The Daily Novel

 

 Today is a wonderful day for examining news priorities in the British press because there is a plethora of good stories according to the news criteria which journalists use. A huge contrast to some of those Sundays I spent working at The Times, when you were still scratching around for a story weighty enough for the Page One lead when the final deadline was hours away.

 

Consider the rich possibilities facing journalists yesterday when they prepared today’s newspapers. (This analysis is done on the newspaper web sites this morning but mostly the web choices are precisely the same as those available last night when the printed versions went to bed.)

 

There was an entirely fresh coming back from the dead story that is even better than the highly popular television fiction story of Reginald Perrin. John Darwin, 57, who was last seen paddling out to sea in his canoe in 2002, turned up alive and well in the north of England. He was arrested by the police, because according to several newspaper reports, his life insurance had just been cashed in, and his wife had recently sold her house and emigrated to Panama. Again, according to newspaper reports, he has spent the intervening years living with other women. This information is not in the official police statement and I have no way of knowing whether the newspapers got their stories from police leaks or talks with the couple and their friends.

 

Also new was a video shown on Arabic television of British hostages who have not been heard of for several months and are now under a death threat from their captors. And a report from the American intelligence services that Iran was nowhere near to developing a nuclear weapons capacity. This story was given extra legs later in the day when President Bush went on television and told the nation that, despite what his own spooks told him, he still believed that Iran was still a nuclear threat, leaving us all to go on worrying lest he start another major war before he leaves office.

 

Then there was the publication of the official enquiry into the crash of the Nimrod aircraft in Iraq, which caused the biggest loss of life in the British military in one incident since the Second World War. The report blamed a fuel leak which raises important questions about this was due to a fault in the plane or cost cutting exercises which have reduced the frequency of inspections.

 

Added to this were new developments of varying degrees of importance in stories that have been running for some time. The most recent of these was the story of Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher jailed in the Sudan for naming a teddy bear ‘Mohammed’. The tearful reunion with her family yesterday was the lead item on BBC Television news last night. But no space was found for her on today’s front pages. The hard news that she had received a presidential pardon and was on a plane back to the UK had been in yesterday’s papers.

 

What does appear on some of the morning front pages are much longer running stories, like the disappearance of the McCann child on a Spanish holiday. For months now the newspapers have been speculating as to whether she was abducted or whether she was accidentally killed by her own parents. The Spanish police still do not know the answer, but apparently they have warned the parents that they might be called in to answer more questions. Then there is the problems in the British mortgage market which have led to the multi-million bail out of Northern Rock by the Bank of England. And of course the running story of the illegal contributions to Labour Party funds, and who knew about it.

 

So what did the British newspapers choose from this embarrassment of rich stories?

 

Starting with the tabloids.

 

The Sun led with the now-alive canoeist, with the McCann follow-up in second place and the Iraq hostages in third place. The Daily Mirror made exactly the same first two choices, but chose the Iran nuclear story as number three. The Daily Express led on the McCann story with a very weak follow up on Labour Party funds in second place. The Daily Mail led on the canoeist but chose a story about the love life of one of the contestants in the television programme, ‘I’m a celebrity get me out of here’ for number two. Their number three choice was about a sperm donor to a lesbian couple who is now being asked to support the child, because the lesbians have separated. All one can say about this story is that it fits in with the Daily Mail love of traditional marriage and its dislike of gays and lesbians.

 

So now for the interesting part of this analysis, what did the other papers who claim to prioritise on the serious business of what news is in the public interest, rather than slavishly follow what interests the public, do?

 

The Times led with the canoeist which by any stretch of the imagination is human interest rather than hard news. In second place it chose a story about GPs involved in ’secret’ tests performing their own abortions. This is a serious story but whether it rates front page scare treatment is highly doubtful. I cannot see anything wrong with GPs doing abortions though it will obviously be upsetting for any  Christian fundamentalist who is against any abortions. So maybe in highlighting it The Times was seeking at bow to the Almighty or to owner Rupert Murdoch, who is one of the Christian faithful.

 

In number three place The Times has the hostage story, strong on human interest, but which also has weighty implications since it relates to the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq. In fourth place was the Iran nuclear story, which is serious news by any yardstick. Likewise their number five story on mortgages, which although it is a ‘boring’ money story relates to fears about house prices and the economy and which, if the Government does not get it right, will lead to downfall of Gordon Brown and his cabinet.

 

The Daily Telegraph, which has been accused of dumbing down under its new young editor (now editor in chief) Will Lewis, actually led with a mortgage story. The number two story was the tabloid classic canoe story, but the next two were equally heavy, Nimrod and Iran nuclear.

 

The Guardian was out on its own with a story based on some digging by its own journalists into charitable trusts into which the banks have channelled £234 billion but which apparently have given nothing to charity. This story is necessarily highly complex but it suggests, what many economic commentators have been saying, that the Northern Rock debacle is only the tip of the iceberg in mortgage story. Northern Rock is one of many banks which have encouraged many house purchasers to take out much bigger mortgages than they can afford.

 

The next three stories, hostages, Iran and abortions, were all totally serious, but in The Guardian was guilty of tabloidisation by putting the canoeist in the number five slot.

 

The Independent, which devotes the whole of its printed front page to one story, chose to do a think piece on the state of the British economy, examining the likely effect of the mortgage crisis amongst many other factors which are causing economists to worry that we are due for a quite serious recession. But even The Independent has to take account of what interests the public (to survive someone has to buy the paper!) and it gives the canoeist the number two slot.

 

For the record I should include The Financial Times, although it is primarily a business paper. It leads on mortgages and has the Iran nuclear story second.

 

Equally interesting is what the heavy newspapers did not prioritise, the news that Andy Hayman, 49, the head of the police anti-terrorist squad. He resigned yesterday because of an investigation by the intrepid journalists of Channel 4 News, which carried the story in detail last night. They had discovered that Hayman had sent 400 text messages to a female member of the Independent Police Complaints Commission, while it was investigating the shooting of  Charles de Menezes, the young Brazilian who was shot by police in 2005 after the July 5 bombing.

 

From what I have learnt from this morning’s reports it seems that Hayman was guilty of love sickness rather than an attempt to improperly influence an investigation but there are still many unanswered questions. Which journalists, as well as the IPCC and the government, will want to find answers for. And these questions will create even more pressure on the head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Ian Blair, who has steadfastly refused to resign over the Stockwell blunders.

 

Which is not good news. Because the nation is waiting with baited breath for the Metropolitan police to get on with enquiry into the legality of the behaviour of Labour Party officials and ministers over the money given them by the colourful Newcastle businessman, David Abrahams.

 

The police have a difficult job to do. And so do the journalists. Fleet Street’s finest could not do much with the Hayman story last night, because they had not got all the information which Channel 4 Television had unearthed. But I hope some of them are working on it today. Who runs the Met and how they go about their work is near the top of the scale on my yardstick for serious public interest stories.