News for the Million

by CLAUD COCKBURN

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THE original idea for the News of the World came from a 64-year-old ex-bankrupt who had been jostling about in the British newspaper business right through the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, the War of 1812, the adult life of Jane Austen, and the construction of the first railroads. His name was John Browne Bell, and in October, 1843, he announced by placard and handbill a new weekly newspaper.

“News for the Million. The Novelty of Nations and the Wonder of the World. 48 Large Folio Columns. Price only 3d. The Size of The Times.” (The Times at that period sold at 5d. and had a circulation of 23,000.) “Our object,” proclaimed the first issue of the News of the World, “is to establish a First Class Journal at a Price which shall place it within the reach of All Classes of Readers. . . . Our practice is the FEARLESS ADVOCACY OF TRUTH.”

Blazing a trail from which the paper has never, in one hundred eleven years, deviated far, the three items most prominently displayed in the first issue concerned THE CHEAPEST AND BEST MODE OF ADVERTISING —which naturally turned out to be a First Class Journal within the reach of All Classes of Readers; THE POLITICIAN AND THE STATE OF THE NATION; and EXTRAORDINARY CHARGE OF DRUGGING AND VIOLATION. With this menu, Mr. Bell became the progenitor of the largest circulation newspaper in the world. Today the News of the World forms the whole, or a part, of the Sunday newspaper reading of almost half the entire population of Britain between the age of sixteen and the grave. More than 20 million is the number of its weekly readers, according to a semiofficial survey by the Institute of Incorporated Practitioners in Advertising. Of these, over 8 million are the paying customers, the officially attested paid circulation. Two other British Sunday papers — Sunday Pictorial and People — are runners-up, with paid circulations of a little better than 5 million each. The distinguished Sunday Times and the Observer stand respectively 50,000 above and 50,000 below the half-million mark. And this has been the rough shape of things as regards the News of the World since before World War I. It is as characteristic and pervasive an expression of the British way of life as the warm-beered British pub and the shuffling queues outside Lord’s cricket ground; as accurate a partial reflection of the mind and face of Britain as are the parliamentary debates or a statement by the Executive of the Trades Union Congress.

This is so little of a paradox that it could be described as an undeniable fact — were it not sure to be ferociously or titteringly denied by millions of British newspaper readers, including several million weekly addicts of the News of the World.

“Sordid,” “inexpressibly vulgar,” “squalid recorder of squalid crime,” “panderer to the lowest human instincts” — a person does not need to be a hypocrite to apply any or all of these epithets to this most popular of all British newspapers. The only hypocrites concerned arc those who pretend that the epithets are mysteriously inappropriate or else that, equally mysteriously, this newspaper is not “truly representative of British taste.” As a people, the British do not much care to be judged by the News of the World. They just buy those 8 million copies of it every Sunday and provide it with the highest advertising rate of any Sunday newspaper.

At the end of an English Sunday, the earnest inquirer could — on the basis of firsthand information received from sincere Britons at all social levels — report that nobody above the lowest income-tax groups reads it at all, except by accident or under some unexplained duress; that respectable members of the working class buy it only to take home to their wives, who have it in the home only because their husbands like to read it; and that its main circulation must be in some other part of the country, among people of lower taste. Persons who admit to reading it are apt to do so apologetically or with an air intended to suggest that the bit of them that reads the News of the World is hardly the real Them.

On the other hand, if the earnest inquirer persists long enough to uncover unabashed addicts, he will eventually find several million citizens who would consider it a frivolous waste of time and money to get any other paper. To them, “the paper” — as something to read, rather than a betting sheet with other stuff printed on the back of the lists of today’s runners — means the News of the World and nothing else. For them, events only assume full reality on being reported in the News of the World.

A fairly large volume of the stream of sincere denunciation regularly directed against the paper from pulpits and the platforms of women’s clubs has its obvious historical springs back in the days when the upper class found it difficult to forgive the lower class for learning to read at all, and predicted disaster and abuses. With a circulation of which over 56 per cent is rated by the Hulton Survey of the Press as “working class,” the News of the World is the natural target for the descendants of those Viewers with Alarm. At least since World War I, “the sort of man who lies in bed on Sundays reading the News of the World” has become a conventionalized image of what any given critic means by national decadence.

Lying in bed with the News of the World is the thing people are alleged to be doing when they are failing to do whatever this or that enthusiast — for churchgoing, walking vigorously through the countryside, or cultivating the garden to make us independent of foreign food and close the dollar gap — thinks they ought to be doing.

As an ingredient of the kind of music-hall joke which the British love because it is just like the ones Father used to make, the News of the World is as well established in the public esteem as cheese. Man lying in bed reading it is still the central figure of the jest, but is here regarded in a more sympathetic light, a symbol of amiable and universal human weakness, like using the housekeeping money to buy beer or bet the horses.

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THE front page of the News of the World — in style, layout, and estimate of news values — is normally as serious as that of almost any newspaper in the English-speaking world, and a great deal more so than that of most. Its younger competitors— and this applies to others besides the tabloids — have increasingly adopted a vile technique (based partly on a discouraged conviction that everyone will have heard the general news on the radio, anyway) by which an editorial conference decides, some time on Saturday (even, occasionally, on Friday), what will be “our” front-page splash this Sunday, and goes remorselessly to town with this “exclusive” offering, regardless of almost anything that may have come up in the meantime.

