Nick Cohen finds that top journalists, so keen to demand that others reveal their earnings, like to keep quiet about their own £200,000-plus salaries
Paul Dacre, the editor of the Mail, lives in Malvern Terrace, Islington - a cul-de-sac that combines the convenience of the capital with the charm of a village lane. The road begins opposite a preposterously pretty pub. On one side is a park. On the other, long herbaceous borders drift down 60ft gardens to 12 creeper-covered cottages. The estate agents tell those who can afford to ask that the cost of living in an Arcadia less than a mile from King's Cross is £1.2m for a modest home and £700,000-£800,000 for a two-up, two-down. Dacre's is mid-market, appropriately enough. It could be yours - for £1m.
The Mail presents itself as the noisy voice of the silent majority; of a decent middle class patronised and stabbed in the back by the Islington mafia who have built the liberal tyranny that is Blair's Britain. Yet when he leaves the office, Dacre is more than willing to ally with his politically correct neighbours against the Mondeo men he affects to support.
Pressure of numbers has made finding a parking space in Malvern Terrace a living hell. It's "dreadful", one cottage dweller told the Highbury and Islington Express. "My gardener was forced to drop his ladders and mower off and park elsewhere." Something had to be done. So the residents bought the lane. They will abolish its status as a public highway by paying Islington Council £121,000 and issue their own privatised residents' and visitors' permits to a select few. Dacre might have drawn his £10,000 contribution to the fighting fund from his loose change. He received £637,000 last year along with the standard extras: a chauffeur-driven car (which soon, thankfully, should be able to pull up right outside his gate), private health insurance and a company credit card.
He is probably at the top of a lush tree. I write "probably" because journalists and broadcasters who demand that politicians list every interest and who ride rudely over any right to privacy, guard their own secrets with a ferocity that would make Jack Straw flinch. What is certain is that on the Today programme and Question Time as well as in Fleet Street, the super-rich news mediators are enjoying their sunniest days.
Dacre's salary can be found in the Mail's annual report. His rivals are harder to pin down. The best the compiler of the "Fat Cat File" in the National Union of Journalists' magazine can do is keep a sharp eye for fleeting references in the media pages and listen to rumours from members. The figures that follow may not be accurate to the last penny, but they are all we have to go on.
Max Hastings told the Observer of 23 April 2000 that "money was an incentive" when he switched from a £185,000-a-year editorship of the Telegraph to the £400,000-a-year editorship of the London Evening Standard. When Jonathan Holborow was sacked from the Mail on Sunday in 1998, his salary was reported to be £300,000. His successor is unlikely to be on less. Hacks at the Independent say that Simon Kelner, its editor, receives about £250,000 - roughly £50,000 more than his predecessors Rosie Boycott and Andrew Marr.
As editor of News of the World, Piers Morgan was on about £140,000 according to "conservative estimates". After moving to the Mirror, staff guessed his new package was worth somewhere between £250,000 and £300,000. David Yelland of the Sun is assumed to be on about the same. Many would regard these wages as more than generous recompense for jobs brimming with interest. That Morgan speculated in "pump and dump" stocks which his City tipsters were gulling readers into buying reveals that, on the contrary, the editor of the people's paper felt hurt and unloved.
As in football, stars can now earn more than their managers. The most breathtaking example is the champion of the plain folk of England against that ever-menacing Islington conspiracy. Love them though he must, Richard Littlejohn is unlikely to be troubled by his unwashed readers popping round for a cup of sugar. He bought a home in the north London commuter belt after joining the Sun and Sky TV in an £800,000-a-year deal in 1997.
Lynda Lee Potter on the Mail is thought to pocket about £250,000, and nearly all Mail columnists receive £100,000-plus. "You're nobody here unless you're in six figures," a friend on the paper told me. In my experience, most of the Fleet Street political pundits earn a minimum of £70,000 and many pull in more. The sob-sisters who wail about their difficulties with boys and the trauma of expanding bottoms make between £80,000 and £150,000 from various Sunday papers.
Like Roy Keane, the journalist who has made it might look back on his predecessors with amazement. L A Lee-Howard who ran the Mirror in the early 1960s, was as successful an editor as Dacre. Mike Molloy, one of Lee Howard's deputies, remembers him saying that he earned £8,000 - four times the salary of a senior sub-editor. Star writers could wine and dine on expenses, but their salaries rarely reflected their value to the paper. "Marje Proops was a national figure and could have named her price," Molloy told me. "But she never did. Paul Foot complained that we paid him too much money. We offered him a company car. He demanded a company bus pass." When Bill Deedes was appointed editor of the Daily Telegraph in 1974, he received £11,000, substantially less than the prime minister of the day. Molloy himself was editor of the Mirror in 1984 and received £60,000. It was good money, as he is the first to admit, but after inflation has been taken into account, it cannot be compared to contemporary executive relief.
Today, Dacre receives at least ten times what a very senior sub-editor will get for laying out pages and trimming copy. There isn't an editor in Fleet Street who wouldn't gulp if he or she were required to manage on Tony Blair's salary of £109,768. No one believes that Keane is a greater footballer than Stanley Matthews, any more than anyone believes that Dacre is a titan the like of whom British journalism has never seen before. Something other than an objective market assessment of the value of talent - tried and tested over the decades - is at work here.
