LITMIR.BIZ

      2

      More Than a Business

      It was a lovely time to be a local newspaper journalist. But after a couple of years I had – as my Cambridge colleagues knew I would – started to make my exit plans. I began using my days off doing reporting shifts at the London Evening Standard, where ancient typewriters were chained to dark green metal desks. I was turned down for a job there, and also by the Times. But my cuttings caught the eye of the news editor on the Guardian, Peter Cole. I bought a new suit and gave what Cole later described as the worst interview he could remember. But he was impressed by my scrapbook of stories and considered I had a modest facility with words. I feel I may have lied when asked about my shorthand speed.

      There was another young reporter starting at the Guardian on my first day in July 1979 – fresh from the Mirror Group training scheme in the west country. His name was Nick Davies. He was extrovert; I was more introverted. He loved standing on doorsteps; I preferred polishing sentences. With his beaten leather jacket, he looked like a beatnik French philosopher. As has sometimes been remarked, I looked more like Harry Potter. We became lifelong friends . . . and got up to mischief.

      The Guardian Nick and I joined had been around for 158 years.

      The Manchester Guardian started life as a small start-up in 1821. Its intention was almost purely altruistic. Its founders had no ambition to reap huge profits from it. It was imagined as a piece of public service. Somehow – amazingly, mystifyingly, staggeringly – it remained a venture devoted to that public service of news more than a century and a half later. It existed to ask questions, to bear witness and to offer forthright (and anonymous) opinion.

      There was no great business model for serious, awkward, enquiring journalism in 1821, any more than there was in 2015 when I left the paper, 194 years into its existence. But most of the time – buttressed by advertising and subsidy from other companies within family or trust ownership – the paper struggled through, with occasional crises along the way.

      Its founder, John Edward Taylor, was a Manchester businessman and advocate of parliamentary reform who had been present at what became known as the Peterloo Massacre. On 16 August 1819, in St Peter’s Square, Manchester, a 60,000-strong unarmed crowd gathered to hear a speech by a great radical orator, Henry Hunt, who believed in some very dangerous things: equal rights, universal suffrage, parliamentary reform, an end to child labour and so forth.

      Fearing that Hunt would stir the crowd to some form of insurrection, the city’s magistrates ordered in the yeomanry, who literally cut their way to the platform on which Hunt was speaking in order to arrest him. Numerous men, women and children were treated for fractures, sabre cuts and gunshot wounds. More than 400 people were injured and 11 were killed. It was all over in ten minutes. The story of the day led to a great poem, ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, by Shelley (‘Rise like lions after slumber . . . Ye are many – they are few’).

      The historian E.P. Thompson described the decision facing the authorities on that day in his 1963 book, The Making of the English Working Class: ‘Old Corruption faced the alternatives of meeting the reforms with repression or concession. But concession, in 1819, would have meant concession to a largely working-class reform movement: the middle-class reformers were not yet strong enough (as they were in 1832) to offer a more moderate line of advance. This is why Peterloo took place.’

      The term ‘fake news’ had not yet been invented. But Taylor, standing on the edge of the carnage, knew what to expect. The official authorities would tell lies about the day. They would claim they were acting in self-defence; they had been attacked by the mob and had drawn their swords as a desperate last measure.

      The one national reporter on the scene, the Times’s John Tyas, ended the day in captivity (or sanctuary) and was unable to file a story. Knowing this, Taylor wrote his own report and got it swiftly to London. It was printed in the Times on the morning of 18 August, two days later. The story marked, in the words of one writer, the ‘birth of the public reporter in English public life’.¹

      By the following day’s edition Tyas was free to file his own eyewitness account and the Times went to town, filling more than two broadsheet pages.

      In the volume of space devoted to the massacre you can feel the editor of the Times, Thomas Barnes, grappling with how anyone could establish the truth. Would people naturally trust the word of one reporter over that of the magistrates? Would readers be more convinced if there were multiple accounts broadly corroborating one version? In addition to its own reporting the paper went in for two techniques that became routine in the early twenty-first century – aggregation and crowdsourcing.

      The aggregation took the form of excerpts from other local papers’ reports of the day. The crowdsourcing came from a petition and from numerous ‘private letters’ similar to Taylor’s. They painted a confusing picture, but the accumulation of evidence overwhelmingly demonstrated that the crowd had behaved peacefully and there was no possible justification for the violence meted out.

      Taylor understood the importance of facts – and also predicted that the facts of the day would be contested, and litigated, for months, if not years. He wanted to place on record ‘facts, undeniable and decisive . . . truths which are impossible to gainsay’.

      He was entirely right. The authorities pushed back hard, creating a set of ‘alternative facts’ around the events of the day: they claimed to have witnessed pikes dipped in blood and torrents of stones and bricks thrown at the troops. The speakers on the day were later arrested and jailed by the same magistrates who had ordered the violence. Thanks to Taylor’s quick response ‘within two days all England knew of the event’, says Thompson. ‘Within a week every detail of the massacre was being canvassed in ale-houses, chapels, workshops, private houses.’ And, thanks to the public reporting of the facts of the day, Thompson was able to write in 1963: ‘Never since Peterloo has authority dared to used equal force against a peaceful British crowd.’

      Peterloo is as good an illustration as any as to why good journalism is necessary. Nearly 200 years later, in the early days of the Trump presidency, the Washington Post expressed the same motivating ideal with the slogan: ‘Democracy dies in darkness’. The New York Times, faced with an administration in 2017 that cared little for the distinction between facts and falsehoods, marketed itself with the words: ‘Truth is hard to find. But easier with 1,000+ journalists looking.’

      Power needs witnesses. Witnesses need to be able to speak freely to an audience. The truth can only follow on from agreed facts. Facts can only be agreed if they can be openly articulated, tested . . . and contested. That process of statement and challenge helps something like the truth to emerge. From truth can come progress. In the absence of this daylight, bad things will almost certainly happen. The acts of bearing witness and establishing facts can lead to positive reform. By the start of the twenty-first century these might – in relatively enlightened democracies – seem unremarkable statements, but 200 years ago these were comparatively new propositions.

      Taylor

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