The Ghouls of Fleet Street

New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 873, 27 April 1956, Page 4

The Ghouls of Fleet Street

) ESPONSIBLE journalists are never quite easy in their ) minds about the limits of taste and propriety in the publication of news. They know that _it is in the public interest to print | reports of criminal trials. A fundamental principle of British justice |is the open hearing, and although | in practice only a few citizens can | be accommodated in courtrooms, the principle is upheld while full | and accurate reports are available _in newspapers. There are, inevit_ably, some people who read these reports for the wrong reasons. It _has been found that crime, especially murder, has a morbid attrac_tion for many whose own lives are apparently blameless. And in England, as well as in other parts of the world, this attraction has been exploited by newspapers which are competing for circulation. The popular Press of London does not stop at the straight report, but fills in the background, and may even supply its readers : with such material as the writings of condemned murderers, or of persons close to them. One of the worst examples has just been reported in the New Statesman and Nation. When the chief hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, retired recently, it became known that for some time he had been preparing -with the help of two ghost -writers-his memoirs of the 433 men and 17 women he had executed, complete with details of their behaviour on the scaffold. Several of the newspapers sold on Sunday-a day thought to be peculiarly suitable for news of human misery-began to bid frenziedly for this document. The prize was won by ‘Empire News, a paper in need of circulation. "It is reported," says a contributor to the New Statesman, "to have paid for the serial and book rights a sum in the neighbourhood of ~£40,000-a substantial amount by any standards, but not too high in Lord Kemsley’s judgment for offering the readers of the Empire News a personally conducted tour of the execution shed." The serial is now being published, and circulation is soaring.

It is depressing to consider the sort of public opinion that is being fostered by ghoulish journalism. There is no need to suppose that only base-minded people are able to feel the attraction of the morbid. Few of us can read of a murderer’s last moments without a disturbance of our most primitive feelings. But whereas the mature mind has other feelings alsocompassion and anger, and a sense of the loss of human dignity-the immature mind feels only the jolt of sensation, a mixture of terror and delight which leaves the throat dry and the heart beating thickly. The popular Press appeals most to the young (of all ages); and although it would be wrong to believe that ‘all these people, or even most of them, will be harmed by a diet of sensation, the corrupting influence is at work among them, and will claim its victims. What is most to be feared is not the occasional lapse of an individual, but the wider coarsening of mental fibre. The English people have a long way to go before they can rid themselves of imputations of a cruelty that is partly concealed by judicial methods of the utmost fairness. The beginning of the 19th century is only the day before yesterday; yet they were then hanging children of seven and upwards, and so many offences were punishable by death that the criminal law was known everywhere as the Bloody Code. We tell ourselves that we have come a long way since then. But have we come far enough? Is there a moral gulf between the crowds who flocked to a Tyburn hanging and the crowds today who avidly devour the memoirs of Mr. Pierrepoint? An unrestricted diet of that sort. may not bring back the public execution, but neither will it promote a climate of opinion in which social reform can have enlightened support from the people. Reforms have never been easy,’ but it was believed that universal education might make them easier. That, however, was in an age of innocent optimism, before Northcliffe. We know better now.