100 Years ago, the daily circulation of The Times was around 5,000. Today it is nearer the 400,000 mark.

You might imagine that the ‘product’ was doing something right – it was once, but today the readers are sadly disillusioned. The ‘Thunderer’ has become the ‘Whimperer’ in the hands of spiky haired young men in shiny suits who sit in Canary Wharf in front of a PC and type their name onto press association copy and PR handouts.

Where, the subscribers wail, are the Cassandra’s, the Keith Waterhouse’s; the drunken, corpulent, gap toothed, staggering, bleary eyed, bulbous nosed wrecks of the human species normally semi-sentient in the ‘Stab’ that miraculously metamorphosed into literary giants when gently led to a nearby phone and reminded that it was time to talk to the copy room, or face the wrath of the subbie. Forget the image of the Remington typewriter – that belonged to the world of the garret authors; the true reporters were sleuths, not grammatically correct, digitally nimble, typists.

There’s an old fashioned word. ‘Reporters’. For that is what they called themselves; not the new fangled ‘journalists’. They ‘reported’ the news from wherever the editor had had the sense of humour to send them. ‘Timbuktu’? They hired a camel. ‘Baghdad’? Then they hired a bodyguard – and an interpreter too. They didn’t sit in an expensive hotel suite in Beijing offering ‘live updates’ on the situation nearly 3,000 miles away in Kuala Lumpur.

The readers are revolting. Some old hands would say that readers have always been revolting – but keeping them happy is a necessary evil. Letters to The Times used to be pedant’s paradise, full of outraged complaints that a sub-species of a virtually extinct Chinese magnolia had been wrongly categorised as Tibetan magnolia – and the writer, who invariably held fifteen doctorates in neolithic Tibetan vegetation, ‘was sure’ the Editor would be appalled by such sloppiness.

It was The Times who sent William Russell out to share the Crimean trenches with the young men who gave their lives for us. He was described by one soldier as ‘a vulgar low Irishman, [who] sings a good song, drinks anyone’s brandy and water and smokes as many cigars as a Jolly Good Fellow. He is just the sort of chap to get information, particularly out of youngsters.’ Quite so. The perfect ‘reporter’. Without William Russell we would never have known of Florence Nightingale, nor the true horrors of war.

Now, we have ‘journalists’ who engender comments such as this:

Where was it “reported?” This is the problem with this particular journalist. He is depending on heresay…and in this case, as far as the story about the engine being active for 4 hours, has been proven to be false and in-accurate. At no time during any PC’s in Kuala Lumpur did the team suggest the engines were active for 4 hours…and today, after checking with the RR team who were in KL assisting in the investigations (they flew out there on sunday morning), they also concluded this was absolutely FALSE. Now, I ask you, WHERE is this reported and WHERE is it stated as a fact? I am so sick and tired of this nonsense…of lazy journalism. Won’t be renewing my subscription after this. This is just embarrassing journalism.

Fleet Street in the 60s might well have seceded from the British Isles; it was another land. Licensing laws abandoned for thirsty Smithfield workers conveniently adjacent, it was a place where its inhabitants felt honour bound to reinforce the concrete in their livers on an hourly basis. ‘Sober’ was an insult rarely afforded the opportunity to be aired. Yet we saluted those shambling drunks, we trusted them, we rewarded them by supporting their employers for allowing us the medieval pleasure of watching them poke the most ferocious hornet’s nests with a sharp stick. Hornet’s nests we would be afeard to approach, in places we had barely heard of.

For some reason Neville Thurlbeck’s robust response to questioning during the Leveson Inquiry comes to mind.

‘Did you give any thoughts to Article 8 rights (privacy) of the women? Yes or no?’

Thurlbeck: ‘There was no discussion of it.’

There wouldn’t have been, I suggest, because Neville himself was ‘old style’ Fleet Street; where ‘reporting the news’ was the agenda – not regurgitating the latest politically correct line. Did anyone give any thought to Florence Nightingale’s Article 8 rights? Should they have done?

I still subscribe to The Times – not because I trust its output as truthful reporting, but because it employs a marginally superior version of copy writer than its shameful competition. I can still enjoy the literary talent of Rod Liddle or A A Gill. That is the only reason.

This train of thought came about today because Moor Larkin reminded me of an e-mail in the Pollard report that I had all but forgotten. The Pollard report into another ‘great’ institution. The BBC. You may have a thousand and one reasons to condemn the BBC today – but once upon a time, like The Times, it was a world class entity with a reputation which still lingers today. An unwarranted reputation.

This was the e-mail trail:

Liz Gibbons, of the British Broadcasting Corporation, still touchingly confident that The Times ‘of all places’ dealt in ‘news’, not unsubstantiated tittle-tattle.

The BBC has since become an exhibit whose life force is publicly bleeding away in parallel with that of the ‘The Times’. Two proud old warriors of the battle to bring news to the public – now busy stabbing each other in the back.

The original ‘Stab in the Back’, watering hole of those long dead ‘reporters’ has become a Pizza parlour…

Tagged as: A A Gill, Cassandra, Keith Waterhouse, Liz Gibbons, Mark Williams-Thomas, Neville Thurlbeck, Rod Liddle, The Stab in the Back, The Times