This has been a bad turn-of-the-century for establishment newspapers. Moscow’s Pravda lost its role when the Soviet Union lost its place in history. Le Monde is now suffering from the combined pressures of loss of money, and of self confidence. The New York Times has scourged itself for two errors: the stories made up by its former reporter, Jayson Blair (the fallout claimed the jobs of its editor and managing editor), and what the newspaper itself viewed as its over-credulous coverage of administration claims of an Iraqi threat. Edinburgh’s The Scotsman has ceased to be the voice of Scotland’s establishment and has become a rootless and shrill critic of whichever parties form the Scottish administration.
The oldest and still the most famed of establishment papers - the one which taught all others what an establishment paper was - is The Times of London. It showed that an establishment paper should be one which presented the news that the dominant class thought important, in the way in which it thought seemly. It prized reports from and by the great state institutions: government, judiciary, established church, political parties, military. Its reporting could be fine and strong - this was a paper which had shaken and even tumbled governments - but in its comment, it made a conscious claim to express the national essence.
However, it passed that baton some time ago: no editor could resist the beat of Rupert Murdoch’s drum, which was and is to fashion most of its media outlets into a dis-establishment, posing the populist values of mass consumption, entertainment and limited government against whatever remained of old establishment-cum-corporatist values.
But there has since been no paper to take up the establishment baton. The Independent had an original commitment to straight and full news reporting - which has now been turned 180 degrees with its successful reinvention as a proudly self-proclaimed “viewspaper”. The Daily Telegraph, less loyal to the Conservative Party than in its heyday, remains nevertheless too close to claim national establishment status. This is, in part, a response to The Independent: but it is more of an attempt to create a journalism as true as it can be to the complexity of events. And though this newspaper has a political position as close to the centre as it is possible to be, it is more than ever the paper of global liberal capitalism.
The only paper which can claim The Times’s legacy is The Guardian: and it seems set to do so. It will follow The Independent and The Times with a change of format - not to tabloid, but to “Berliner” size, the size, as it happens, of Le Monde. This allows for a menu of stories on the front page - rather than, as the tabloid format dictates, having one story displayed on page one, a choice best served (as The Independent does) by making it into a reported editorial.
But the size change is the smaller of those planned. The paper’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, wants The Guardian’s reportage to be informed by a desire to produce as near as can be managed a version of the truth, from which journalistic spin is omitted. In part a response to The Independent’s positioning, it will also maintain aspects of The Guardian’s own culture, which has been one in which the facts and the commentary can be mixed. C.P. Scott, Manchester Guardian editor from 1872 to 1929, will always be in journalism’s pantheon for opining that “comment is free, but facts are sacred”. Rusbridger seems to mean to return to his predecessor’s injunction.
The effect of this, if successful, will be to place The Guardian in the establishment slot. It will remain a liberal paper: but its liberal-cum-leftist views will be more clearly demarcated from the news columns. That a strongly liberal paper now has the best chance of becoming the establishment is a mark of how public opinion, and the values to which it feels it should be (even when it is not) committed - have shifted.
The establishment values are those of liberals: sexual and racial equality; sensitivity to the marginalised; the avoidance of market (or any other) fundamentalism; cosmopolitanism; secularism; scepticism; insistence on human and civil rights - all of these are now mainstream. From these pulpits, lessons can be taught. From these criteria, politicians - of any party - can be held to account for themselves. These - not duty, service, faith, patriotism, loyalty - are the moral guides. They have not always replaced these older establishment values: but where they have not, they have absorbed and transformed them.
The establishment Guardian will have some parallels with The Times: it will tend, sometimes reluctantly, to vote for Labour, as The Times, sometimes reluctantly, voted for the Conservatives.
But the differences will be greater. It will be more sceptical and aggressive: who isn’t? It will have many more columnists, diverse in their views: the new establishment makes a point of being contentious: modesty in opinion is an old value. It will be more self-flagellating than self-confident.
To take the mantle of establishment, Rusbridger will have to succeed in making his paper one where the reader of any opinion will go and expect to read a reasonably straight first draft of history. The British establishment has prided itself - often rightly -on being straight, on looking truth in the eye. It would be good to have a general newspaper willing to take on that responsibility again, and to take the brickbats that go with it.
