The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  It was not difficult to understand why many thought the paper was lowering its standards when the front page became the least decorously laid out part of the whole paper. Given how impenetrable the front page of Douglas-Home’s Times had been, this shift was not entirely for the worse. For those of an aesthetic disposition, though, one newcomer really did lower the neighbourhood’s tone. The placing of a puff strapline above (or periodically below) The Times masthead was intended to draw the attention of non-committed passers-by to interesting features buried in the pages within. That The Times’s rivals all adopted the same approach suggested they too saw the commercial necessity of selling their product’s internal wares more openly. At The Times, the process began in earnest in 1988 as a means of demonstrating the increasing variety of sections contained within the Saturday paper. With Peter Stothard’s arrival in the editor’s chair, the practice became a daily occurrence. What was more, the width of the puff band expanded and eventually its superimposed images began to burst beyond the strap boundaries. Suddenly, the elegant lettering of The Times masthead, with its Hanoverian coat of arms, was daily jostled by the raised arm of an ecstatic footballer or the bald head of a cartoon character. Like a famous department store taking lessons in shop-window display from an out-of-town supermarket, this did nothing for the dignity of the paper.

  These were questions of style and, perhaps, taste. But what had become of the substance? Had The Times really reduced the quantity or quality of its content as its critics alleged? The popular perception, reinforced by media pundits like Stephen Glover, was that the greatest period of dumbing down occurred during Peter Stothard’s editorship when the paper’s circulation doubled. Not everyone believed gaining more readers was good for The Times’s mental health. This was the same ‘more will mean worse’ argument that had animated Kingsley Amis’s denunciation of expanding the number of universities and students in 1960 (a process that had subsequently grown the ‘quality’ newspaper market). At The Times, there was certainly more. The paper’s circulation had gone up not only by lowering the price hurdle for purchasers but also by expanding the coverage it provided. There were over four million column centimetres of journalism (excluding advertisements and inserts) in The Times during 1992. In 2002, the figure had jumped to nearly 6.7 million column centimetres. Thus, The Times of 2002 had over 2.5 million more column centimetres of journalistic material in the year Peter Stothard departed the editorship than when he took up the position.4 This was a substantial increase. Home news had increased from 625,929 column centimetres in 1992 to 923,551 in 2002. European and world news had increased during the same period from 348,042 to 397,049. This was a less spectacular jump but nonetheless ran counter to the popular assertion that The Times had reduced its international coverage over the years. The business pages – hardly a ‘dumb’ section of the paper – had risen by more than 60 per cent. Sport had recorded an even more spectacular growth.

  Soure: Author’s calculations based on data from Nielsen Media Research.5

  The raw numbers, of course, did not tell the whole story. The issue was not just one of quantity but of quality. The space devoted to home news doubled over the decade but some of this increase was accounted for not by more intensive political or investigative journalism but by an increasing predilection for ‘human interest’ stories. These might range from salacious disclosures in the High Court involving some private tragedy or a celebrity divorce to the sort of ‘fancy that?’ style of story that could be summed up in the headline ‘Long day for Santas but that’s ho ho ho business’.6 The number of stories involving animals showed a marked rise. This development was put down by some to Stothard’s interest in wildlife. The tone of these animal and human interest articles was often whimsical and they shed a light on some aspect of British eccentricity that might otherwise have gone unrecorded. Occasionally, the focus looked more prurient. Personal tragedies tended to make for better stories if accompanied by a picture of the dead/missing/pregnant teenager. The photograph was larger if the victim was pretty or middle class. When critics derided the journalistic quality of The Times, it was often this sort of reporting they had in mind. Against such observations, two points need to be made. First, such articles were usually supplementing, rather than replacing, the more traditional news items. Second, the idea that The Times’s role was to report the machinations of the powerful and influential but to ignore stories about ordinary people living and working beyond the metropolitan elite, suggested a rather narrow interest in the world in all its variety and diversity. The paper was there to appeal to and reflect a large community, not behave as if its constituency was a nineteenth-century rotten borough.

  It was possible to exaggerate the extent to which ‘human interest’ stories were taking a hold of the paper, although the impression was helped by the increasing likelihood of their being placed in the front few pages of the main section rather than further back. A reader trying to locate Peter Riddell’s political commentary had first to flick through several pages in which the small type of the news articles made less visual impact than the outsize photographs of the actress Kate Winslet smiling from a red carpet or the entertainer Michael Barrymore looking troubled. This did give the impression that the paper had a populist sense of priorities. It was certainly a change from The Times of former decades. The front news pages of the 1970s and early 1980s contained tightly packed political stories. Yet, on closer inspection, a significant proportion of the political news in The Times of that period was the work of the labour desk. Edition after edition was packed with news of strikes, industrial problems and successive governments’ attempts to intervene in them. These stories became a casualty not of an editorial decision but of their increasing infrequency once the Thatcher reforms began to have their effect on changing the climate of Britain’s industrial relations and depoliticizing the disputes that remained. Consequently, the work of successive industrial correspondents, Edward Townsend and Ross Tieman, and industrial editors, Derek Harris, Philip Bassett and Christine Buckley, increasingly appeared not in the news pages but in the business section.

