The 'King' of Fleet Street:

...In fact, the fusion has resulted in a near monopoly of magazine publication being concentrated in one group ultimately controlled by one man, who is now also—in theory anyhow—responsible for the running of two mass circulation dailies (the Daily Mirror and the Daily Herald), two popular Sunday papers (the Sunday Pictorial and the People), a string of provincial papers and a slice of Britain's biggest privately owned television network...

...This is all to the good, of course, but the counterpart of the public's growing sophistication is a tendency to read the papers—at least the popular papers—for their amusement content rather than their news...

...Being simultaneously wedded to big business and to free enterprise, a journal like the Economist is in a quandary over the issue of newspaper amalgamation...

...This, anyhow, is the judgment of those native and foreign commentators who have bestowed upon Cecil Harmsworth King the title of "press emperor...

...It would be an understatement to say that these worries are not shared by King himself...

...King is also a nephew of Lord Northcliffe, the original "press lord" of the early 20th century, who was a power among Right-wing Tories...

...Figures such as these explain a good deal, but not everything...

...This particular difficulty, however, affects most papers...

...An experienced foreign correspondent recently remarked that there are only two papers which occasionally tell the whole truth about the underlying purposes of British policy, the Economist and the Financial Times, the latter being the London equivalent of the Wall Street Journal...

...We will behave precisely as we have done in the past with the true cognizance of our duty to the public as well as to our shareholders...

...The fact is that the majority of union members and Labor supporters read either the Tory Express or King's Mirror—the latter a lively tabloid which particularly appeals to the younger generation and has been cashing in on its support since World War II...

...The other side of the coin—not very often mentioned in public—is political apathy...

...A recent study of voting trends during the last general election suggests that TV played a much bigger part in educating the public than did the press, though the impact of direct party political propaganda appears to have been almost nil during the brief campaign itself...

...But what has all that got to do with the issue of political power in a socalled democracy...

...But if newspaper ownership and management goçs on being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, Parliament will eventually have to take notice...

...Meanwhile the advertisers go on complaining that newspapers are not really as good a medium as television, and the press lords—with an authentic emperor now breathing down their necks—go on rationalizing each other out of existence...

...It was then overtaken by King's Mirror, which combined popular language, amusing features and a mild infusion of pornography with political pseudo-radicalism, i.e., support of Labor as long as it was in office...

...If all the eight million members of the TUC contributed even an extra half-cent a week, he observed, they could raise about $2,250,000 a year...

...It was at first thought that a majority of the million or so subscribers would rebel at being sold to the hereditary enemy and move over to more left-wing organs...

...In matters of this kind the first instinctive reaction of professional journalists is to look for "the man behind the news...

...Its sister organ, the Sunday Pictorial, regularly tops five million...

...Mere])- to list the empire's outlying provinces (before the fusion, King's group alone controlled over 130 magazines and technical periodicals and more than 200 yearbooks and trade directories) would exceed the length of this article...

...Most unions cannot persuade their members to raise their meager dues in order to carry on even the most urgent work, let alone subsidize the Herald, which only a small proportion of them read...

...the New York Times had previously (March 2) informed its readers that King is in fact a highly educated pillar of the British oligarchy, although something of a rebel since his politics tend to the Liberal or pro-Gaitskell Left...

...Getting them back is going to be a problem, especially for a paper which supports the Labor leadership against the instinctive radicalism, pacifism and neutralism of the rank-and-file...

...Richard Armour...

...Thomson may be indifferent to politics—he has said he doesn't care if some of his provincial papers support Labor, as long as it is good for business—and King may be full of the noblest motives, as well as being a Liberal, a connoisseur of history and a collector of Greek pottery...

...The same superior air is noticeable in the Guardian, in the Observer and even in the staid and businesslike Telegraph...

...It is largely a question of tone...

...This was demonstrated in a striking fashion last autumn, when the corpse of the defunct News Chronicle was divided up among its rivals...

...There is a further important question: How independent in fact are even Opposition papers like the Guardian or the Observer when it comes to certain fundamental assumptions of British foreign policy, e.g., the idea that the French are to be blamed for not allowing Britain to dominate Europe without being part of it...

...Statesman regularly includes a supplement on vintage wines and foreign holiday resorts of the more expensive kind...

