Checkbook Journalism

"Jimmy can't expect me to stand up and praise him for the crooked life he's led," wrote the father of Murderer-Rapist James Hanratty (TIME, March 2) in London's Daily Express (circ. 4,328,524). Elsewhere in the paper, the girl Hanratty raped relived her travail: "I thought he wouldn't do it. I thought it could never happen, that I was dreaming." London's Sunday Pictorial (5,306,246) weighed in with first-person accounts from the beautician who dyed the fugitive killer's hair, and from other members of the family who had helped him hide. Sample quote: "When he was asleep, his mouth was always open. He looked like a child."

These gaudy journalistic outbursts had one thing in common: all of the stories were bought and paid for by Britain's popular press. Even Hanratty himself optioned his story to the Express--which was shrewdly holding off a while, perhaps until Hanratty's date with the gallows. The prices that Fleet Street paid for its stories were not high; the Express, for example, managed to sew up its principals for some $8,000. Yet for unabashed checkbook journalism, Fleet Street has its own style.

Anything goes. John George Haigh, who dissolved nine British subjects in acid after first quaffing goblets of their blood, collected $14,000 from the News of the World for an exclusive story of his grisly deeds. An attorney for a woman cleared of fatally poisoning her spouse accepted bids on her story (the Sunday Express won, for $35,000). Some years ago, a murderer sold his confession to a paper even as he pleaded his innocence in court.

The lurid press aftermath of big British criminal cases is a direct result of the country's stringent laws governing coverage of crime. Although a trial can be reported in full, any paper that goes beyond the testimony--even to describe the mien of the magistrate on the bench--risks heavy fines and severe punishment. Behind such enforced discipline accumulates the enormous urge of a newspaper to tell the whole story--as well as an enormous public urge to hear it. Then the checkbooks come out.

However sensible the necessity of protecting the privacy even of the man in the dock, the British system has its drawbacks. For one, witnesses already under hire by some newspaper face an irresistible impulse to embroider the truth for the sake of tomorrow's headlines. And Britain's checkbook journalism has inspired in the heart of many a felon the conviction that crime does pay. Said Stuart Campbell, editor of the People (circ. 5,450,727): "It's getting to the point that when you ask anyone the color of his hat, he says, 'Six quid and I'll start talking.' "

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