‘Am I not God’s chosen?’

Never write blurbs. That is my modest advice to Sir Harold Evans, who in his endorsement of Muckraker describes the life of W.T. Stead as ‘ennobling’. This is particularly odd because Stead (1849-1912) was the shameless precursor of the gutter journalism that Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World and Sun have inflicted on the UK — something that Sir Harold, once editor of Murdoch’s classier Times, knows all too well.

Most symptoms of the current red-top plague were rampant in Stead’s style of journalism: the claim to speak for the decent majority, the vow to drive bad people from office by exposing them, the conceit that those who run newspapers should not only advocate, but create, policy, and that no person or subject, whether local or international, is immune to high-minded scrutiny.

All this, as Stead wrote in his diary, must be ‘lively, amusing and newsy’. Together with these agreeable qualities, however, went deceit, scandal-mongering, especially about sexual matters, and anything-goes dirt-digging.