It was an utterly shocking allegation. The child's features, the newspaper claimed, bore a striking relationship to his powerful father. The mother was young and attractive, and worked in the father's employ. “It is well known that the man … has kept [her as] his concubine.” A scandal-sheet tale of Arnold Schwarzenegger's love child with Mildred Baena, his one-time maid? Or perhaps a reference to the daughter sired by John Edwards, a man recently within reach of the White House, via his campaign aide, Rielle Hunter?
Actually, neither. The story, published in 1802 in the Richmond Recorder, was an account of then-U.S. president Thomas Jefferson's illicit and clandestine relationship with his black slave, Sally Hemings. The shocking charge of miscegenation (not adultery, since Mr. Jefferson's wife, Martha, had died) was vehemently denied at the time, and only recently substantiated by DNA testing.
Often called the father of the Declaration of Independence, Mr. Jefferson apparently did not restrict the scope of his paternity. Most historians now believe he fathered as many as six children by Ms. Hemings.
The Recorder's historic exercise in muckraking is worth recalling amid the sanctimonious fulmination that greets every new revelation of wrongdoing in Rupert Murdoch's besieged media empire.
The outrage, of course, is justified. The ethics displayed by his British weekly News of the World were deplorable. Hacking cell phones, blagging to obtain private bank account data, bribing police officers, the Royal Family's retinue and other informants – such practices should be condemned in the harshest possible terms. Mr. Murdoch's newsrooms seem to have fostered an ethos of cavalier criminality.
But silence, please, the gathering chorus calling for curbs on traditional press freedoms. The hacking affair needs a much broader perspective, one that recognizes the not invaluable role that tabloids have played in Western society.
‘Not to instruct, but to startle'
For starters, any honest post-mortem would acknowledge historical reality: There is nothing new here.
Forty years before the Richmond Recorder's exposé of President Jefferson, British journalist John Wilkes was scandalizing London by savaging King George III in the pages of The North Briton. Mr. Wilkes and 49 others were arrested; his name ultimately became synonymous with liberty and an inspiration to the American Revolution.
In the U.S., the gutter press made its debut in the 1830s with the New York Sun and The Herald. The Sun – trumpeting the demotic slogan, “it shines for all” – once published six articles claiming there was life on the moon, all pure fiction. The Herald was owned by former schoolmaster James Bennett, who unashamedly declared that newspapers ought “not to instruct, but to startle.” He was good to his word: An early front-page story recounted the lurid details of a prostitute's murder.
The American apex of yellow journalism – so-called because one paper featured a cartoon character swathed in yellow ink – pitted Joseph Pulitzer's New York World against William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, the screaming-headline ancestors of News of the World. Then as now, it was all about money, otherwise known as circulation. During the Spanish-American War, the two papers were constantly upping the sensationalism ante.
A generation later, in Britain, the owners of the Daily Mail (Lord Rothmere) and Daily Express (Lord Beaverbrook) went further. They not only used their papers to propagandize, but created and funded political parties to campaign for their favoured causes. Compared to their interference in public affairs, Rupert Murdoch's meddling seems restrained.
“All of us like to discover the secrets of our neighbours, particularly the ugly ones,” W.H. Auden observed. “This has always been so, and, probably, always will be.”
The tabloid, in short, is the inevitable merger of rumour and the printing press. They probably had one in ancient Sumer – the Ur-tab, written in cuneiform, documenting rumours of kickbacks Nebuchadnezzar II's ministers received while building the Hanging Gardens. (The word tabloid itself, meaning pill-like, was coined by a 19th-century British company, Burroughs Wellcome, to describe its shrunken-sized tablets with condensed medicinal powders; it describes the compact size of these papers compared to traditional broadsheets.)
Only one aspect of the tawdry News of the World story is actually new – technology. The cellphone, a portable, audio diary of conversations and contacts, constitutes an inviting gold mine for competitive, news-hungry reporters.
Worse, it's hugely vulnerable. Accessing its content remotely is mere child's play. Why did Mr. Murdoch's writers and editors do what they did? On one level, the answer is simply because they could.
