This is the story of two men from the local press. The first, Don Hale, the former editor of the Matlock Mercury, could soon defy precedent and become the most celebrated journalist in the world. The second, Frank Branston, a columnist for Bedfordshire on Sunday, has struggled like Hale against the forces of official suppression, but victory won’t bring him fame outside Bedford. Yet both would admit that Branston is the luckier journalist, from a paper that will produce better journalism long after the appeal of Hale’s fight against injustice has faded.
Bedfordshire on Sunday is one of the few remaining independent titles in Britain, while the Matlock Mercury is one of 189 owned by Johnston Press plc, a voracious conglomerate that is chewing up locally owned journalism. The papers’ contrasting styles prove that, contrary to the free-market orthodoxy, ownership matters, and matters more than anything else.
Most of you will have heard of Don Hale – and if you haven’t, you will. The story of how he found the evidence that freed Stephen Downing, who was wrongly convicted of the murder of Wendy Sewell in a Bakewell cemetery in 1973, all but gets on its hind legs and begs to be told. The BBC is bringing out a feature-length drama in the autumn. The cast list isn’t quite ready, but rumour has it that Christopher Ecclestone will be Hale and Jane Horrocks will be a junior reporter. Julie Walters and Pete Postlethwaite may play Downing’s parents, Ray and Juanita, who came to Hale’s office in 1994 to persuade him to start writing about the framing of their boy. If Hollywood has its way, the BBC won’t have the last word. Three studios have talked to Hale about buying the rights. Liam Neeson told Warner Brothers that he wants to play the editor, and there is a whisper that Julia Roberts will take on her most challenging role yet as Sewell. An understandably dazed Hale is dubious about Roberts turning herself into a working-class Derbyshire woman, not least because a character who is murdered in the opening scenes doesn’t seem a part to die for.
If the producers don’t mangle the facts to accommodate Roberts, the drama will be an inspiring account of how a local editor took on a corrupt establishment. Wendy Sewell had many lovers – she was known, inevitably, as “the Bakewell Tart”. Hale heard all kinds of whispers about influential people not wanting the case reopened and Masonic conspiracies to protect well-dressed backs. Whatever the truth of such whispers, the film-makers can safely show how the police piled pressure on Hale to drop the investigation. He was threatened with libel actions repeatedly and, on one occasion, with prison.
Scotland Yard put CIB, its internal investigations branch, on to Hale to discover the identities of his moles inside the force. The Home Office was almost as bad. Downing was “IDOM”, in the barbaric jargon of the prison service, “in denial of murder”. Like other innocent lifers, he was refused parole or transfer to an open jail because he would not pretend that the flawless criminal justice system had got the right man. Hale fought successive home secretaries and a small army of sneering civil servants until the Court of Appeal quashed Downing’s conviction in January this year.
A happy ending? A triumph for the free press? Not quite. Hale’s account of the case, A Town Without Pity, will be published by Random House next month. It will describe how his most dangerous enemies were not the Derbyshire constabulary, but the management of Johnston Press. The corporation worked as hard as the other vested interests to kill the story, and had the power to take Hale’s career down with it.
The management were not worried by the risks of a libel action. British libel law may often be a kind of reverse National Lottery, a game of chance in which the loser is stripped of a fortune, but the most timid lawyers would have put money on Hale. Honest officers had leaked to the Matlock Mercury with abandon. Hale had full particulars of the interrogation of Downing. He could show how the simple-minded suspect was questioned for seven hours without being cautioned and without a lawyer or his parents present. (Downing was denied sleep, the easiest way to break a man, as the Spanish Inquisition knew.)
Hale also found witnesses from the early Seventies who were prepared to swear that Downing could not have been in the cemetery when Sewell was attacked. In short, Hale had the police bang to rights, and that was the problem. Johnston managers didn’t see it as the job of its journalists to upset people in power. The tiny staff of the Matlock Mercury had been halved over a decade to four journalists. They were paid to recycle press releases and puff local shops, not to create a scandal. Johnston told Hale to apologise for causing trouble. When he said he had nothing to apologise for, he committed the far graver offence of refusing to obey orders.
