http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/12/07/091207crbo_books_lemann?currentPage=all
Books The Power and the Glory A newspaper legend recalls his ascent. by Nicholas Lemann December 7, 2009 Text Size: Harold Evans became a master of high-profile crusades. Twenty-five years ago, Harold Evans published a memoir called “Good Times, Bad Times,” which told about the fourteen years he spent as the editor of the London Sunday Times, and about losing his job after Rupert Murdoch bought the paper. In the memoir, he appeared as a fully formed editorial big shot, albeit one who was cruelly and unfairly knocked off his perch. In his new book, “My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times” (Little, Brown; $27.99), which is closer to a true autobiography, Evans explains how he got to be the person who fought with Murdoch in the first place. The Murdoch press likes to characterize professionally esteemed editors like Evans as liberal élitists. That line doesn’t work with Evans. He is a child of what he calls “the self-consciously respectable working class” in the urban North of England. Both of his parents, by his enthusiastically detailed account, worked like mad to make the most of themselves—his father as a train driver, his mother as the operator of a small grocery store that she created in the living room of their house, in Manchester. But their opportunities were strictly limited, because of the British class system—in particular, it was nearly impossible for working-class kids to get a real education. Evans, born in 1928, came along just in time for the advent of the supposedly progressive system that led Michael Young, the mordant British sociologist, to coin the disapproving term “meritocracy.” Evans took the eleven-plus exam and did not do well enough to place in the ten per cent of children who had good odds of going to university. Instead, he proceeded on pure drive. At sixteen, he finished school and wrote letters asking for work to every newspaper in or near Manchester (there were a lot of them). He wound up with a three-month tryout, at a pound a week, at the Ashton-under-Lyne Reporter, a relentlessly quotidian paper—“it bothered with the little things in people’s lives, the whist drives and flower shows,” Evans writes—that had thirteen local editions. Soon, Evans decided to try for college. At the time, there were fourteen English universities, and he wrote to them all, finally talking his way into the University of Durham. He presents this as his big break in life, although, as he reminds us throughout “My Paper Chase,” Durham was no Oxford when it came to credentialling purposes, even in journalism. After college, he went to the Manchester Evening News, in a period when it seemed like nearly the center of the journalistic universe; the city “simply throbbed with news day and night.” Nine years later, he was made the editor of the Northern Echo, in Darlington. All through this painstakingly recounted rise, Evans was anything but oppositional to the social order; rather, he was a Horatio Alger hero, an improver of himself and of the world around him. He learned shorthand, tutored members of the Workers’ Educational Association, and formed a society of volunteers that spent weekends clearing debris from local woodlands. He worked much longer and harder than Eliza Doolittle to learn to pronounce the letter “H.” As a journalist, he crusaded not only against wrongdoing but also for improved commerce in the North of England and for civic beautification. He had his staff produce a series about factory relocation called “They Came North to Success.” He worked to represent the interests of the provincial newspapers on the National Council for the Training of Journalists. He calls a son-et-lumière show he organized at Durham Cathedral “the single most exciting and uplifting experience of my time in Darlington, a magical marriage of North East enterprise and artistry to reflect the splendors of human faith and endeavor.” (It is impossible to imagine Evans’s closest American counterpart, the insouciantly patrician Ben Bradlee, of the Washington Post, doing any of these things.) And, at every moment, Evans, in a manner highly atypical of a member of the British chattering classes, has worshipped America as a place where “it was permissible to dream.” It’s important to understand all this about Evans in order to understand him as a journalist. During two years that he spent travelling around the United States on a Harkness Fellowship, in the mid-nineteen-fifties—he joined a long line of British journalists groomed in that way, from Alistair Cooke to Andrew Sullivan—he encountered and was impressed by investigative journalism. America didn’t have the kind of dominant national newspapers that Britain did, and the local papers were mightier and more ambitious than their counterparts in Britain. There, the national papers “preferred the rarefied air of Whitehall and Westminster,” the tabloid investigations focussed on sex, and the local papers were unremittingly mundane. Evans describes struggling to change a headline at the Northern Echo from “MISSING WEST HARTLEPOOL BOY FOUND” to “GANG OF KIDNAPPERS ON THE RUN.” Evans did push the Darlington paper into what he calls “campaigning journalism” (in Britain, the editor of a provincial paper runs both the news and the opinion pages, and serves as a kind of civic impresario, using the paper to promote causes), but these early forays were consistent with his self-consciousness as a local booster. His first big campaign was against pollution from an Imperial Chemical Industries plant, the kind of pollution that reinforced stereotypes of cities in the North as being foul and unpleasant. Another campaign was for the exoneration of a bakery-van driver who had been executed for murder, a just cause that also played to the readers’ sense that working people in the North were always being done wrong by establishment toffs, who ran the court system along with everything else. It’s important, too, that these campaigns sat atop a large and sturdy base of unglamorous, essential information that the newspapers of the North provided their readers. Journalism in Britain may not have been a profession, but it was a skilled trade in the best sense. Manchester, when Evans joined the Evening News, in 1952, was home to twenty-six newspapers. Evans lovingly and evocatively describes the vanished newsroom of Linotype machines and gigantic manual typewriters, nearly as noisy and smelly as a factory floor. The best passage in this book is an extended set piece about the work that a copy editor (known as a “sub”) did on a British paper in the fifties, with all the calmness, efficiency, and speed that Evans’s father brought to his railroad work. Newspapers thrived because they had figured out a way to perform what was then an indispensable and logistically