Ronald Stevens

Hugh Cudlipp and Cecil King had been colleagues for 15 years when Cudlipp was ejected from the editorship of the Sunday Pictorial. Though a director of the company, King made no attempt to save Cudlipp’s skin. A couple of years later the man who had toppled Cudlipp, Harry Guy Bartholomew, was toppled himself, and it was King who pushed him. He took over Bartholomew’s chairmanship...

Something about the British press attracts Canadians. In the 1920s Max Aitken bought the Daily and Sunday Express, turned them into successful popular papers and became Lord Beaverbrook in the process. In the 1950s Roy Thomson bought Kemsley Newspapers, added the Times to his empire in 1966, and was similarly rewarded with a seat in the House of Lords. Conrad Black came on the scene in the...

Nearly everyone is happy with the Press Complaints Commission except people with complaints about the press. Governments like it because it provides them with a handy bolthole whenever demands to tame the tabloids become too insistent to ignore. Newspapers like it because it allows them to get on with entrapments, invasions of privacy and other unprofessional outrages, knowing that nothing...