  Much of the shift of industrial/political stories from news to business happened during the 1980s. A different rebalancing of power was responsible for the reduction of other political news stories in the 1990s. In the home news section of the paper, the coverage of British politics and Parliament halved between 1992 and 2002. In drawing comparisons, it should be remembered that 1992, unlike 2002, was a general election year. However, by 1992 Simon Jenkins’s decision to terminate the parliamentary page had already been made. Saving money was not the only reason behind his decision to do away with the paper’s attempt to provide readers with a potted version of Hansard. Reporting the legislature’s debates made sense in the past but its relevance had ebbed as far as contemporary politics was concerned. Britain was increasingly governed not from the chambers of the Houses of Parliament but – as Jenkins well comprehended – from Downing Street, Whitehall, a multitude of quangoes and through EU directives and regulations emanating from Brussels. From a journalistic perspective, this created problems: these other governmental organizations were not as transparent as the Palace of Westminster and publishing on-the-record information was more difficult. This did have a deleterious effect on the comprehensiveness of political reporting.

  By 2002, The Times had five journalists lurking around Westminster’s precincts where twenty years earlier it employed twelve just to report the Commons debates for the Parliament page. Nonetheless, when parliamentary politics most mattered, such as on key Commons divisions or in political crises, The Times’s coverage was as comprehensive as it had ever been. Nobody reading it during Peter Stothard’s tenure could have complained there was insufficient coverage of the European debate. The reporting and analysis of Budget statements became increasingly detailed. Peter Riddell had as good a feel for the business of government as any of the paper’s past political editors. Indeed, on closer inspection the supposed past ‘golden
age’ tarnished easily. In terms of general election coverage, The Times had improved remarkably over the last half-century. In the run-up to the 1951 general election, The Times offered only one page a day (it was then only a twelve-page paper) of reports on the coming election. A week before polling day in February 1974, it had expanded sufficiently to provide election reports on the front page and on one and a half pages inside, supplemented with Op-Ed and leader page comment (out of a total paper of twenty-eight-pages). By comparison, during the 1997 general election campaign, the fifty-six-page Times was regularly committing eight pages of coverage every day in addition to a level of in-depth scrutiny, outside specialists’ analysis and interviews that was simply unimaginable a quarter of, let alone half, a century before.

  Nor was the reporting of general elections a rare aberration against the trend. The average Times edition of 1951 only devoted half a page to home news and two-thirds of a page to foreign news. The business section ran to three columns. Far from being the repository of fine writing, most of the content was short ‘news in brief’-style articles for which the source was usually information provided by wire services and official announcements. Analysis was largely restricted to the anonymous proclamations of the leading articles. By 1974, The Times was moving much closer to the paper of 2002 in its approach to news gathering and content. Yet, even allowing for a format that crammed more words onto the page (and was consequently harder to read), its offering was much more narrowly focused than what was made available by the paper edited by Peter Stothard.

  Much of The Times’s historic reputation had been built on the strength of its foreign reporting. It was, after all, the paper of William Howard Russell, Henri de Blowitz and Louis Heren. During the 1980s and 1990s the main allegation against the overseas reporting was less that it had dumbing down by introducing too many human interest stories so much as that it had simply lost its authority. Such a charge was, necessarily, a matter of opinion and, with hindsight, it was not clear what was so impressive about a paper’s past judgment that backed appeasing Hitler in the 1930s and Stalin in the 1940s. Naturally, there were those who believed appeasing Israel and taking a tough line on the Arab states were mistaken opinions adopted by the modern paper although the foreign desk received far more – often abusive – calls from readers who were convinced the paper was too critical of successive Israeli governments. All the paper could do was assess the situation to the best of its ability and, having taken every effort to establish the facts, stand by what it reported.

  In the areas where the paper’s foreign coverage could be quantified, there was no question that it had improved since its acquisition by News International. The paper’s foreign news coverage took up more space in the first years of the twenty-first century than at any period in its history. It also had more foreign correspondents reporting from around the globe than at any previous time. Even after taking account of inflation and other increments, the resources the company ploughed into foreign news reporting dwarfed what had been invested in previous decades. Such was the financial squeeze pursued by the Thomson management that when one of the paper’s most experienced foreign correspondents, David Watts, joined The Times in 1974, he discovered that the foreign desk staff were forbidden from making international telephone calls, even when in direct pursuit of a story. Instead, they had to wait for a possible informant to call them. A paper riding on its reputation for foreign coverage was temporarily reduced to a policy that could only be described as ‘call us, we won’t call you’. Unsurprisingly, in Watts’s opinion, the quality of the paper’s foreign journalism had improved immeasurably over the succeeding thirty years.7