difficult service, one that was impossible for anybody else to replicate. Evans managed not only to boost the Northern Echo but also to generate a national reputation for himself, mainly by appearing as the token provincial on a television program called “What the Papers Say.” At thirty-six, he was summoned to London and offered the job of managing editor of the Sunday Times. Not long afterward, the editor left and Evans got the job. Suddenly, he was being driven to work by a chauffeur (and also riding around London on a motorcycle), working in an office that looked “like an elegant drawing room,” and supervising a staff that was substantially made up of Oxford and Cambridge men, whose upper-class credentials and accents he describes almost obsessively, all these years later. This was the great glorious time in Evans’s career, and the most glorious aspect of it was the work done by the paper’s “Insight” team: it included journalistic espionage (often directed at government spy agencies), quick-cycle history, scientific research (on topics like airline and drug safety), and the sort of campaigning that Evans had perfected in Darlington. The team memorably took on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the birth defects caused by Thalidomide and the lack of justice for its victims, the infestation of the British intelligence service by upper-crust spies, and wars and human-rights abuses around the world—all in the face of government restrictions on the press that were much more severe than in the United States, or in the United Kingdom today. The Sunday Times’ proprietor during most of this period, Roy Thomson, was, in Evans’s account, peculiar and inaccessible but also wholly supportive. Thalidomide was manufactured by a liquor company that was the Sunday Times’ largest advertiser. “You happy in your own mind, Harold?” was all Thomson said when Evans wanted to publish the diaries of a Cabinet minister despite government warnings that doing so might violate the Official Secrets Act. All this was happening at roughly the same time as Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, and the early glories of magazine “new journalism” in the United States. Evans and the people he worked with were major contributors to a supercharged new conception of what journalism could be: at once powerful and devoted to the powerless, literary and intellectual, glamorous and dutiful, quasi-governmental in its status but in perpetual opposition to government. “No intelligence system, no bureaucracy, can offer the information provided by free competitive reporting,” Evans exclaims at one point. The financial condition of journalism was scarcely a topic of concern. Benign owners like Thomson were doing just fine for themselves; until quite recently, big-city newspaper publishing was a highly profitable business. (The Sunday Times under Evans had an editorial staff of a hundred and sixty; by 2000, a typical big metropolitan daily newspaper in the United States had a newsroom head count of double or triple that.) And if one owner’s interest in supporting journalism ever flagged, well, there was a long line of other rich people waiting to get into this exalted game. It was during this time that David Halberstam wrote a book about large news organizations and gave it the title “The Powers That Be.” Evans’s fall was, as he notes, ultimately the fault of the Sunday Times’ all-powerful unions: resisting the computer revolution, they caused publication to cease for an entire year, during Britain’s “winter of discontent” period, in the late nineteen-seventies, and forced the Thomson family to sell. (Evans, the son of a union man, applauds Murdoch’s ruthless breaking of the unions in the nineteen-eighties.) Even after that, the fundamental economics of the newspaper business looked very strong: such, alas, are the “vanished times” of Evans’s subtitle. Evans himself had a rockier time of it. Murdoch persuaded him to accept what looked like a promotion, to the editorship of the daily Times, spent a few months having lieutenants make his life miserable, and then asked for his resignation. Evans skates over the past quarter century of his career, which was spent almost entirely in America, in a single chapter. For the record, he held a number of big jobs in this country. His second wife, Tina Brown, was the editor of The New Yorker, and Evans spent a decade at this magazine’s parent company, at first as the founding editor of Traveler, later as the head of Random House. In another phase, he worked for U.S. News & World Report, which shared an owner with the magazine I worked for, The Atlantic, and I had occasion to experience what it’s like to have him affix his startlingly blue eyes on you and give you to understand, through a few artfully mumbled words, that you and he belong to a small company of people who fully grasp the glory of journalism. In his account of this period, Evans is almost entirely diplomatic (except for a well-placed dig at David Gergen, who, as the editor of U.S. News & World Report, once asked him to change an editorial to please an advertiser). He experiences the United States as a country without a class system, which undoubtedly helps account for his cheery mood. He ends by acknowledging that things today aren’t as great as in the grand old Sunday Times days, and asserting, with characteristic optimism but uncharacteristic lack of specificity, “If we evolve the right financial model, we will enter a golden age of journalism.” One can think of “My Paper Chase” as a potent exercise in escapist nostalgia—as an intoxicant that’s bound to produce, at least in journalists, the irresistible high of revisiting the halcyon era of the mainstream media. But Evans never actually says that he believes newspapers are going to come back as good as ever. Surely, if he were young today, he would be operating in the digital world, and surely that world is still full of nascent Harold Evanses, as determined to rise as he was. What Evans admits to being nostalgic about is not so much the journalistic past as “the mythic north of my childhood,” where “there was comfort in being rooted in a community and recognized within it as a good neighbor.” Overnight success, especially for a working-class lad, was impossible in that world; instead, one had to mount a long, slow, relentless assault on the battlements of a highly structured social system. The system is gone, as is the way that people like the young Evans operated within it, and what’s most arresting about “My Paper Chase” is that Evans makes us miss them. ------------------------------------ -- INFORMATION OVERLOAD? Get all ZESTMedia mails sent out in a span of 24 hours in a single mail. Subscribe to the daily digest version by sending a blank mail to [email protected], OR, if you have a Yahoo! 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