Fayke News by Derek J Taylor, reviewed by Neil Boulton

Look it up Fayke Newes

Neil Boulton reviews…. The Media vs The Mighty from Henry VIII to Donald Trump Derek J Taylor The History Press 2018 ISBN 978 0 7509 8778 3

As the title suggests, this is a book with a contemporary resonance. Derek Taylor’s blurb says he studied law and history at Oxford, but the style and tone owe more to his career working as a correspondent for ITN, the BBC and as Chief Executive of Associated Press Television News. The story is related in the manner of an extended version of one of Jonathan Freedland’s The Long View programmes, with a certain amount of heavyhanded authorial shepherding involved. There are no notes, but in the half page of Acknowledgements, the author reckons to have ‘consulted close to a hundred books and academic papers’ and cites Phillip Knightley’s The First Casualty as worth singling out.

So it is no surprise that war is presented as the principal agent of change in this chronology. Vying with it comes technology, which allows Gutenberg primacy as an influencer, bookended by Twitter and Facebook.

The principal stages of development follow a route that takes it for granted that this is an Anglo-American journey. There are some other players who get a look-in, mainly Germans (inevitably A Hitler, a brief reference to Goebbels, and rather more on Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe), but also a decent exposure of the impact of samizdat publishing in the Soviet Union. Overall though, the big players in this struggle write and speak English, or US English.

Initially the available media dealt in gossip, three headed beasts and suchlike. Civil war, on either side of the Atlantic in successive centuries, changed the terms and conditions somewhat. So too did the relentless acceleration of the speed of communication and the nature of the democratic process. In the pre-modern era, the heroic characters anticipate Private Eye – Marchamont Nedham, John Wilkes, Isaiah Thomas, James Gillray. The contemporary villains were often off the pace, having to react, though, as the pre-modern era leads to the State, the villains eventually managed to effect a degree of control.

A case study of the Suffragette movement and the media demonstrates that it was not necessarily a one-way street.

Ironically though, the Great War gave women the vote but also the Defence of the Realm Act. The latter, along with various Official Secrets Acts, tipped the balance in favour of the mighty. National security became something of a trump card for governments, even in the USA, despite constitutional safeguards for free speech.

If government agents mainly wear black hats in this story, the media have some to offer as well. Rothermere’s appeasement enthusiasm gets appropriate coverage, and there is mention of Maxwell. Interestingly Rupert Murdoch makes a single tangential appearance and thus does not emerge as any sort of villain. Alistair Campbell seems much worse. As correctives we have C.P. Scott of the Guardian, Woodward and Bernstein of the Washington Post – though maybe that should be Bradlee and Graham – and Geoffrey Cox of ITN.

Taylor becomes understandably enthused by the onset of television as a player. Vietnam created significant challenges to the relationship between the media and the mighty. But even here the tensions between news and national security stack up in the latter’s favour. Watergate and the Dodgy Dossier might seem to have been the work of heroic reporters. But Woodward and Bernstein needed the FBI source and the Special Prosecutor to get a result, and Andrew Gilligan gets almost as much censure from the author as Alistair Campbell for their respective roles in the saga of WMD.

In the end, the Internet, essentially another product of military needs, hijacks the process, puts everyone on the back foot, and returns us to three headed beasts, gossip and alternative facts.

After what has been a quite light touch run through, Taylor concludes with some interesting suggestions about a way forward and the need for some ethics to re-enter, or perhaps enter, the equation. In sum, these amount to ‘education, education, education’. But that didn’t really end well either.

Neil Boulton read History at Oxford and was Director of Studies at Bryanston where he taught History, Economics and Politics.