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Diary Of A Shallow Man
Mar 2009
The Insider - Piers Morgan - Ebury Press, 2005
*
In a recent edition of QI, Stephen Fry asked the participants to name a poisonous snake and Jimmy Carr triggered the show’s infamous boring and obvious alarm by suggesting Piers Morgan. That Carr should make such a joke, and that the QI elves should predict that he would do so, says a lot about the opinion in which Mr Morgan is held by the celebritocracy. Which makes reading this account of his editorships of The News of the World and The Mirror a rather bizarre experience, in that a good proportion of the text consists of self-congratulatory vignettes in which famous people from Kate Winslet to Tony Blair ask and then thank him for his wise advice. The disconnect between his popular image and his own world view strongly suggests that we have an unreliable narrator and makes us inclined to doubt his account of the tabloid editor's world. Not that it is that insightful anyway.
The book is written in diary form, which in itself is somewhat misleading. Morgan kept contemporaneous notes of his activities, but the consistency of tone of the final text and the occasional continuity error suggest that the diary entries were written specifically for the book. This may explain why Morgan's opinions of people are so set in stone from the first time he meets them. The impression given is that he is a good judge of character, whereas in fact it is in an artifact of the writing process. There is also considerable use of direct speech, which often reads suspiciously like novelistic dialogue rather than a direct transcription of tape recordings or shorthand notes.
The unreliability of the narrative unfortunately undermines the chief selling point of the book, which is the supposed insights into the characters of celebrities as evidenced by their interactions with newspaper editors. Having no great interest in the personalities with which the tabloids usually concern themselves, I found the revelations about Princess Diana, Boy George, Paula Yates etc underwhelming. The big reveal of a transcript of a telephone conversation between Morgan and Princess Diana is a damp squib - for once this feels like the genuine article but adds nothing to our mental model of her character. The interactions with New Labour were more interesting but harder to believe. It seems unlikely to me that Morgan was quite as close to Tony Blair as he makes out. It will be interesting to see what Blair's memoirs have to say about him.
The depiction of the tabloid newspaper world - the tricks used to obtain scoops, the games played with other newspapers, the bunfights with arrogant columnists, the obsession with readership figures - will come as no surprise to anyone with a moderately cynical view of the media. What is surprising - and rather depressing - is the lack of analysis of the system and its effects. There is no discussion of newspaper ownership (not a word of criticism of Rupert Murdoch and his media empire) or of where the lines should be drawn between personal privacy and public interest. Editing a tabloid, it appears, is like being a soldier: you can't do it if you stop to question what you are about. Lack of self-reflection is clearly a primary quality for the job.
This does lead to some strange inconsistencies. For a man who has built his career on tabloid exposes of other people's private lives, he is oddly protective of his own, with very little mention of his family and only a passing reference to his divorce. Now a desire to protect current and former loved ones from undesired attention is of course a good thing, but the fact that he clearly understands the concept but did not extend it to others while sitting in the editor's chair makes him look like a hypocrite.
To be fair to Morgan, he did make the right call on the Iraq war. He is also capable of being self-critical - the account of his infamous appearance on Have I Got News for You is rounded off by quotes from three corruscatingly negative reviews, about which he admits to being "puzzled". But the inconsistencies, inaccuracies and hilariously anodyne opinions in this account suggest a fundamentally shallow man. The saddest thing is that he would probably not take offence at this description, arguing that the general public tends not to think too deeply about things and that a good tabloid editor should reflect this. Well, maybe. But given the importance of the media - even the tabloids - in making sense of our complex society, I would prefer the people in charge to display more maturity than Mr. Morgan does here.
The Insider - Piers Morgan - Ebury Press, 2005
*
In a recent edition of QI, Stephen Fry asked the participants to name a poisonous snake and Jimmy Carr triggered the show’s infamous boring and obvious alarm by suggesting Piers Morgan. That Carr should make such a joke, and that the QI elves should predict that he would do so, says a lot about the opinion in which Mr Morgan is held by the celebritocracy. Which makes reading this account of his editorships of The News of the World and The Mirror a rather bizarre experience, in that a good proportion of the text consists of self-congratulatory vignettes in which famous people from Kate Winslet to Tony Blair ask and then thank him for his wise advice. The disconnect between his popular image and his own world view strongly suggests that we have an unreliable narrator and makes us inclined to doubt his account of the tabloid editor's world. Not that it is that insightful anyway.
The book is written in diary form, which in itself is somewhat misleading. Morgan kept contemporaneous notes of his activities, but the consistency of tone of the final text and the occasional continuity error suggest that the diary entries were written specifically for the book. This may explain why Morgan's opinions of people are so set in stone from the first time he meets them. The impression given is that he is a good judge of character, whereas in fact it is in an artifact of the writing process. There is also considerable use of direct speech, which often reads suspiciously like novelistic dialogue rather than a direct transcription of tape recordings or shorthand notes.
The unreliability of the narrative unfortunately undermines the chief selling point of the book, which is the supposed insights into the characters of celebrities as evidenced by their interactions with newspaper editors. Having no great interest in the personalities with which the tabloids usually concern themselves, I found the revelations about Princess Diana, Boy George, Paula Yates etc underwhelming. The big reveal of a transcript of a telephone conversation between Morgan and Princess Diana is a damp squib - for once this feels like the genuine article but adds nothing to our mental model of her character. The interactions with New Labour were more interesting but harder to believe. It seems unlikely to me that Morgan was quite as close to Tony Blair as he makes out. It will be interesting to see what Blair's memoirs have to say about him.
The depiction of the tabloid newspaper world - the tricks used to obtain scoops, the games played with other newspapers, the bunfights with arrogant columnists, the obsession with readership figures - will come as no surprise to anyone with a moderately cynical view of the media. What is surprising - and rather depressing - is the lack of analysis of the system and its effects. There is no discussion of newspaper ownership (not a word of criticism of Rupert Murdoch and his media empire) or of where the lines should be drawn between personal privacy and public interest. Editing a tabloid, it appears, is like being a soldier: you can't do it if you stop to question what you are about. Lack of self-reflection is clearly a primary quality for the job.
This does lead to some strange inconsistencies. For a man who has built his career on tabloid exposes of other people's private lives, he is oddly protective of his own, with very little mention of his family and only a passing reference to his divorce. Now a desire to protect current and former loved ones from undesired attention is of course a good thing, but the fact that he clearly understands the concept but did not extend it to others while sitting in the editor's chair makes him look like a hypocrite.
To be fair to Morgan, he did make the right call on the Iraq war. He is also capable of being self-critical - the account of his infamous appearance on Have I Got News for You is rounded off by quotes from three corruscatingly negative reviews, about which he admits to being "puzzled". But the inconsistencies, inaccuracies and hilariously anodyne opinions in this account suggest a fundamentally shallow man. The saddest thing is that he would probably not take offence at this description, arguing that the general public tends not to think too deeply about things and that a good tabloid editor should reflect this. Well, maybe. But given the importance of the media - even the tabloids - in making sense of our complex society, I would prefer the people in charge to display more maturity than Mr. Morgan does here.