Denis MacShane looks at lessons from the 1930s in reporting on Europe


Plus Ça change I


n years to come, PhDs galore will be written about how British journalists handled Brexit. Soccer reporters covering England’s forays in international


football have been called “fans with typewriters.” Much the same can be said of British journalists who write on Europe – only they are not fans. Anti-EU organisation Brexit Central has


helpfully published a list of 50 organisations that have been campaigning against Europe for decades. The list shows that, far from the June 2016 referendum being what Andrew Marr described as a “rebellion’’, it was the culmination of a 25-year long project. This was initiated and controlled mainly, if not exclusively, from the right – especially the anti-trade union and anti-immigrant right – and paid for by some of the richest men (always men) in the land. However, among these 50 outfits, there is no place for the most powerful campaigners against the EU – the journalists working for newspapers owned by men who are not British and who pay no tax in the UK. For a quarter of a century, journalist-


politicians such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove have fused a venomous contempt for Europe with their own political careers. Tory politicians who are good wordsmiths, such as


16 | theJournalist


William Hague, have used their highly paid perches in national papers to preach against Europe with all the venom of a 19th century Tory denouncing the Vatican or Churchill in the 1920s and 1930s promoting the British Empire in India. We have been here before. The newspapers in the 1930s also felt obliged to take sides in the big question of the day – again, a European one – namely what response to the rise of Adolf Hitler? A new book by journalist Will Wainewright, Reporting on Hitler (Biteback) should be a must read for every NUJ member who is interested in responsible reporting of big foreign policy issues – whether Europe today or Europe 80 years ago. In both eras, journalists were at the heart of


how Britain’s policy towards Europe was defined and shaped. Then and now, the government paid inordinate attention to the public opinion- forming capacity of the press. In European capitals today, most Brexit negotiators openly express concern that a major difficulty in reaching a satisfactory, fair compromise during the negotiations between the UK and the EU is that the British press is a major player, more important than the Brexit negotiating team. This has uncanny parallels with the 1930s,


when Hitler paid considerable attention to British papers.


I confess I am a lifelong student of extreme ideologies. These include Britain and Europe in the 1930s and today. How NUJ members cover international affairs has fascinated me over years of NUJ membership. So this is by far the most gripping book I have read on the ever- relevant subject of English newspapers and how journalists covered the rise of nation-first extremism in Germany and Italy. Wainewright tells the story through Rothay Reynolds, the Catholic, multi-lingual Daily Mail correspondent in Berlin from 1921 until the outbreak of the war in 1939. He had been a foreign correspondent in Russia during the revolution, and spoke Polish as well as French and Italian. He flew with Hitler in his private plane. Compared to today, it is extraordinary how much time British foreign correspondents got face to face with Hitler and other Nazi bigwigs. Rothsay had his copy changed by the owner of the Daily Mail, Lord Rothermere, the de facto editor, who cut out paragraphs reporting on Nazi anti-semitism in the 1930s. Presumably, there may have been a balanced report on Europe in the Daily Mail in recent years but none comes to mind. Rothermere fell in love with Oswald Mosley


and printed the address of the British Union of Fascists in the Daily Mail so readers could join.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28