Fleet Street, Main Street and the Continuing Implosion of Will Lewis

A tasty blend of U.S.-style and U.K.-style journalism could be great. Too bad The Washington Post's publisher probably isn't the person to create that.

One day in 2008, I found myself in Oxford, England, making tea with Jeremy Paxman and pondering the state of the news media. Paxman was the feisty British journalist who for years hosted “Newsnight,” the BBC’s daily — well, nightly — public affairs program. In that role, he’s perhaps best known for the grilling he administered to government minister Michael Howard in 1997. In the space of 90 seconds, Paxman asked a variation of the same question a dozen times: Did you threaten to overrule Derek Lewis?

You don’t have to know who Derek Lewis is or why overruling Lewis — or threatening to overrule Lewis — is such a big deal to be entranced by the encounter. Look it up on YouTube. It’s a “Did you order the Code Red?” moment. And I think it’s the sort of interaction you’d be unlikely to see on an American news program, where journalists tend to ask a question and move on, uninterested in challenging the stonewalling or the dissembling.¹

I met Paxman when he spoke at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, where I spent a year as a visiting fellow. All sorts of British mediafolk visited us there. I’m an Anglophile and a journophile — I love English things and I love journalism — so this was the perfect opportunity to compare U.S. and U.K. media. ²

After his presentation, I glommed on to Paxman in the kitchen of the Reuters Institute building — a grand house on a leafy Oxford lane — and asked him what he thought of American journalism. Paxman told me he had great admiration for American journalism, but found much of it “po-faced.”

We don’t have that expression in America and I struggle to define it. One definition is “humorless and disapproving.” Another is “piously or hypocritically solemn.” You might add “dry and boring.”

Certainly, American newspaper racks in 2008 didn’t display the vibrancy of Fleet Street’s offerings back then, which ranged from topless Page 3 models in the tabloids to long investigative pieces by The Sunday Times’s Insight team.

The articles themselves were often more engagingly written than their U.S. counterparts. Columnists wrote the way people talked, with bad words and everything. Editorial cartoonists were puerile and outrageous, their pens dripping acid. (The Guardian’s Steve Bell regularly drew George W. Bush as a barefoot, knuckle-dragging ape.)

If American newspapers could be puritanical — The Post’s Eugene Meyer once decreed that “the paper shall observe the decencies that are obligatory upon a private gentleman” — British newspapers could be Rabelaisian. They acknowledged the messiness of the human condition.

That was in presentation. But it turned out the British press could be pretty messy in the way it gathered news, too. Some journalists paid sources for information. Some journalists hired private investigators. Some of those private investigators hacked the phones of celebrities, royalty, murder victims...

If during my time at Oxford, Paxman occupied one end of the Fleet Street continuum, Peter McKay occupied another. McKay was a columnist for the Daily Mail. During his visit to the Reuters Institute, he shared a story from early in his career, when he worked at the Daily Express, another tabloid. A Scottish fishing vessel was presumed lost after a storm in the North Sea. McKay and a colleague were dispatched to Aberdeen to write a scene piece. Miraculously, the boat returned, the crew unharmed. But because McKay and his colleague hadn’t managed to get a photo of the actual return, the pair paid the skipper to take the boat back out to sea and motor back into the harbor. They staged the return.

I pointed out that this was a blatant fabrication of the sort no respectable American paper would allow. This must have rankled McKay, for a month later in his Daily Mail column, he wrote about his trip to Oxford and mused on our exchange: “[A] Washington Post journalist on the course said his paper would never countenance such a deception. The pompous idiots do, however, publish mock-up pictures every day of President George W. Bush ‘in conversation’ or ‘sharing a joke’ with distinguished visitors."

I still don’t know what he meant by that (“mock-up pictures every day”?), but it probably gets back to being po-faced. McKay may have thought The Post showed too much deference to the president.

As for Paxman, he and I agreed we’d love to see some admixture of the two countries’ practices: the rigorous peanut butter of American journalism combined with the frisky chocolate of British journalism.

Which brings us to what’s really on my mind: the latest news about Will Lewis, the publisher of The Washington Post. British authorities are apparently pondering whether to examine what role, if any, Lewis played in covering up phone hacking at Rupert Murdoch’s papers.

It’s been a rough few months for Lewis and The Post. His response to the drip-drip-drip of disquieting information about his Fleet Street career has been of a sort that would have irked him when he held a notebook. Every time you read “Lewis declined to comment through a Post spokeswoman,” another angel loses his wings.  

Lewis may yet survive these latest developments — his “third newsroom” may be the magic bullet that saves The Post (I hope it is) — but he’s already blown his chance with a lot of journalists and people who care about journalism.

Lewis is smart enough to know that what is — or was — acceptable journalistic practice in Britain is not acceptable in the United States. On his first day at The Post, Lewis could have just said, “The competitive, rough-and-tumble world of Fleet Street in its phone-hacking, source-paying heyday had different rules. The journalists at The Washington Post will not be following those rules. The Post will continue to abide by the same journalistic principles that guided Ben Bradlee, Len Downie and Marty Baron.”

But I suspect that even raising that would have been a reminder that Lewis himself had practiced that other form of journalism. His newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, had paid a source — for an important story, yes, but one an American editor would have directed her reporters to keep poking at until they got it without reaching for the checkbook.³ And Lewis was involved in some still not satisfyingly explored way in handling the fallout from phone hacking at Murdoch’s papers.

Some British hacks still scoff at how journalism is practiced on this side of the Atlantic. In its media column a few weeks ago, Private Eye magazine simultaneously praised The Post’s reporters for covering the Lewis affair and slapped them for the manner in which they did so: “[To] demonstrate their own respect for the traditional strictures of American journalism, they are ensuring it is presented in as dry and unappealing a format as is humanly possible.”

Will Lewis may wind up being the person who adds some moisture to dry American journalism, but a lot of us don’t like the taste of what he’s brought to the table so far.

Full disclosure: I worked at The Washington Post for 34 years, the last 20 as a local columnist. I took a buyout from the paper last December. I met Lewis once, when I implored him to donate The Post’s photo morgue to a local library so it would be accessible to researchers. (As far as I know, nothing has come of that.)

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1. A notable recent exception: The way Rachel Scott of ABC News questioned Donald Trump at the NABJ conference.

2. I wrote a blog while I lived in Oxford and I devoted every Friday’s edition to weird stories from the British press. Also: photos of gargoyles.

3. Or “chequebook.”