Exhibit JC42 - The Leveson Inquiry

For Distribution to CPsThe importance and meaning of the London University Diploma for Journalism courseCambridge Universities lost nearly 5,000 graduates killed in action duringthe war. Yet it was the provincial side of the newspaper industry, throughthe Newspaper Society, which supported students on the course withExhibitions, although a few national groups did contribute (see AppendixXX and XXI).The existence of the course coincided with some of the greatest changeswithin the British press: Wickham Steed labels it the ’commercialisation ofthe press’ in his 1938 Penguin, The Press. In its attempts to come to termswith these developments it would appear that the course adopted the roleof training for the provincial press to please those newspapers fundingstudents attending the course, although, even here, there were supporterswho provided more than mere verbal support - like Reuters supplying ateleprinter, at no cost and even insured by Reuters because King’s Collegewould not meet the cost.By the time Mr. Tom Clarke arrived as Director of Practical Journalism in1935 the course was locked into the occupational belief that journalism hadto be experienced first at the provincial level before the pinnacles ofnational journalism, in Fleet Street, could be attempted. One of theproblems of this system was the lack of system, with no acknowledgedcareer pattern easily visible. Too much seemed to depend on luck, or bluff,as Piers Brendon put it to me while he was writing his book on The Life andDeath of the Press Barons, published in 1982.Regardless of the progress made during the existence of the course it isstill a fact that London University appointed no one ’person or academicbody responsible for co-ordinating the teaching, initiating changes, orobserving progress. ’3 It was left to someone like Dr. Harrison, whatever hismotives, to make the running in trying to develop the course into a fullyfledgedSchool of Journalism, within the University; but, in his view, King’sCollege’s only reaction to new ideas was to drop them into the RiverThames from Waterloo Bridge. 4A (iii) The London School of EconomicsTo modern eyes it appears unusual to find the London School ofEconomics dropping out of the Diploma for Journalism from the end of1929/30 academic year, especially as it was just as ’close to Fleet Street’as King’s College 5 where the course eventually established its centre. Yetwe have seen that the aspiring Socialist Member of Parliament, Dr. HughDalton, relegated the Journalism Committee to its ’ragged crowd ’8 role, andhe was, supposedly, tutor to LSE’s journalism students. They stood littlechance against Dalton’s numerous attempts to secure a parliamentaryseat. There is no reference to the subject (of the Diploma for Journalism) inany of the papers of the LSE’s director from 1919 to 1937, Sir William (laterLord) Beveridge. He did not see journalism as being ’one of the urgentintellectual needs of our time ’7 which he saw as the main aim of the School:’training for a new learned profession.., that of public administrators.., nowords are needed to emphasise its growing importance. ’8To further this aim LSE needed money to establish the new socialsciences and Beveridge spent the early years of his directorship catching~,’2186MOD100051357