Who will mourn the passing of the News of the World? The staff will, especially those not recruited by the Sun on Sunday. A pure-minded lover of Pakistani cricket might, thanking ‘the fake shaikh' for exposing the national team's easy corruption.
This week everyone hates the News of the World, and yet only last Sunday around 2.6 million people liked it enough to buy a copy. They didn't mind what they were reading, so long as they didn't know how some of it came to be written. And they didn't mind that too much, either if they knew about phone hacking, they overlooked it until it came to the case of the murdered girl, Milly Dowler.
The British own what the Victorians knew as their baser selves. When the News of the World first appeared in 1843, Britain was embarking on a long age of public respectability in which salacious accounts of sex and violence were hard to find. The News of the World made this a specialism, mainly by reporting court cases no other paper would touch.
The education acts of 1870 and 1880 spread literacy through every social class and hugely expanded the reading public. By 1914, the paper was selling a couple of million copies a week, all of them published on a day nominally devoted to worship and quiet reflection.
In its peak year, 1949, the circulation averaged close to 8.5 million and required not a parcels van or two but a whole train to take Scottish copies north from the presses in Manchester. It was, by then, the world's biggest-selling newspaper a publishing triumph owned by an English family, the Carrs, that exploited an otherwise unsatisfied appetite for sexual voyeurism and scandal.
Whether hypocrisy is a peculiarly British vice is debatable; other societies may be just as two-faced in different ways. A new breed of newspaper publishers, of which Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe) was by far the most inventive, saw a less worthy side. He spread the message to his staff like a preacher: roughly, to subvert the words of Philip Larkin, readers were forever surprising a hunger in themselves to be more trivial.
‘Only human' principle
"Crime exclusives are noticed by the public more than any other sort of news," Northcliffe told his news editor at the Daily Mail, Tom Clarke, in 1921. "They attract attention, which is the secret of newspaper success. They are the sort of dramatic news the public always affects to criticise but is always in the greatest hurry to read. Watch the sales during a big murder mystery, especially if there is a woman in it. It is a revelation of how much the public is interested in realities, action and mystery. It is only human."
Northcliffe first put his ‘only human' principle to work as the 22-year-old editor-publisher of a little weekly, Answers to Correspondents, which told its readers how many MPs had glass eyes or cork legs , and how tall Gladstone was, and adjudicated debates over whether women lived longer than men and if snakes could kill pigs.
Later, he would say that his fortune had been founded on useless information, but by then he could afford to make jokes about his youth, having in the meantime launched the Daily Mail (1896) and the Daily Mirror (1903), and bought the Observer (1905) and the Times (1908). No one did more to shape the future of British journalism.
During the First World War he met a young Australian journalist, Keith Murdoch, and adopted him as a kind of editorial pupil. Promoted to an editorship in Melbourne, Murdoch emulated the maestro's techniques and forged his own political alliances, so much so he got the nickname Lord Southcliffe. His only son, Rupert, learned the trade at his knee.
Northcliffe had an unhappy end. He became paranoid and issued bewildering instructions that his staff, trained to oblige his imperiousness, never knew how to disobey.
He died under the supervision of two nurses in a hut on the roof of a house in Carlton Gardens. Neurosyphilis has always been strongly rumoured, but never proved. It was an organic psychosis of some sort, in a mind that had been unsteadied by power.
In his last days, he ordered hundreds of sackings, but he had always been a brisk sacker. An editor who said she wasn't to blame for her paper's criminal behaviour because she'd been on holiday at the time? Her feet would never have touched the ground. For the moment Rebekah Brooks stays, but all around her the great age of Britain's popular press is tumbling squalidly to its close.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