...Even the Guardian, once very definitely a Manchester paper, is now to be printed in London and already draws over half its readership from southern England...

...The Guardian would have to raise its selling price from four cents to 11 cents in order to break even, if there were no advertising revenue...

...It is probably no accident that it has simultaneously lost much of its old radical flavor and become something of an "Establishment" organ, though liberal enough on most issues to be permanently in opposition to the Government...

...In the case of the Guardian, which of course ranks as a "quality" paper, the proportion is about two-and-one-half to one...

...As the Economist so rightly observed, the press is after all a business, and a big one at that...

...This kind of monetary disproportion affects every newspaper in varying degrees, depending on the size and make-up of its readership...

...It is an old story that in England one can be a socialist without necessarily being a democrat...

...It did this by the simple expedient of hiring most of its defunct rival's staff writers, and slightly modifying its own politics to please its new readers...

...The remaining 300,000 former subscribers were divided among the other dailies, with the Herald picking up barely half...

...Since the TUC gets only $840,000 a year in affiliation fees, this seems rather visionary...

...The Express was the first to cash in on this trend, and it duly reached the magic figure of four million readers before its rivals...

...The Herald was left behind because it chose to remain sober and responsible...

...Yet the Labor party has raised no personal objection to his acquiring control over the Herald (49 per cent of its shares still belong to the Trades Union Congress...

...Suffice to say that Odhams, for its part, published not merely the Laborite Daily Herald and the People (a Sunday paper with a circulation of over five million), but—together with its subsidiaries— some 150 periodicals, magazines and annuals...

...but it has become the businessman's paper and thus ranks as "quality...

...This "quality" press, whatever its politics, is sharply set off from the mass circulation papers...

...This was just when its own editorial renaissance had begun, but the new editor was the first to admit that the Mail had walked off with the lion's share...

...It would take a volume to describe the structure of the British press and publishing industry, and that volume probably won't be written until the Royal Commission has dug out more of the relevant facts about production costs, advertising revenues, share holdings and so forth...

...Thus, members of the TUC General Council were urged by E. J. Hill, of the boilermakers' union, to consider subsidizing the Herald, which has been trailing the other mass circulation dailies with its mere million-and-a-half readers...

...But one or two simple facts can be stated: The cost of producing a paper like the Herald is about four times its selling price...

...The Mirror's current circulation is stated as close to four-and-three-quarter million...

...This may account for the fact that "burly, baby-faced Cecil Harmsworth King" was promptly spotlighted by Time magazine (March 10...

...OPEN DOOR POLICY We think, and we hope we're not being, In view of his actions, loo critical, That Castro should ask for asylum— The regular kind, not political...

...It is still below the Times, however, which is read by statesmen, bishops, college heads, high-ranking civil servants and the upper grades of society generally, and preserves the habit of casually taking for granted that all its readers have had'a classical education and are reasonably fluent in Greek and Latin...

...Already the talk in Fleet Street is that the Herald may not last beyond the seven-year span its new owner has promised to keep it alive, and even the Mail is not considered quite safe unless it can get at least three million readers— now apparently regarded as the minimum for a "popular" paper...

...The Chronicle had for many years been very closely identified, through the Cadbury family, with the Liberal party, and when the paper was merged overnight with the arch-Tory Daily Mail, there was a considerable outcry among Liberals and others...

...These were curiously ill-chosen adjectives...

...Since the beginning of March (when the stockholders of Odhams Press agreed to a hundred-million-dollar, deal resulting in the amalgamation of the Odhams kingdom with the Daily Mirror group of principalities), King has presided over a newsprint empire on which the sun literally never sets...

...For their proprietors and editors belong to that undefinable entity, the "Establishment," perhaps best described as the ruling elite of a still rather hierarchical and not very democratic country...

...It seems that few people care sufficiently about politics to switch over to another paper...

...Here the matter would seem to end, but there is more to it, much more, as any Fleet Street editor knows...

...The rest has to be covered by advertising...

...What matters most for the quality of British democratic society is the kind of newspaper which the economics of big business bring about," wrote the Economist in a rather embarrassed comment on the recent press upheaval...

