature of the problem and him seeking help and
so on. It was passed up because it was clearly legally dangerous.
| 
