Section 3 in Chris Horrie's Tabloid Nation is an informative and hilarious piece of writing which aimed to explain the motions by which the Daily Mirror erupted with success and then proceeded to crumble due to the rise of The Sun newspaper as well as the fall of the Daily Express.
The daily Mirror, under Hugh Cudlipp in 1950 went international and became increasingly successful. The newspaper upped its number of employees even bringing in university graduates to work for the newspaper. The Mirror strictly supported labour as far as politics were concerned. Nener was introduced to the paper and made sure the mirror had its daily injection of sexual interest and he took charge of the front page and eventually became editor.
Shock issues were introduced and Cudlipp made the claim that this was his own invention. This saw stories aimed to give ‘an exercise in brutal mass education’. These issues ranged from poverty, child abuse, to suicide cults and motorcycle gangs. This helped increase the sales of ‘The Mirror’ and actually gave it a sharp increase in sales than that of their competing paper, ‘The Daily Express’, despite the express having higher
sales figures overall this was still quite an achievement.
Expense fiddles started to emerge in ‘The Daily Mirror’ as a result of the papers success. Writers used the mirrors bank account like that of a high street cash machine to pay for alcohol and even call girls. This was seen as a way of paying people ‘cash in hand’ and keeping the official salary figures down.
‘The Daily Mirror’ proceeded to raid The Daily Express for their writers and ended up with more staff than the express, this was seen not as an overly expensive workforce but as a display of the journalistic strength of the newspaper.
The introduction of television however meant that the number of pages in newspapers throughout England had to be reduced. This inevitably led to a decrease in ‘the mirrors’ revenue as television was now the primary source in which younger people fled to.
Cudlipp decided to re-launch The Mirror and aim it towards a young market, this ended up with a series of cringe-worthy articles with the ancient heads of the Daily Mirror making poor attempts at being cool and hip.
The incredibly old style of The Express however meant that there was a gap in the newspaper market, which the mirror managed to grab due to its efforts to be young and cool (even though still having all the old editors and story writers in charge during the war period). Therefore the mirror continued to grow and prosper, founding a new office near Fleet Street nick-named the ‘Taj-Mahal of journalism’.
By 1964 The Daily Mirror was regularly selling more than five million copies a day which meant that it had become the largest selling newspaper in the world. During this period of boom for the newspaper, the Mirrorscope was created as a pull out paper which had the intention of becoming its own separate paper further down the line.
Cudlipp continued to enjoy the luxuries of his success by undertaking in the purchase of a ‘Mirror Dinghy’; however he was caught up in a series of affairs which led him to instate Cecil King as one of the most important figures in the paper in Cudlipp’s absence. After seizing control, King used the wealth and power provided by the mirror to create a huge private office which took up a majority of the ninth floor of the new ‘Taj-Mahal’ office.
King aimed to make the mirror a powerful organization and started buying out other papers and companies. The mirror and Sunday mirror became only small parts of a new IPC conglomerate or in other- wise known as the ‘Odhams international publishing corporation’. King ended up in control of over 200 consumer magazines, nineteen different printing plants and a large stake in ITV commercial television, a record company, and several paper mills.
King aimed to scale down the Herald newspaper and turn the market over to the sun however wasn’t able to achieve this due to the labour parties threats to push for a referral to the competition authorities. This meant that king was forced however to maintain the Herald and attempt to push it into some form of success. The herald eventually flopped and wreaked havoc with Kings Finances, it became known as ‘kings cross’ due to bringing King’s spending to a standstill.
The herald was re-launched as the sun in order to combat its massive losses. The paper Targeted a very young new audience and maintained key focus on things such as the modernisation of Britain with automation, computers, electronics etc… it ultimately failed and Cudlipp sought to be rid of the paper as soon as he met the agreement of labour to keep it running in one way or another for an extended period of time.
During a period in which economic instability was looming in Britain, King published a front page article with the headline ‘enough is enough’ calling for Harold Wilson to leave his office as prime minister. King wrote in an article that Wilson had ‘lost all credibility, all authority’.
