Jonathan Mirsky

‘Am I not God’s chosen?’

Never write blurbs. That is my modest advice to Sir Harold Evans, who in his endorsement of Muckraker describes the life of W.T. Stead as ‘ennobling’. This is particularly odd because Stead (1849-1912) was the shameless precursor of the gutter journalism that Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World and Sun have inflicted on the UK — something that Sir Harold, once editor of Murdoch’s classier Times, knows all too well.

Most symptoms of the current red-top plague were rampant in Stead’s style of journalism: the claim to speak for the decent majority, the vow to drive bad people from office by exposing them, the conceit that those who run newspapers should not only advocate, but create, policy, and that no person or subject, whether local or international, is immune to high-minded scrutiny.

All this, as Stead wrote in his diary, must be ‘lively, amusing and newsy’. Together with these agreeable qualities, however, went deceit, scandal-mongering, especially about sexual matters, and anything-goes dirt-digging. In a final possible precursor of today’s scandals, Stead went to jail.

Ian Hislop’s blurb gets Stead partly right, describing him as ‘a radical, maverick innovator’. He doesn’t mntion that he was also a liar, woman-exploiter and weirdo.

From a nonconformist, devil-fearing, joyless background, Stead, at 21, became Britain’s youngest newspaper editor, of the respectable Northern Echo in Darlington. Just before taking up the position, he said this — words that defined the rest of his life:

From Darlington, Stead moved to London, to become deputy and then editor of the upwardly striving Pall Mall Gazette.There he laid down his 30-page ‘Gospel According to the Pall Mall Gazette.’ Two headings stand out admirably:

‘The Independence of Women’, and ‘The Establishment of a United States of Europe’, topics that continue to agitate the press today.

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