Any honest analysis of the current scandal would also allow that sensationalism isn't confined to the world of print journalism. We all live, immersed, in a yellow, tabloid submarine. For better or worse, mainly worse, it's our new normal. The tabloid mentality now runs amok: shock-talk TV and radio, Internet gossip sites, and if-it-bleeds-it-leads TV newscasts.
The culture is permeated with artifice – reality-TV shows, Photoshopped images, voice corrected, lipsynched performers, surgically enhanced starlets, drug-assisted athletes.
Speaking for the rest of us
The stories published by tabloids are mostly innocuous and often entertaining. Cheap, salacious rumour? No doubt. But as American philosopher Emrys Westacott has argued, gossip can pay social benefits, restraining abuses of power.
The appeal, if not the charm, of British tabloids has been their willingness to threaten the rich and the powerful – unfaithful politicians, corrupt athletes and vain celebrities (the nouns and adjectives are interchangeable)
Saying what others might think but decline to say, they speak effectively for the underdog. Their narrow, laser-sharp focus is aimed squarely on passion and betrayal, great fires of the human engine. For generations, their largely working-class constituency has voted with their wallets, yielding circulation figures that dwarf those of the more respectable broadsheets.
“What you have to remember,” says Ed Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, “is that popular papers in the United Kingdom were a reaction to the establishment press, which served the ruling class, had clear partisan orientations and only allowed elite points of view to be expressed.”
Effectively, says Mr. Wasserman, the tabloids “speak for the rest of us.”
Did News of the World reach too far, hacking the cellphone of murdered schoolgirl Millie Dowler? No doubt.
But in a world of Facebook friends, YouTube videos and Twitter feeds everyone, as Andy Warhol predicted, in a sense becomes a public figure, and thus fair game for the hovering paparazzi and aptly named hack reporters.
“It's the democratization of celebrity,” says Mr. Wasserman. “People are outraged because the same techniques once used to pursue Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles are being applied to ordinary people.”
Stories no one else will tell
And here's another fact too seldom conceded: While their investigative methods may be suspect, tabloid journalists frequently break important stories the mainstream press is reluctant to pursue.
It was the much-scorned National Enquirer that disclosed former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards's extramarital affair and paternity. It was conservative blogger Matt Drudge who revealed Bill Clinton's Oval Office dalliance with Monica Lewinsky.
The argument that the private lives of politicians should be off limits to the press is absurd. Positions on foreign and domestic policy matter, but so, too, does character. Surely voters are entitled to know whether seemingly respectable aspirants to the highest offices in the land are in fact rogues, liars and adulterers.
The truth may be out there, but it is usually well hidden. Every journalist's job is to find it, by all legal means possible. News of the World's Mazher Mahmood adopted false identities to expose fixing scandals in soccer, snooker and cricket, as well as marital infidelity and drug habits. In Germany, investigative journalist Gunter Wallruff went undercover to document the miserable conditions of Turkish guest works.
Indeed, where the tabloid press really has failed, argues University of Sheffield journalism professor Martin Conboy, is in its coverage of the bigger picture. It will divulge the hypocrisies of the wealthy and powerful, but often seems “totally oblivious to structural elements. It will expose individual drug use, but do nothing about the underlying social conditions that lead to drug abuse.”
But would we be better off if Mr. Murdoch's malaise provided grounds for restricting the media's scope of inquiry? Far from it. For all its sins, a muscular, independent press remains vital to the maintenance of a robust democracy. An unfettered press keeps governments and politicians in check. And journalists, too: Were it not for resourceful investigations undertaken by The Guardian and The New York Times, the News of the World's appalling behaviour might never have come to light.
Absent a free and vigorous press, society would be poorer and weaker – not simply less well informed, but more vulnerable. It is not for nothing that America's founding father saw fit to enshrine freedom of the press in the first amendment of the constitution. It was Thomas Jefferson himself who wrote in 1786: “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press. And that cannot be limited without being lost. … [It] can never be constrained, but by a despotic government.” And that went even for the Richmond Recorder.
So by all means, bring the full weight of the law to bear on criminal wrongdoing at News of the World and elsewhere. But be wary of the indiscriminate muzzle. It will silence and suffocate us all.
Origin
Source: Globe & Mail
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