To Molloy, the answer is simple: Rupert Murdoch changed everything. By Murdoch, he doesn't mean just Murdoch the man, but the wider Murdochian system of ruthlessness, marketing and downsizing. In the Murdochian media, staff are there to do as they're told and lose their jobs when necessary; unions are to be broken; readers and viewers are to be manipulated; and managers are always meant to put the short-term interest of shareholders before the long-term interests of their newspaper or station.
Executives who will obey orders are the hired help as much as they were in the Sixties; but they are a better class of servant who, when they are given share options, have the crudest of reasons for keeping the stock price high regardless of the cost to the quality of their programmes or news pages. They may on occasion fancy themselves the social equals of the owners. "What we have got is robber-baron journalism," said Molloy. "Those who can grab what they can, grab it."
If his image of American plutocrats lighting cigars with $100 bills strikes you as hyperbolic, consider the following incident at the 1997 Labour Party conference. Blair was being lunched by the Mirror. The conversation turned to Gordon Brown's decision to freeze the pay of his Cabinet colleagues. Morgan, who was probably earning three times as much as the Prime Minister, found the differential hilarious. He chucked a £20 note at Blair and bellowed: "Hey, Tony, buy the kids some toys." The note lay on the table. Silence descended. It takes a man of extraordinary crassness to bring out the hidden nobility in Alastair Campbell. Morgan was that man. Campbell picked up the crumpled offering and straightened it out. "Why don't you give it to charity, Piers?" he asked quietly.
Morgan apart, there would be a temptation to wish the well-padded luck, were they not joining the pension funds as the beneficiaries of exploitation. The NUJ asserts that in no industry was the drive to derecognise unions as fierce as in the media - and it is probably right. Until the mid-Eighties, national journalism was a trade in which most practitioners could expect to make a reasonable living. Today, the union finds young reporters working for the cash-strapped Independent for nothing and the cash-rich Sunday Times for £10,000. They are likely to be burdened with debt. Before the unions were broken, journalists were trained at the expense of local newspapers. Today, most won't be considered for a job unless they have paid the tuition fees and living expenses entailed in completing a three-year degree and a year's postgraduate reporting course.
Anna McKane, who lectures on journalism at the City University in central London, says that the modern media have a "Victorian system, where those whose families can afford to pay for an apprenticeship are the most likely to be trained for jobs".
I have argued on these pages before that news journalism suffers as a result. The salaries of the stars may seem huge, but it is cheaper to hire columnists to fill space or interviewers to fill the airwaves than pay intelligent journalists and send them out into the world to investigate and report.
The bridge between the gilded beneficiaries of the print media and the super-rich of television journalism is David Dimbleby. It is hard to say exactly how much he earns, but a BBC executive told me he would be very surprised if it were less than £300,000 a year. We can, on the other hand, be precise about the conditions of the staff at the Richmond and Twickenham Times Group that he owns. The sports editor has to work evenings and weekends to top up his £7,800-a-year salary. A news editor won an industrial tribunal against Dimbleby after she was sacked while on maternity leave.
Dimbleby is the voice of BBC impartiality, and no one would dream of questioning his professionalism. If he ever hounds a chief executive or minister about employment rights, he will show the disinterest of a great philosopher.
The BBC signed a £3m deal with the Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark. Jeremy Paxman, Kirsty Young and Trevor McDonald have, according to the cut- tings, salaries of between £750,000 and £1m.
These are all fine journalists, but inevitably their questions on, say, the treatment of the inner-city poor are not motivated by experience. Indeed, the questions that they don't understand the need to ask may be the most telling thing about them. Their researchers, on insecure £500-a-week contracts (without pension rights) may make the better inquisitors.
For others, broadcasting is a showcase rather than a full-time job. There's a startling Nick Ross page on the internet, which doesn't describe him as a journalist, but as "one of Europe's leading conference moderators". It provides a list of 50 satisfied clients from Allied Dunbar to Visa International.
John Humphrys combines the Today programme with the production of corporate videos, the chairing of conferences and after-dinner speaking. The New Statesman phoned Humphrys's representative posing as a manager of Pelf.com, a new, albeit fictitious, net firm. It would cost us £8,000 for an hour's after-dinner talk, we were told - about 2,000 times the minimum wage rate.
The BBC has strict rules about what its presenters can and cannot do, but nowhere in the corporation or the rest of the media is there a version of the MPs' register of interests. This is a wise precaution. Imagine the difference it would make if the Mail were required to end editorials condemning taxing the rich by printing the editor's salary; or if the Times and the Sun tempered their rants against benefits cheats with acknowledgements that Murdoch has dodged £1.2bn of corporation tax in the past decade. The media super-rich are far grander than the politicians they berate, but would prefer it if they didn't have to meet the standards they demand of others.
You might reply that all I have noted is the workings of the market. Footballers, lawyers and City dealers are making fortunes, as wage inequality breaks all records. Why should news celebrities lose out? All I can say in reply is that footballers and foreign-exchange dealers speak for no one. Lawyers speak for their clients. But journalists claim to speak for the public.
Perhaps the reason why they - we, to be honest - are increasingly reviled and ignored is that we are a socially isolated clique too smug and indulged to realise it.
Nick Cohen earned £55,500 last year
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