  When The Times had been understaffed and underresourced during the Astor and Thomson proprietorships, great reliance had been placed on the reports arriving from the news agency wire services. The result was that, on almost any given day, the paper carried brief news reports from a wide variety of different countries. Details even of a relatively minor change in the Sudanese cabinet might appear. This gave the impression of a paper devoted to publishing the detailed business of government from countries large and small. Peregrine Worsthorne once lovingly recalled that as a trainee foreign sub at The Times in the late 1940s he had been given a dressing down for failing to spot a minor mistake in the published list of the Sudanese government’s new members – the junior minister of posts’ name had been inaccurately rendered from the Arabic. To Worsthorne, this episode demonstrated how much a paper that once prided itself on its accuracy had subsequently lowered its standards. Yet the incident also highlights the extent to which The Times’s foreign reporting often comprised little more than copying verbatim (with or without mistakes) an official press release. In what respect was this insightful journalism? The Times of the 1990s certainly contained fewer references to the intricacies of the Khartoum regime’s musical chairs and, in this sense, the paper could be accused of being less of an international journal of record. But those who really needed to know the identity of the current junior minister responsible for Sudan’s postal service could far more easily contact its embassy or find it out through an internet search rather than hope it might be listed somewhere in The Times that day. The notion that the paper’s primary role in the 1990s should still have been – as Worsthorne comprehended it half a century earlier – to provide the ‘essential information needed by the then governing and administrative classes to carry out their official duties’ was one that technology had comprehensively superseded.

  In fact, the unvarnished statements that comprised so much of The Times’s international coverage in the 1940s and 1950s had not been entirely abolished fifty years later. The old agency wire-based tradition continued in the ‘news in brief’ columns running down the margins of the page and this left most of the expanse of paper for much longer and more perceptive articles than had been the vogue in the past. Such changes called upon the expertise of far more reporters filing from the countries they were actually writing about (and using knowledgeable local stringers where necessary). David Watts’s understanding of the complexity of the Asia-Pacific countries, Roger Boyes’s reports from central and Eastern Europe, Richard Owen in Rome and Charles Bremner in Paris all combined to provide a deep knowledge of their adopted countries with a fluid and engaging writing style. This was something The Times of previous generations often lacked. Indeed, as Worsthorne pointed out, ‘the most important qualification for being a journalist when I began fifty years ago was not an ability to write’. Such was The Times’s aversion to analysis rather than the straight repetition of published information that ‘intellectuals, therefore, were frowned upon as well as writers’.8 In retrospect, foreign reporting in The Times has become a far more sophisticated profession. Aside from covering political developments, correspondents have also been given the space to paint in their articles a ‘slice of life’ from the countries and cultures that are their speciality. Such insights were rarely accorded to Times readers back in the ‘golden age’. Where the focus remains narrowly political, innovations like Bronwen Maddox’s daily ‘Foreign Editor’s Briefing’, instituted in 2001, greatly enhanced the paper’s breadth of international analysis. Anyone interested in comparing The Times then and now need only look at its coverage of the signing on 25 March 1957 of the Treaty of Rome, which, in creating the EEC, was one of the most important political developments of the twentieth century. The event was accorded one news item, on column six of the foreign news page (page eight), under the headline ‘Further steps in uniting Europe’. There was no picture (the photograph used that day was of voters going to the polls in Belize) and, in order of priorities, it was accorded the fifth most important priority status on that day’s page. About half of its 350-word commentary was taken up listing the names of the signatories and describing the décor of the hall in which the agreement was reached. No unaware reader would have understood why the German Chancellor was prophesying it to be ‘a historic date in European affairs’.9 Nor would the reader have bee
n any the wiser seeking elucidation in other pages of the paper. The leading article that day decided the passage of the Shops Bill in the House of Lords was more worthy of its attention. Indeed, apart from one brief article on 11 March and a reprinting – without comment or analysis of any kind – of the basic provisions in the agreement on 20 March, The Times failed utterly in the months either side of the Treaty’s signing to bother with the story of the EEC’s creation even although it was clearly regarded on the Continent as a development of the utmost significance. Judged by such slipshod standards, it is the foreign coverage of the pre-Murdoch Times that appears surprisingly dumbed down.

  A year after News International’s purchase, the fortunes of the paper’s business section had fallen markedly. For the next fifteen years, successive business editors were unable to regain the level of coverage that The Times business news had provided in the 1970s. This was a period of sudden but long-lasting decline. Indeed, the notion that the paper was a serious rival to the Financial Times could not be sustained. The Times had neither the range nor the depth. By the late 1990s, however, it was clawing ground back fast. This was partly a response to investment but also a mood of optimism and professionalism that prevailed following Stothard’s appointment of Patience Wheatcroft as business editor. The improvement was rewarded in the readership statistics. One serious survey in March 2002 suggested that The Times was leading the way with business readers classified in the A-B social grades with 274,000 business readers as compared to 239,000 for the FT and 235,000 for the Daily Telegraph.10