...Addressing a group of Labor MPs at the House of Commons on the subject, he is reported to have remarked, amidst some nervous laughter, that he saw no harm in such a concentration of power, as long as he was in charge...

...It is nice to know, of course, that more people read the Guardian, that the Observer makes a profit and that Roy Thomson (the Canadian newspaper magnate who almost got control of Odhams before he was outmaneuvered by Cecil King) has vowed in public not to interfere with his editors—unless they are atheists...

...Thus a "quality" paper like the Times or the Guardian, each of which sells about a quarter-million copies, gets huge advertising revenues from the big commercial firms who do not, as a rule, trouble to advertise in the Herald—partly at least because its million-and-a-half circulation is small by British standards...

...Rather typically, the left-wing New...

...But the Mail managed to retain 70 per cent of the old News Chronicle readership, and upped its own circulation from two million to two-andthree-quarters...

...King has recently become the controlling figure in a printing and publishing empire whose assets are conservatively valued at $280 million, which is rather more (we are told) than the corresponding figure for Time Inc., hitherto regarded with awe by the inhabitants of this island...

...So far the Government has dodged the issue by the time-honored expedient of appointing a Royal Commission, which, it hopes, will report that things are not as bad as they seem...

...Such obstinacy went down well with the older Labor readers but not with their teenage sons and daughters, who switched in droves to the Mirror...

...Papers like the Guardian, or like David Astor's Sunday Observer (a success at three-quarters of a million, though topped by Roy Thomson's Sunday Times with a million-and a quarter), are very close to the Liberal party and to the Gaitskell wing of Labor, but would probably be regarded as snobbish by most Americans...

...That of course was the reason why the TUC sold control of the paper to Odhams in 1929...

...it is privately estimated that about half the Guardian's readers are opposed to its support of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and it is very probable that most Tories disapprove of the quasi-liberal policies preached by their papers in such matters as African affairs or the uncontrolled immigration of West Indians into Britain...

...No wonder the Government has seen fit to appoint a Royal Commission to look into the whole matter of press ownership and control...

...There is the impact of television, and the question of what place the newspaper is going to occupy in a community which seems to be increasingly switching from the written to the spoken word...

...The New York Times described him as "Czar," but that may have been due to a perverse hankering after originality rather than a desire to hint at autocratic tendencies...

...On thinking it over, one is inclined to agree...

...This is true, but all it signifies is that middle-class tastes are improving...

...The British press, in fact, is a national rather than a local business...

...By contrast, the sober Daily Telegraph is a huge success with a million-and-a-quarter...

...Conversely, the four million Tory readers of Lord Beaverbrook's lively Express, and the Labor stalwarts who take the Herald (now at last, after years of mismanagement, blessed with an energetic editor) may not have much in common politically, but socially they form a homogenous readership, and the advertisers are well aware of it...

...For in addition to a mountainous assemblage of newspapers and magazines in Britain, his domain includes at least two West African dailies (in Nigeria and Ghana...

...The average voter, it would seem, is getting used to public debates on the air and resents the blatant partisanship of the newspapers which never tell more than one side of the story...

...Since it can neither approve the trend nor condemn it outright, it takes refuge in the comforting thought that at any rate the "quality" press is steadily gaining ground...

...The 'King' of Fleet Street Publishing empire of Cecil King, now one of the largest in the world, controls the British daily press and most national magazines By G. L. Arnold London The British Empire may have gone the way of Rome and Carthage, but the imperial style has recently scored a signal triumph in a domain where "lords" and "barons" had long proliferated: the press...

...In the old days of strident party warfare, such indifference on the part of old Liberals would have been inconceivable...

...Labor's worries— and those of a good many other people—are centered on the principle of monopoly rather than the personality of the chief monopolist...

...But an undercurrent of nervousness clearly subsists...

...The "big two" among the "popular" dailies, the Mirror and the Express, attract revenue because they have broken through to the magic figure of over four million...

...No wonder, too, that few people believe the trend toward integration can be reversed...

...Even the Daily Mail, with a mere two-and-three-quarter-million readers, must be careful...

...A few days later, opening the new 18-floor Daily Mirror building at Holborn Circus (described by him as a Taj Mahal and the finest newspaper building in the world), he reverted once again to the painful subject of monopoly...