UFO Info Week-End

Headlines tell us that Michael Howard will jail the Gypsy invaders

Headlines tell us that Michael Howard will “jail the Gypsy invaders”. A leader warns about “the menace of Gypsies who flout the law and despoil the countryside with their rubbish-strewn, insanitary squats”.The Express has not been alone. But rat-like cunning, one of the qualities the late Nick Tomalin listed as essential for journalistic success: shouldn’t belong exclusively to the red-tops. The great Tomalin, remember, worked for The Sunday Times.Bill Hagerty is the editor of ‘British Journalism Review’. To Michael Howard, it is “responding to people’s concerns” To Alan Milburn it is “serial opportunism”. Amazing how much more pressing people’s concerns are as a general election approaches. Amazing how opposition attitudes to council tax and immigration are opportunist when government announcements on school dinners and bus passes are not.

Elections focus the relationships between those agendas.For example, we know the Daily Express dislikes asylum-seekers, unemployed immigrants, Gypsies, Europe and New Labour. I sympathise with those who considered the story of David Beckham’s extra-marital Spanish escapades unworthy of the Scoop of the Year gong it collected. Informants have been selling information – often to the police or the security services, but to journalists, too – as long as there has been information that somebody, somewhere, didn’t want known.True, sometimes the results suggest unnecessary extravagance. Tipsters do not arbitrarily pick the name of a reporter from a media guide – The Sun’s Trevor Kavanagh, Reporter of the Year for his Hutton Report leak, has spent years cultivating contacts.Objections to “chequebook journalism” are as spurious. Most weeks one can count the number of “serious” scoops broken by the “serious” papers on the fingers of one finger. Meanwhile, at the grubby end of Grub Street, the tabloids are raking muck and blowing whistles fit to bust.Yes, often their stories are obtained by tip-off or in return for a substantial fee – methods deplored by those who appear to believe that a story ain’t a story unless an “investigative” team has spent months on it What nonsense. Nor did the BJR appreciate Geldof hijacking the presentation of our Hugh Cudlipp Award to set the vulgar tone of the evening.

But Financial Times editor Andrew Gowers’ claim of “a formal recognition in recent years that there is only a tabloid press in Britain because the judges seem to dance to their tune” is ludicrous.Gowers and The Guardian’s Alan Rusbridger say “there is no merit in handing out awards to papers which do not seek to publish truth-telling serious journalism”. This is a direct attack on the red-top tabloids (the Mail group and the new kids on the tabloid block, The Times and The Independent, cling to “compact” as if scared of catching something nasty).Yet it is the red tops, plus the Mail, that more often than not set the print journalism news agenda. It doubtless wouldn’t stop the abuse of oafs by other oafs, but at least the cries of “Not fair” and constant carping about the decisions of the judges would fade into the annual hubbub.I am no fan of the structure of the awards and said so in the British Journalism Review. But let’s not pretend that the broadsheet form of journalism is inherently superior.Peter Wilby is the editor of the ‘New Statesman’ and a former editor of ‘The Independent on Sunday’ …while Bill Hagerty finds nothing honourable in the broadsheets’ readiness to adopt tabloid agendasIf the self-styled serious press spent half the time sniffing out sensational stories as it does whining about “the tabloids”, the British Press Awards might not have the kind of form that one day could result in them being asked to assist the police with their inquiries.

But I do not think most broadsheet journalism today is significantly different.First, broadsheets are just as driven by the public relations industry as the tabloids. My friend and admirer, Dylan Jones, recently estimated that over half the content of GQ magazine, which he edits, is generated by PR. I would guess the proportion for the national press, broadsheet as well as tabloid, is higher: not just film, theatre, books and music PR but also the PR of pressure groups, unions, companies, government departments and political parties. News in the classic sense – of something that someone somewhere does not want known – is very rare indeed.Second, the broadsheets are as obsessed with personalities as the tabloids: they are just different personalities, being more often politicians, international leaders or highbrow novelists, for example. You may object that these are more important people, of greater than ephemeral interest So try this simple test. Can you remember why Stephen Byers resigned? And who won the Booker the year before last? No, nor can I.By all means reform the British Press Awards andthe prizes so that like is compared with like.

Is this journalism as traditionally understood? Probably not. On Maundy Thursday, The Sun devoted half its front page and a double page inside to Colleen McLoughlin. The big news was that McLoughlin was, er, on holiday.Like most men, I know that McLoughlin is the fianc?of Wayne Rooney, the England football prodigy, and that she was of interest because Rooney had just been in a night-club punch-up. But many days, The Sun, Mirror or Star headlines the doings of some soap star or other TV celebrity of whom I have never heard.