The Times a-changin'

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going to be a pretty sight. capitalist nations. 'Good Times are Bad Times' is being serialised, ironically enough, in the Sunday Times' main rival for Sabbath respectability, The Observer.

The first two episodes shed an almost comic light on the attempts of the Editor to maintain independence from the owner of the newspaper. This was not just any old editor. Harold Evans was the king of the new breed.

Youngish, brash, he gave the Sunday Times the reputation of being a campaigning paper - not left wing, but on the loosest of peoples of Germany and France as well.' leashes from the establishment.

His most famous battle won the right to publish articles attacking the Distillers Company over its treatment of Thalidomide rakia what about China and Vietnam? victims.

Evans did not do anything radical, like publishing and being damned. He fought through the courts and eventually rileged bureaucrats is a million miles from that. won the right for the stories to be printed. It was, to some extent, thanks to the Sunday Times that worst vices of capitalism flourish monstrously. Thalidomide victims received their inadequate compensation, instead of nothing at all.

Renowned Nor was it just any old newspaper owner. Rupert Murdoch was renowned throughout the world for interfering directly in the editorial affairs of his publision as the big capitalist powers.

cations, which included the bottom of the market Sun in Britain, and half the gutter press across the world.

So when the Times was taken over by Rupert Murdoch and the sphere of or into alliance with the USSR. Evans was appointed editor, the stage was set for a fair test of one of the most cherished beliefs in British journalism:

Every journalist has it drummed into their psyche that the ester. whole structure of press freedom rests on the independence of the editor and the editor's right to determine how the paper will be run. It is a principle repeated as if it were self-evident and sufficent to ensure that the newspaper would ever fall under any maligned spell - say, like the National Union of Journalists the fiction could have been maintained that the Editor has editorial control.

Evans was hopelessly tangled in the web, incapable of making a stand against the owners except through dumb insolence.

Evans asked Murdoch to come to dinner.: On the way to his house, Murdoch began complaining, because the Times had invited James Tobin, the Nobel Prize-winner, to comment on British economic policy.

'Why do you run that stuff?' - Well, it's timely.' - "And it's wrong! Wrong! What does he know, anyway?' - 'He won the Nobel Prize.' - Intellectual bullshit.' Murdoch exercised his control not only through his direct vocabulary but also through the budget, which insisted that Evans cleared any spending over £1,000 with him. Revealingly, Evans says that £1,000 is rarely spent on one story, even on the Times, , but cites as one example where it was necessary to spend more than £1,000 'the story of the Labour Party's unknown activists, who had captured the Constitution.' Disappointingly for the sum of human knowledge he does not tell us where the £1,000 went.

In this week's episode, Evans reports his eventual downfall at the Times, and it should make rivetting reading.

Evans does not seem to realise that his book is a self confession that editorial freedom is worth peanuts.

He continues to protest that the problem here was one bad owner. In fact, if Murdoch has a virute, it is that he says and does directly what other newspapers do more discretely. And at least Evans got some happy days out of it. In one scene he describes, at St. John's Wood, he was having dinner at Woodrow Wyatt's house. The guests were Rupert Murdoch, Arnold Weinstock, head of General Electric, and Frank Chapple, Head of the Electricians Dinner with Chapple, Murdoch and Weinstock - and, presumably, all that for under £1,000. Now that's what I call editorial integrity.