Christian Kerr writes:

There’s an interesting piece on l’affaire Brogden in The Sydney Morning Herald today, headed Reading between the lines – interesting, if a little one-sided in the way it puts the boot into its rival, the Daily Telegraph.

It talks about Piers Morgan, former the editor of London’s Daily Mirror
who was sacked in 2004 for running hoax photos of British soldiers
abusing Iraqi civilians, and refers to “his instructive memoir,” The Insider: the private diaries of a scandalous decade.

Morgan may actually be instructive in more ways than one. Financial Times magazine editor John Lloyd reviewed his book in Prospect Magazine (subscription) in June this year. Dave Penberthy should take a look.

“The diaries kept by Piers Morgan when he was editor of the Daily Mirror
(1995-2004) comprise one of the most revealing narratives on the nature
of power and the media in modern Britain,” he wrote. “Morgan made his
name, appropriately enough, as a show business columnist on the Sun.”

Lloyd is a media theoretician as well as a journalist. Last year he published the book What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics,
where he argues that much journalism is venal, lazy and irresponsible
and produces an environment of cynicism which is virtually destroying
public life.

Earlier this year, on Radio National’s Media Report, Lloyd made this interesting point:

What you’ve got in this hugely competitive environment is a
media which is very powerful, very competitive and therefore, having
that power, has begun to compete, or indeed some years ago, began to
compete directly for the allegiance of people with the political class.
The other institutions, like churches, political parties, trade unions,
associations of all kinds, even institutions like the family and
respect for elders and so on, have declined quite dramatically over the
last ten years in favour of the State on one hand, and the media on the
other. And that I think is a matter of concern, because although a free
media is utterly indispensable for a free society, the exercise of
freedom by the media now begins to impinge upon the exercise of
democracy, and I think we haven’t got an adequate explanation or
vocabulary to describe that.

He went on to add:

I think what we have is a system, and that is a system in
which media and the politicians are both players. When you have a media
as powerful as the one we have now, as the national ones we have now,
politicians of course become part of that. Politics becomes media-ised,
and the politicians have very little choice. It is inconceivable in
this country and I think in most now developed rich countries, to have
a Prime Minister who is not adept on the media. Politicians now are
media figures, they have to be, they run politics through the media,
and as political parties in all of our countries are declining, the
media step in and they become the media through which politics and
politicians are held to account. And thus politicians and the media
figures become almost interchangeable, and it’s that I think that the
media have simply not reported. We haven’t reported on ourselves, we
hold power to account, we should hold power to account, we fail I think
to hold ourselves to account and to reflect upon what we do to society
and to politics.

“Who is in the right? The Telegraph or Media Watch and the former two press gallery reporters who only agreed to co-operate if they remained anonymous?” the Herald
asks today. It has a response from Richard Walsh: “What is the truth is
highly complex. It’s a gross simplification to say because it was
denied it was not true.”

And while there’s much finger pointing at Penberthy and tut-tutting over the Tele, it’s worthwhile reading Lloyd’s conclusions over Piers Morgan:

Morgan shows the calculations of this world and does so unselfconsciously – assuming, as of right, that the editor of the Daily Mirror can treat politicians with contempt: he has, after all, been trained by Kelvin MacKenzie, editor of the Sun
in the 1980s and 1990s, whose scorn for politicians was measureless.
The conspiring of politicians in their own trivialisation is one of the
untold stories of our times. It is time we were told – and Morgan’s
document is a good start.