James Harding on Mistakes Made

By Elizabeth Culliford

In December 2007, James Harding was named the youngest ever editor of The Times. He has a First from Cambridge, speaks five languages and has worked as a speech writer to the Chief Secretary of the Cabinet in Japan. His Wikipedia page reads as a series of feet put right; all the way from St. Paul’s to the Shanghai bureau of The Times to editorship history. But on 30th May 2012 he spoke to Oxford Media Society about mistakes.

Harding was late and he was apologetic – but apologies extended only to the subject of trains. While he plainly said that the outcome of Leveson would be ‘that newspapers will have to treat people better’ and while he has previously stated that he expected much better of his paper than the reports of hacking, he is evidently not the man to go to if you want grovelling regrets about poking noses and camera lenses in too far.

He set the scene with stories of false obituaries read with surprise by the supposedly dead and of the Harcourt Interpolation - the time when a rogue compositor inserted an obscenity into the middle of a speech by a leading politician of the day and The Times had to send out telegrams to hastily recall all of the unsold editions. While these mistakes are not on the same level as the ethical misjudgements made by hackers today, his point was that newspapers are not infallible or superhuman; they make errors and always have done. Harding did not use these as excuses but as history; he seemed very aware that when the newspaper is one that Abe Lincoln described as ‘more powerful than the Mississippi’, the repercussions of those errors may be frighteningly large.

Harding quoted Lincoln; he is evidently proud of the paper and still excited by his position at its helm. This excitement is what makes Harding so impressive; at a time when other editors might be slumped at desks, worn out from giving evidence and not be so keen to come and answer bald questions from students, he travelled to whole-heartedly back ‘a boisterous press’. He gave us the headline that there is not too much investigation but not enough. Taking collective responsibility he said ‘we haven’t looked deep enough into the riots, or at what was going on inside Downing Street’. He argued that we know very little about Iraq and that we were kept in the dark about the banking mess. This man is one who believes that Britain’s press is not ‘too free’, knowing no bounds and pulling limitless skeletons out of cupboards but is not searching nearly deep enough.

As we sat noting things down he was doing reviews of his own - hands up surveys of print vs. digital media, pulling consumer information from the younger generation even as he gave the talk. He was adamant that the owners of newspapers had no say in their content, entertained by the way papers were entwined with identity – ‘The Express is awful, going downhill, writings rubbish. . .but I wouldn’t buy another, I’m an Express man, me’ – and firm about what he believed. He answered questions but then had to dash, apologising for having to go, but going back to run The Times unapologetically.