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Photo: Mark Ellidge
ust how reverent can you be with Sir Harold Evans? Undisputed bastion for quality journalism, he stands tall above the squalid antics of the gutter press. He is the heavyweight who fought relentlessly for compensation for the thalidomide children, a champion for investigative journalism, a thorn in the side of injustice. Evans has the bling to show for it – recognition from his fellow journalists means a Gold Award for Lifetime Achievements and a European Gold Medal. He even has a knighthood for his services to journalism. Arise Saint Harry. Even Evans will play up to this reverence. His response to my email request for an interview with the man I describe as the “all-time greatest British newspaper editor” (as he was once voted) was simply: “Who could resist a chance to adjust a halo?” All this talk of divinity makes me wonder whether a beatific Evans is now too saintly to enjoy the fires of journalism. At 82, he is absent from the throb of a pulsing newsroom, perhaps he’s not relevant any more. Could he be past it? Within minutes of speaking to him he has answered my doubts. He’s a saint who really loves his iPad. He tells me, from his Manhattan apartment, how handy he is with the tablet, well-informed of the improved features. He asks me what apps I like and I shamefully admit that I don’t own an iPad. “I have one guilty secret,” he teases before telling me that he plays chess on his when he really should be working. “I’m playing against the computer but it’s not particularly – how can I put it – encouraging to one’s self-esteem,” he says, laughing softly. His embrace of innovation is a theme that crops up continually during the interview, but more controversial Top: Last day after 14 years at The Sunday Times are his strong opinions on the failures of journalism and Bottom: A rare pause in his busy schedule how truth-seeking has been compromised. Right: Passing on wisdom to the first ever City postgrads in But it’s not all shop talk. There is Tina Brown, of course. 1976 and stressing the importance of looking for hard facts “We’ve been married for thirty years, you know,” he says proudly. Save US Vogue’s Anna Wintour, Brown is the most conspicuous failures” this century, which are symbolic of talked-about editor in New York, formerly editor of Tatler, Vanity what is going wrong with journalism. Fair, The New Yorker and the now defunct Talk magazine. After a The first is the war in Iraq and the failure of journalists to uncover print hiatus editing online newspaper The Daily Beast she is now at what was really going on. He rails against “the amount of information the helm of Newsweek, which has just merged with The Beast. discovered and descriptions of Iraqi society [which] were too little to Like a proud father Evans is a collector of Tina Brown’s have inhibited that misadventure.” He also says that public opinion journalism. Throughout the interview he celebrates stories that have over-influenced the news agenda. “Patriotic emotions came into play. appeared under her editorships, from a Daily Beast iPad review, an We didn’t want to be suggesting that this particular policy was going exposé from Talk magazine, to the recent cover feature of “Tina’s to be disastrous”. Newsweek”. “My wife happens to be a particularly fine journalist, The second concerns the financial meltdown of 2008. He suggests okay?” Evans says, the Manchester of his youth still present in his that journalists became lazy and unquestioning. “We were caught up voice. She is not just the darling of Manhattan, but Evans’ too. in the euphoria of a boom,” he says. “In a boom people don’t like to think it might start to rain. It’s like going out in beautiful sunshine but putting up an umbrella before it rains.” He warms to his theme: “Journalism was the equivalent of seeing your child come into the room with spots over their faces and not even noticing it. The disease had already taken hold but nobody bothered even to diagnose or prescribe a remedy for it.” While he concedes that a handful of journalists, such as New York Times’ Gretchen Morgenson, were tenacious in their reporting, there was a failure to decode the story and make it relevant to the public. “The compartmentalised reporting of business and increased specialisation of financial instruments meant that few people understood it.” His third contentious example has the touch of the conspiracy about it. Could the 9/11 terrorist attacks have been anticipated? The infectious enthusiasm he has for Brown is as fervent for the “No doubt if I had been [editor] I might have slipped up too,” he current state of journalism, the dominating topic of the interview. admits before critiquing the reporting of one of the biggest stories of But it will not be of journalism’s success, but of its abject failure. It is modern times as inadequate due to the “low boredom threshold” of the story of bad journalism and misinformation, the type that “can the media. drive out good”, the “stuff in the tabloids that people are soaking up”. In January 2001, eight months before two planes crashed into He believes journalists and their editors are guilty of “three Photo: the Guardian
Journalism was like seeing your child with spots all over their face and not noticing it
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