Exhibit JC42 - The Leveson Inquiry

For Distribution to CPsEditorial Attitudes Towards News Reporting Revealed in Clarke’s Lecture NotesIn the eyes of Dr. Harrison, the ideal instructor for journalism students:’should be chosen rather for their liveliness and ability !o communicate thanfor their academic achievements - but not quacks. ~z Discussions withClarke’s former colleagues and students demonstrate his sense ofliveliness, indeed it appears as his hallmark. Most striking to the modernmind is the way Clarke imposed a sense of discipline among students bytreating them as if they were reporters instead of undergraduates.Yet we never really know what Clarke was thinking and feeling, althoughthere are interesting intimations in a book he wrote in 1936. Called simply,Brian, it is the story of his youngest son’s battle with an incurable disease,which killed him before his tenth birthday. In the book Clarke refers to hisdays at Ruskin College, Oxford, in his early teens (although the Collegehas no record of his attendance), and mentions that further serious studywas cut off by the necessity of earning his living. He mentions his eldestson, Dennis, ’deep in reading philosophy for his Oxford exam, took me wellout of my depth. ’~~ He foresaw that what the schools and universities then,in the 1930s, were afraid ’to know about.., fifty years hence they will beteaching the history of the Russian Revolution and its lesson to the world.’Clarke mentioned how Brian had regarded Latin as ’stupid stuff’ until: ’1asked him if he remembered the Roman villa at Bignor... and asked himwhat language the Romans used who’d lived there. When told Latin, andthat I wished that I knew Latin well.., and then could read the things on thewalls of the villa...’He instances this as an example of how many boys, reported ’dull’ bytheir schoolmasters: ’would be reported otherwise if efforts were made toshow how their studies could be linked up with interesting everyday things.’Clarke’s objection to the emphasis on examinations was also ahead of itstime in saying that it only prepared children for exams, ’not for the realitiesof life and work.’This, then, can stand as Clarke’s original approach to teachingjournalism in a university: making it inte?esting, involved with everydaythings. In this he is a true successor to all those quoted earlier who talkedabout ’learning by doing’- this Clarke attempted to practice as Britain’s firstDirector of Practical Journalism at London University between 1935 and1939.While he contributed fully to the activities and responsibilities of beingthe Director, he still maintained a toehold in Fleet Street, with a weeklycolumn in a popular Sunday newspaper, and also started to make areputation as a broadcaster, something he was to expand during the waryears. Whether or not he made any attempts to return to a full-time editorialposition we are not in a position to judge. At the end of the Second WorldWar, nominally still the Director of Practical Journalism, he returned to thefray to support its rehabilitation in London University, without success. ~4Clarke did not give evidence to the first Royal Commission on the Press,even though favourably mentioned as someone to whom Commissionmembers should speak, by Lord Burnham (formerly Col. Fred Lawson,chairman of the University Journalism Committee up to 1939.) Clarke had,however, suffered a heart attack in 1945 and retired from broadcasting hisLetter from London for the BBC after a second attack in 1948.138MOD100051309