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.story of the day. How many of you noticed? Two. Both ladies. All thesefacts were presented to you on a plate and only a handful of you thought itworthwhile...to mention them. ’4 Clarke stated that this was an example ofwhen reading history and adding a ’few lines explaining the significance ofthe historical meeting’ would have been better than reporting the presenceof people who were not there, like Lloyd George. ’What was going on in thestreet and palace’ was what Clarke said was wanted, although he alsodevoted a lecture to ’Names and Titles’ and all the reference books neededfor achieving this. So reporting of facts went hand-in-hand with a need foraccuracy in reporting which was a measure of powers of observation alliedto having ’a gift of words, a sense of colour, and a lively sympatheticimagination.’ This description removes journalists from the role of ’lowergrade clerks’ which the sociologists Harry Christian and Jeremy Tunstallassign to them, although it neatly aligns with Harold Evans’s requirementsthat reporters should ’tell a straight story plainly’?Andrew McBarnett described the initiation into journalism as being one of’accustoming themselves to a routine acceptance of official versions ofreality. ’6 This inbuilt bias towards factuality is usually cited as evidence ofintellectual weakness on the part of journalists, ignoring as it does, similartrends in present day historiography ’with its preference for the quantifiable,the statistical... ’7 Lawrence Stone describes the French ’new historians’undertaking ’storytelling...based on the testimony of eyewitnesses andparticipants’ as an attempt at recapturing something of the outwardmanifestations of the mentafite of the past - a description some journalistswould not argue with in describing their own activities.Like so many aspects of British journalism the emphasis on observingthe external world, and systematically recording and analysing suchobservations, springs from unacknowledged American practices and, in thisexample, illustrating the social science basis for such attitudes. While sucha background itself remained unacknowledged by British journalists on aworkaday level until the 1990s, in America it became institutionalised intextbooks (with titles like ’Precision Journalism’) that needed to serve thevast numbers of journalism undergraduates, or more precisely,undergraduates undertaking practical journalism as a part of their liberaleducation on the American pattern of vocational/professional journalismeducation. This pattern developed strong traditions, which British journalistsadopted surreptitiously not wishing to be seen to be influenced by such - toBritish journalistic eyes - uncommon practices as journalism degrees.In the best account of the philosophical development of Americanjournalism education Wilbur Schramm (1907-87) details how that systemdeveloped and illustrates what Britain failed to achieve until recently,though it might well have done so earlier if London University’s journalismcourse had not closed its doors in 1939. 8Eadier commentators on American journalism education document thesedevelopments further, filling in the intellectual background of twojournalists-turned-sociologists, Max Weber (1864-1920) and Robert EzraPark 9 (1864-1946), as decisive figures in these developments. Suchhistorical antecedents would come as a surprise to many British journalists,MOD100051174