Hale says that only the dogged efforts of the National Union of Journalists and its lawyers saved his job as editor and, by extension, freed Downing. “I had to go to Matlock three or four times,” said Colin Bourne, a former full-time officer for the union. “They kept finding petty charges to throw at him. It was clear to me that his job was on the line. What they didn’t like was that he was a single-minded journalist who wouldn’t let go.”
Hale took to working on the story in the evenings and at weekends so that he couldn’t be sacked for wasting company time that would be better spent producing supplements on the local shopping centre. When he went to London to lobby ministers, he paid for his tickets and hotels. By the end, he spent about £5,000 of his own money investigating the Downing case. Last year, when it was clear that Downing was on his way out, he resigned.
The Matlock Mercury‘s victory was therefore double-edged. Hale was given 14 awards, including the British Press Award for journalist of the year, which has never before been given to a provincial journalist, let alone an editor of a tiny weekly paper. Johnston could not share the reflected glory. All it could do was reflect that, with Hale out of the way, the Mercury could concentrate on the important business of telling readers where to buy bathroom accessories in the Peak District.
Johnston is no different from any of the other mighty newszak corporations, which act locally while thinking globally. It has spent nearly £6bn on regional press acquisitions and mergers since 1995. The largest 20 publishers now control 96 per cent of total weekly audited circulation. The top five – Trinity Mirror, Newsquest, Northcliffe, Associated and Johnston – have cornered a modest 67 per cent of the market.
In the case of the media, the characteristic feature of capitalism’s inherent drive towards monopoly is the flight from news, said Bob Franklin, a professor at Sheffield University. He has surveyed local papers since 1987 and seen coverage of local councils and courts slashed as the priorities of downsized staffs are set by the advertising and marketing departments at head office.
I think it is safe to say that Liam Neeson will never play Frank Branston. The part-owner of Bedfordshire on Sunday merely questions the borough council in a robust manner. If the story of the paper’s fight with the town hall were made into a film, there would be a touch of Ealing comedy about it. Branston blasted the council for messing up the count in a ward election. His paper exposed how councillors enjoyed dozens of trips to Europe at the taxpayer’s expense. Then there was a regrettable incident allegedly involving a reporter, a photographer, a councillor, several outraged young women, a pub and flying fists, which may yet end up being discussed by the courts.
Branston fights with old-fashioned pugnacity. A typical column begins: “A psychiatrist commented last week that if Bedford Borough Council was his patient, he would diagnose acute mental illness. He did not say whether he would commit it to the loony-bin, but his purport was clear. The council is incapable of running its own affairs – let alone ours.”
If this sounds like small-town bombast, it is worth noting that the proper spending of public money and honest counts at the polls are at the root of local democracy – indeed, all democracy, as the people of Florida and Zimbabwe will tell you. Bedford Borough Council certainly doesn’t find Branston quaint. Accusations about the Euro-jollies led to a condemnatory auditor’s report and the criminal prosecution of the former leader of the council and an officer – the defendants were acquitted. The council authorised £100,000 a year on a council-run freesheet to compete with the paper.
Branston and Bedfordshire on Sunday are currently before a judge sitting without a jury at the High Court in London. Council officers are suing them for libel, as they have done before. Whatever the result, Bedfordshire on Sunday will ignore the council’s lawyers and its threats of advertising boycotts, and keep banging away at real or perceived iniquities in the town.
That was once the job of local papers at their best. Corporate media seem less eager to take on the task.
Their record must be dire because the usually somnolent Competition Commission has finally stirred itself to investigate the local press. It has called in an attempt by Johnston Press to obtain a near monopoly in Northamptonshire by buying eight local titles. The wider prospect is less cheering. A government white paper on the media is out for consultation. With justifiable confidence, the conglomerates expect that new Labour will do as it is told and cut back what few limits there are on local as well as national ownership.
The “Newspaper Society,” which does not represent journalists, editors or readers, but only proprietors, is pushing government to allow its members to buy radio stations in their circulation areas, and thus create total local news monopolies. Tim Bowdler, the unselfconsciously named chairman of the society’s media-ownership working party, described controls on ownership as “totally inappropriate” for today’s “overall communications landscape”. Bowdler is also the chief executive of Johnston Press plc.
There was a time, when we were all younger and stupider, when we would have expected Labour ministers to fight for diversity. Now I’m sure that, when the consultation is over, they will give Bowdler and his kind the scope to Bowdlerise without limit.
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