King looked for an alternative leader to take charge which would inevitably oust Wilson from his leadership role and the conservatives would take power with this alternative leader. King looked to King-Mosley to be that man.
After disregarding King-Mosley due to his age, King attended a meeting between Mountbatten and Zuckerman to discuss the mirrors role in helping to elect a new form of government. King during the meeting insisted on Mountbatten to form a new government as soon as possible. This form of government would see military dictatorship take over democratic procedure in preparation of the looming recession.
Two men, Penrose and Courtiour opened the case and examined this meeting as it was allegedly a ‘coup’ which was formed in order to oust Wilson with the collaboration of the MI5. After this, apparently 30 intelligence officers had come to the conclusion that Wilson was in fact a threat to national security. They were secretly plotting with the IRA to create a united Ireland, this was known as ‘operation clockwork orange’, this was designed to undermine and remove the labour government. It was reported that following this king had actually worked for the British intelligence in Ireland.
Following this discovery Cecil King was sacked by Hugh Cudlipp. This was due to his association with national affairs and he had been accused of creating a situation between him and his colleagues at IPC. His article ‘enough is enough’ was considered as the piece of work which ended his career. His room was efficiently removed of any trace of King almost immediately.
Rupert Murdoch bought the news of the world in 1968 and instantly made a few simple changes to restore the newspapers profitability. After effectively managing to gain a foothold in the industry, Murdoch looked to buy another newspaper to expand his potential profitable empire within the media.
Murdoch flew over to Rome to speak with the print union leader Richard Briginshaw, he promised that if he bought the sun newspaper off of IPC (or Cudlipp) there would be no redundancies which is exactly what the unions wanted to hear which obviously got the unions on his side. Murdoch managed to buy the paper for an ‘astonishingly low’ amount of money following this meeting, and held off Maxwell (another potential buyer) from purchasing the paper off of Cudlipp.
This was a somewhat fatal error on Cudlipp’s part as he severely underestimated Murdoch as any kind of serious threat despite being aware that the paper would be in direct competition with The Mirror. However at this point in time Cudlipp wanted rid of the paper after keeping it going for far longer than he had ever intended it to be in production for and suffering heavy losses because of it.
Murdoch invited Larry Lamb (former employee of IPC) for a ‘quiet dinner’ to talk things through with the basic aim of gaining a chief editor. They discussed how to go about making the sun newspaper similar to that of the glory days of which the mirror experienced by making the paper anti-establishment, campaigning, radical and sexy.
Feeling potentially threatened Cudlipp introduced the mirror magazine which was aimed to see off Murdoch’s newly founded newspaper. Cudlipp filled the magazine with a new and up-and-coming team of journalists fresh from graduation. However, Cudlipp’s magazine failed miserably, it was criticised to not fit with the agenda and type of stories and photography which ran throughout their main newspaper, The Mirror. This failure unfortunately occurred just before the sun was released.
Murdoch’s paper was released, and it was rife with sex, scandal and shocking stories such as filled the mirror in the 1930s. Murdoch’s plan to present the paper just like that of its previous successor had worked and the sun overtook The Mirror in sales to become the world’s best-selling newspaper. The Daily Mirror now had the dilemma of how to turn around their paper to either compete with the sun or enter a slightly or entirely different market to keep it afloat.
Hugh Cudlipp left the daily mirror in 1974 and threw a party of astronomical proportions to be sent on his way. The Mirror went downhill from here. Cudlipp handed the role of editor over to Tony miles, who then died, which resulted in Mike Molloy taking over. Following this Clive Thornton took over as chief executive at the mirror who ruthlessly cut staff expenses and attempted to reorganize the company in an effort to maintain profitability. After Thornton had failed, Maxwell who had been circling the office for weeks was given the job. He immediately dipped into the company’s finances and made un-kept promises about how he intended to return the newspaper to its former glory of the 1960s.
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