Exhibit JC42 - The Leveson Inquiry

For Distribution to CPsHacks and Dons -Teaching at the London University Journalism School 1919-1939: Its origin,development and influence.Attitude Towards The ReaderClarke reminded students that the public was buying news and did notlike to be ’lectured or nagged’ by the press. As he saw it the public were thereal makers and censors of the press with the press reflecting, more than itdirected, public opinion. They all had to remind themselves that the public,collectively, was what those in authority had made them, those who wereresponsible for social legislation: ’If you say the modern Press is cheap andvulgar it represents the cheapness and vulgarity of the Public; andtherefore, in the long run, represents the vulgarity and cheapness of our socalledbetters who have run the country these last few centuries.’That was one view, but ’giving the public what it wants’ was too glib adescription, for Clarke, of the process whereby events became news. Hisattitude was that there was always a main news stream that dominatedthought and discussion which, in turn, directed public thought anddiscussion. The journalist could not escape it: ’Your criteria are forced uponyou. You have to watch that stream and tell the world its message - that is,unless you are totally bereft of any sense of responsibility.’Speaking in January, 1938, Clarke saw the main news stream as thesickness of the poor world: mainly economic but social and political as well.That was the ’Big News’- the news behind all the other news. It threw up allkinds of topics and Northcliffe’s phrase for them, ’talking points for thejournalist to exploit’ - social, political, economic. Here, however, Clarke,saw these as elements of news and not of features and he went on to saythat the most difficult thing was knowing how to deal with the rest of thenews, ’discussion news’ he termed it: ’... selection.., must be according tothe Purpose of your paper, and its idea of what entertainment the publicwant.’It was this ’Purpose and its Interpretation’ by the paper that determined,to some extent, how reports were ’coloured,’ This could not be avoided inmodern journalism but Clarke did not think that ethical standards had to belower in newspapers than in other walks of life. Clarke admonished hisstudents (when they next thought of News Values) that journalists were nobetter, and no worse, than any other body of human beings, trying, on onehand, to earn a living by service and, on the other, to try and leave theworld a better place than they found it.Review and SummaryIn this chapter we have observed how a former editor of a national dailynewspaper, of the late 1920s and early 1930s, approached the question ofhow to teach news values, selection procedures and verification systemswhich would enable fledgling reporters to accurately report what they sawand heard,Clarke’s approach was essentially pragmatic, involving the teaching ofpractical journalism’s ’relation to reality,’ as he called it, supported bysimulation and role play when specific learning objectives would have beendifficult to organize in the ’real world’- such things as covering a fire, or, at amore advanced stage, having two news teams simulate the operation of131MOD100051302