[A-List] UK news media: Daily Mirror

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Old glories or the gutter?

Paul Foot

Wednesday May 26, 2004
The Guardian

I had 14 exhilarating years on the Daily Mirror so I follow the paper's
current problems apprehensively. Any affection I may have had for Piers
Morgan vanished with his intemperate and pathetic assault on Ian Hislop - an
assault plainly inspired by pique at some mild mockery of Morgan on Have I
Got News for You. Nor is there the slightest justification for printing
faked photographs.

But questions remain. Which is the greater crime - to print faked
photographs of troops' abuse of prisoners when every day there is more proof
that such abuse did take place, or to persuade a whole nation to go to war
with faked evidence that was entirely false? Which crime killed the most
people? Which caused more lasting damage to the Middle East and to world
peace? And why is it that so many people who published or broadcast the
facts about the real crime have lost their jobs while the ministers they
exposed cling to office?

Those responsible for appointing a new editor of the Daily Mirror should
ponder these questions. However recklessly Morgan behaved over the faked
photographs, they should not forget another aspect of his recklessness: his
determined and flamboyant hostility to the war in Iraq.

On many occasions in the past few months the Mirror reached out to its old
glories, giving generous space not only to the glorious prose of its former
star reporter John Pilger, but also to new, untried journalists who told
millions of Mirror readers what was happening in Iraq and protested about
it. The directors of Trinity Mirror will no doubt feel that the time has
come for some form of relief, for an editor who will "go easy" on the
government and drag the paper relentlessly down into the gutter marked Sun.

This would be tragedy not only for the hundreds of thousands of readers who
revelled in the paper's anti-war campaign but for the future of the paper
that has never prospered following the Sun's line. On taking up his or her
office, the new Mirror editor should make two points quite plain: there will
be no more faked photographs, but neither will there be any deference to the
government over its catastrophic policies in Iraq, and on that crucial issue
the Mirror line will remain constant.