Peter Wilby is strangely reassured by howlers from Fleet Street's "golden age"
Wherever old journalists gather together - and I would guess the same is true of old chartered accountants or old lumberjacks - they lament declining standards. The headlines used to be better, the writing more literate, the report- ing more accurate, the content more weighty. Having examined an array of front pages from the past century in an exhibition at the British Library, I'm not so sure.
"Titanic goes down. Everyone safe," proclaimed the Daily Mirror in April 1912. Other headlines dug the paper into an ever-deeper hole: "Passengers taken off"; "No lives in danger"; "Morning of suspense ends in message of relief".
Then there was the Daily Express in 1938, after the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, had met Hitler at Munich. The single word "Peace!" dominated the front page and, in a bold strap, the paper declared that "Britain will not be involved in a European war this year, or next year". A sub-head obscurely added: "Surrender less than Hitler plan." The Express further comforted its readers, who had been trying on gas masks for weeks, by reporting that the British Legion would help police the settlement. This information was attributed to "well-informed sources" in Berlin which we can assume were close to Hitler, as the Führer had long argued - to the hilarity of British ambassadors - that the SS was no different from, say, the Salvation Army. Then, as now, newspapers readily fell for spin.
The truth is that they have always muddled along, sacrificing accuracy for speed, judgement for impact, and scepticism for the wish to appear in the know. Very little is really new, including the celebrity culture. The exhibition cleverly juxtaposes a Daily Graphic front page of September 1908, devoted wholly to Winston Churchill's wedding (Churchill being then a Boer war hero as well as a Liberal minister), with a Sun front page from 1999, featuring the Beckhams' wedding. Newspaper photographers were banned from the church on both occasions - in the Beckhams' case, because the rights had been sold exclusively to OK! magazine. The Graphic used an artist's impression; the Sun got a fuzzy sneak shot. The two don't look all that different.
Royal tittle-tattle existed in 1937 as it does now. The Mail reported it in the most extra- ordinarily crafty way. The day after the Hindenburg airship blew up ("100 dead" was the splash headline, showing the familiar press weakness for round figures that turn out to be nearly three times the true death toll), the Mail front page also featured a Mr R R Hyde, a director of the Industrial Welfare Society, addressing the Industrial Co-Partnership Association. Hyde mysteriously chose this occasion to "refute" (confusion over the meaning of that much-abused verb isn't new either) unpublished "calumnies" about the royal family, including suggestions that George VI's daughters - the present Queen and her late sister, Margaret - were deaf, dumb or imbecile. "Only yesterday at my club," complained Hyde, "I was asked if the King was epileptic."
Also very old are "embedded" reporters, who struggle for anything resembling accuracy and even-handedness in war reporting. After the Battle of the Somme (1916), in which 19,000 British troops were killed on the first day alone, the Daily Sketch carried a picture of "our lads" (yes, they were called that even then) joyfully waving their helmets, above the caption "the glorious Advance". The Sketch insisted that it proved "the wonderful stories of our war correspondents . . . were not exaggerated. The camera shows you the spirit of our men."
Yet some things have changed. In April 1968, the News of the World devoted most of its front page to warnings of civil war in the United States after the assassination of Martin Luther King. It might do the same now. It certainly wouldn't allow that day's other main story, an account of "uproar" in the Pembrokeshire Labour Party, anywhere near the front.
Something else, to the 21st-century eye, is even more striking. Even when big events occurred - as was the case for all the front pages shown in the exhibition - a paper might have a dozen or more other stories on the front. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, the Express had 18 stories, half of them from overseas. It is said that newspapers no longer pur- vey information because it is so easily available through other media. But it is hard to believe that the kind of news that packed the papers in 1957 - not all of it inconsequential - could easily be found anywhere on the internet.
One reason why the Express could cram so much news on the front in 1957 was that it was still a broadsheet paper. That didn't stop it clearing the page to make an impact. At George VI's funeral in 1952, the whole front page, save for a single left-hand column, was given to a deep picture under the headline "The three stand alone". It showed Elizabeth II with her mother and grandmother, dressed in black from head to toe, their faces etched with what might have been grief but might equally have been agon- ised thought about the abrupt changes in their roles. The effect was stunning, and nothing like it could have been achieved with a tabloid or a Berliner. The same applies to the Daily Telegraph's "War on America" front page of 12 September 2001, which BBC Newsnight viewers voted the winner from among those exhibited. Yet the Telegraph is now the only national white broadsheet on the market.
As this absorbing exhibition constantly reminds us, progress is a funny thing.
"Front Page: celebrating 100 years of the British newspaper (1906-2006)" is at the British Library, London NW1 (www.bl.uk or 020 7412 7222) until 8 October
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