Rising above the pond scum

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Journalists who stay in the grubby trade for any length of time become hardened to being regarded as something lower than pond scum, regularly rated on the same level of professional integrity as the dodgiest of used car dealers. So it's cheering to be reminded that a life in what is now called the mainstream media is not necessarily misspent and that the reporting business can be an honourable calling.

Of course, Harold Evans' autobiography tends to highlight the best side of the game, those occasions when dogged, well-resourced investigative journalism uncovers injustices and wrongdoing. In a long career, from his editorship of the provincial daily the Northern Echo to his distinguished tenure at the Sunday Times, Evans was involved in some of the best newspaper achievements of the time.

In Darlington he revitalised a hidebound newspaper with an expose of industrial pollution from one of the area's most powerful companies and he drove an eventually highly effective campaign to set up an early diagnosis scheme for cervical cancer which has saved countless lives. When he moved to the national stage at the Sunday Times, he was involved in the Kim Philby affair, perhaps the biggest of Britain's notorious spy cases, in which a Soviet agent was at the heart of Western intelligence.

Persistence seems to have been one of his strengths and he showed the value of not letting a good story go in the thalidomide campaign. The discovery of the damage to children by their mothers' use of thalidomide had been made public but Evans' team went into bat for decent compensation for victims. The newspaper ran into a wall of commercial, legal and political obstruction - a familiar scenario for most journalists - but in the end the publicity not only won a better deal for the thalidomide children but in the process changed British law in favour of a freer press. This is not only a tale of victories.

Evans provides a substantial account of the investigation into the murder in Cairo of Sunday Times reporter David Holden. It fails to reach an unequivocal conclusion but leaves Evans with "the aching suspicion that he died not for journalism but for some secret cause he betrayed", an uncomfortable verdict for an editor whose commitment to good reporting was unquestioned. Nor did Evans' newspaper career end in triumph. He was summarily dismissed as editor of the Times by Rupert Murdoch in an episode which shows the downside of hardheaded commercial control of the media.

Evans went on to new careers in book publishing and other ventures in the United States in the company of his young and glamorous second wife, Tina Brown. Murdoch went on to own more and more outlets, including most recently the Wall Street Journal with the help of guarantees of editorial independence which proved such a con trick at the the Times. This book is subtitled True Stories of Vanished Times and the practices of Evans' early days in newspaper production, the field in which he truly excelled, sound as remote as medieval monks slaving over illuminated manuscripts although they are well within the memory of many journalists still working today. His descriptions of his childhood in the working class north also conjure up a world that no longer exists, although the story of a working class boy made good is a staple in British literature, usually accompanied by that inescapably British class compulsion to marvel that "here I am, up with the toffs".

But if his times and the glory days of newspapers are gone, Evans does not wallow in nostalgia and remains an optimist for the new media future and a defender of the journalistic faith. "What we have to find is a way to sustain truth-seeking. If we evolve the right financial model we will enter a golden age of journalism." For society's sake we must hope he is right.

My Paper Chase by Harold Evans (Little, Brown $77)
Reviewed by John Gardner

* John Gardner is an Auckland reviewer.