The “exclusive” may be anything from a “hardhitting exposure” of something or other — a spy ring or the impending collapse of the automobile industry — to inside news of a rift in the Cabinet or the Court, but it is so puffed up and noisy that almost every other item of interest has to creep away and curl up somewhere on the inside pages.

The News of the World has maintained a fairly sturdy and consistent resistance to this malpractice; and although it will devote at least as much care and money as anyone else to the comprehensive front-page presentation of, say, yet one more “extraordinary case of drugging and violation,” there will almost certainly be room for a report, at intelligible length, of a minor war, a new scheme for old-age pensioners, a major scientilic development, a reshuffle of the Cabinet, and even, if circumstances warrant, a further “extraordinary case of drugging and violation.”

One gains the impression that people at the News of the World still believe that what 48 per cent of the population of Great Britain want to get first front their Sunday newspaper is a reasonably clear, not excessively peptonized or childishly overdecorated, account of the main things of general interest and importance that are going on. And this is encouraging, for surely the people at the News of the World should know.

The editorial page strengthens the general impression. The editorial itself—politically almost dead center, and thus unexacerbating rather than exciting — at least eschews that rib-poking, backslapping mateyness with which several of the competitors find it desirable to approach the mysterious millions. The largest space on the page is likely to be occupied by an article — which could probably have appeared in the Times, certainly in the Daily Telegraph, and improbably anywhere else except the News of the World — by a Member of Parliament such as Sir Robert Boothby, or some other figure chosen because he has something to say rather than because he came into journalism with a big future behind him.

At this point, the visiting stranger begins to think he has been hoaxed, or that the English are crazier than he had been led to suppose. And then his eye takes note of those long, steady columns which form the bulk of the News of the World and are the basis for the jokes, the legend, the denunciations, and, of course, the supreme circulation. One hundred and eleven years later, these, without so much as a tremor of sensationalism in presentation or style, carry on the tradition of the first issue — testify to the old faith that although people are interested in advertisements and in the state of the nation, they like them a lot better if they are absolutely sure that in a minute or two there will he some fairly clotted cases of drugging and violation to sit quietly down with.

With their meager, almost colorless headlines and lack of all other decoration, these serried columns— recording in language which is something between a ritual and a code the most popularly appealing of the crimes, misdemeanors, and sexual mishaps of the citizenry brought to light during the previous seven days — constitute the heart and driving power of the News of the world.

Their raw material is the volume of straightforward, dead-pan reports from News of the world “stringers” covering police courts and magistrates’ courts all over the country, supplemented in major divorce cases and other cases of importance at the assize courts by staff reporters. Selection of what is News of the World-worthy starts, of course, at this level.

So far as major cases are concerned — a multiple murder, for example — the News of the world cannot claim to offer the customers any service strikingly superior to that of its rivals (although it will probably give the matter a little more space and sometimes, through its exceptionally close and mutually profitable relations with the police, a detail not vouchsafed to others). It is in its technique of selection among the more homely, everyday rapes, breaches of promise, assaults, and indecent suggestions that the News of the 11 orld is unique. Broadly speaking, one might say that its tendency is to prefer the “It might have been me” type of crime or misdemeanor to the merely exotic or lurid. A great part of the appeal of the News of the World lies in the fact that in its compendious pages crimes, and particularly sexual misbehavior and impropriety of every kind, are seen as going on pretty well all the time, everywhere; they are woven into the texture of familiar life. The spotlighted stage upon which the criminal classes perform has been taken away, audience and players aie at one; the curate at Wold mere who made that “certain suggestion” to the boy scout might have been our curate, here; the lewd schoolmaster who “disordered the clothing” of Mary Ann “with a view to committing an offence” is of the same clay as Mr. Jones. All of them might have been us.

Other papers often give the impression that it is only a special sort of people that are up to no good. News of the world readers know that almost anybody may be up to no good, with special reference to those sly ones who mask themselves in respectability as bank managers, clergymen, elderly solicitors — “He locked the door, saying the consultation must be confidential, and subsequently made a certain suggestion” — and men with eight-room homes in a good part of town. It is in every way a comforting thought. We always suspected things were that way, and they are; and nobody is really any better than anyone else.

The homely, family relationship established between the News of the World and its readers is more than one of mere “atmosphere” or sentiment. It maintains an Advice Bureau which replies to an average of between 6500 and 7000 readers letters a week. By well over a quarter of a million people it is regarded as the most reliable and discreet of family lawyers and doctors, and it expends a great deal of effort and money to justify this faith. To deal with legal queries alone, it maintains a fulltime staff of highly qualified lawyers; medical inquiries receive as expert medical advice as is available to anyone on the basis of consultation by mail; and the thousands of queries from soldiers and their parents, arising from the introduction of compulsory national service, are as likely as not to be studied and answered by high-ranking officers “retained” for the purpose by the paper.

Although the American-type comics have recently held the spotlight as potential menaces to the moral state of Britain, the debate over the significance and Moral Consequences of the News of the World goes on year in, year out.

Reginald Cudlipp, fortyish, gravely urbane editor of the News of the World since November, 1953, is not much moved by the familiar and unceasing attacks; he considers that most of them are based either on ignorance of the News of the world or on an absurd lack of touch with human nature. His explanation of the 20-million readership is simple and impressive.

“The person,” he remarked to this writer, “who has no interest in the News of the world has no interest in Life.”