For months now, the whole idea of the Leveson inquiry into press standards has been dimly reminding me of something. Only recently did I figure out what it was. You know when anthropologists descend upon some almost-doomed Patagonian tribe, desperate to document their language, costumes and strategies for spear-throwing, nose-boning and rat spit-roasting before the last one succumbs to alcoholism and keels over and dies? It’s a bit like that. It’s the Domesday Book for the British press.
This isn’t to say that there won’t be a British press 30 years from now. There had better be, or else some of us are going to be in trouble. But surely, by then, it isn’t going to look much like it does now. And I don’t just mean in delivery. Obviously we’ll never see actual paper — we’ll wake in the morning, obviously, and the Daily Huffington will have already been uploaded via 8G wireless networks onto the symbiotic pixels of our retinas and wallpaper — but the mechanisms and the corporate structures will surely be as different, too.
Roughly speaking, you can divide the industry at the moment between the hand-wringing, responsible press which has plummeting sales, and the shamelessly daft press, which remains fairly robust. The latter, though, is surely in a Wile E. Coyote stage; in that period of stunned, hopeful grace that happens after he goes off the cliff, but before the ground starts rushing up. There’s a slack provided by the inertia of class and age, as evidenced by the staggering 650,000 people every single day who still haven’t figured out how to stop reading the Daily Express. Surely, eventually, it’s going to go taut. And a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.
Within my lifetime, I suspect, there isn’t really going to be a recognisable ‘British press’ with standards into which Lord Justice Leveson could inquire. But there is now, and regardless of the ultimate utility of the whole project, I suspect that I for one will be gripped. The press loves reading about the press — it’s the one thing we really understand and know about. And those corners of it which I neither understand nor knew about, well, they’re all the more fascinating.
Imagine being the man who spent all day, every day, hacking phones. Imagine the inside of the poor sod’s brain. John Prescott’s dinner plans and Sienna Miller’s hair appointments, all mixed up with whatever people have to say when they’re mad enough to be friends with Heather Mills, and Chelsy Davy calling Prince Harry to tell him she’s on the bus. It’s like some banal mind-melting nexus; a damnation from a multi-media Tartarus. What a world this was.
But was, was. Once Leveson finishes, I hope somebody takes the time to figure out the average age of those called to give him evidence. It’s surely going to be quite old. Even at its best, media commentary today is dominated by relics of the Blair era. I’m not saying that wasn’t quite an era — historians will probably regard it as the very peak of press relevance and clout — but it’s very much coming to an end. Reporting will always matter, but the most vital role of tomorrow’s journalists will surely be as curator. Ours is a world of Twitter, live-streams, injunction-busting blogs and well-placed civilians with iPhones. Only a few months ago, WikiLeaks published most of America’s diplomatic intelligence at the accidental flick of a switch. There’s something quite quaint in the way we’re still worrying about the behaviour of tabloids.
In the byzantine psychology of society at large, I’ll bet there are reasons. We’re on the quite frightening cusp of accepting that media is becoming an organic, twisting thing that nobody can ever quite understand or control. Before we do, though, we’re going to grab hold of this small part of it that still makes sense, and splay it open like a dissected frog.
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Listen, Boris old lad. I’m worried about your legacy. It was supposed to be the cycling stuff, wasn’t it? But the Boris bikes will get painted red and renamed when Ken gets back in, faster than you can say ‘cripes, now look here, she’s only a friend’. And the cycle superhighways? Well, I’m not sure that’s quite working out. Some of them, I’m told, are brilliant, although I wouldn’t know because I’ve never managed to find one that goes anywhere near anywhere I’d ever want to go.
Most of them, though, are still just bits of road painted blue. You’d be amazed at how totally safe you don’t feel on a bit of road painted blue. There’s one particular junction in Bow at which two people have recently died, but the real flaw is with the wider concept. Painting a road blue doesn’t help anybody.
A couple of years ago, I heard somebody suggest a much better plan, which was railway verges. Wherever there is a line coming into London, and wherever there’s a pointless corridor of scrubland next to it (i.e. everywhere) why not turn it into a cycle path? Is there any good reason why nobody has seriously considered this? I know it would be expensive, but if we can afford Crossrail, not to mention that other giant poo tunnel they’re apparently building under the Thames, then surely it’s at least worth thinking about.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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