The British media loves to portray Freemasonry as a sinister, secretive and unaccountable organisation. Its hostile reporting of the organisation led Freemasonry Today to wonder whether, in these politically-correct times when the rights of minorities are sacrosanct, we are the last bogeyman, the last group whom the press feels it can insult with impunity.
    Freelance journalist JOHN CRANAGE, a non-mason, was asked to look at the newspaper coverage the Craft has received in the wake of the House of Commons home affairs select committee sessions last year. The issues raised by the affair have highlighted the need on the part of Freemasonry to update its image and blow away the cobwebs of secrecy - a trend that is already well under way in some of the English Provinces.
    But as Cranage discovered, some of Freemasonry’s severest Fleet Street critics are themselves reluctant to speak about their apparent animosity towards the Craft. The reaction to his attempts to persuade some editors and journalists to contribute to this article have raised the question of just who, in 1999, is the real bogeyman of British society - Freemasonry or the press?

Is the Craft the last bogeyman for the media bullyboys?

Question: What do Freemasonry and Glen Hoddle have in common?

Answer: Both can claim to be victims of a bullying and vindictive British media.

Hoddle was forced out of his job as England’s national football team coach after expressing his views on reincarnation and karma to a national newspaper journalist. That was his first mistake. Begin talking about spirituality to the average national newspaper hack and you are automatically marked down as a ‘loony’. Hoddle’s second error was to link karma with the problems of the disabled, who, he said, were being punished in this life for sins committed in previous existences.
    The ensuing storm of moral outrage - fuelled by a highly vocal disabled lobby and with Prime Minister Tony Blair at its epicentre - which was whipped up by all sections of the media meant that Hoddle had to go. The fact that Hoddle, in his stumbling way, was expressing a belief shared by millions of Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs and Jains meant nothing to a media that had the scent of fresh blood in its nostrils. It meant, however, that, for a few days at least, the English national press had a bogeyman other than Freemasonry in its sights. It had a fresh victim to hound and bully.
    Freemasonry has to endure media coverage that at best is riddled with clichés about rolled-up trousers and funny handshakes and that at worst speaks darkly of sinister webs of intrigue spreading malignantly through the police force, the judiciary, the City and local government. It’s a toss up as to what line a journalist will take when writing about the Craft. Will he opt for the ‘make ‘em laugh’ approach with talk of men in aprons performing silly rituals and swearing blood curdling oaths? Or will he nurture the fantasies of malcontents and conspiracy-theorists by hinting at masonic plots to keep bent coppers in their jobs? Either way, his reporting will more often than not be based on a rehash of the cuttings mixed with ignorance about what Freemasonry and its 400,000 British adherents is all about. And to a large extent, Freemasonry has only itself to blame. For too long has the Craft been impersonating the tortoise and withdrawing deep into its shell whenever danger threatens. Its obsession with secrecy (as opposed to a wish to protect the privacy of its members) has only served to hand out ammunition to hostile and uninformed journalists.
    But there are signs that the Freemasonry worm (to switch metaphors) is beginning to turn and show a willingness to take the fight to its media tormentors. That, combined with a new willingness in some quarters of the Craft to throw open the lodge doors and invite the press and public in, is beginning to alter the perception of Freemasonry in the minds of some journalists. However, there’s a long way to go before the public relations battle is won, as a review of the way in which the national and provincial press have covered Freemasonry in recent months shows. But before embarking on that review, it is worth listening to the views of one writer and broadcaster who is not afraid to let the world know that he is a Freemason.

Ed Doolan

Ed Doolan of BBC Radio WM in Birmingham responded to attacks on the Craft following the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee inquisition last year by writing an article for the Birmingham Evening Mail in which he said: “In 1963 I was initiated into the ‘secrets’ of Freemasonry and have spent the last 35 years wondering what all the fuss was about.”
    On behalf of Freemasonry Today I asked Doolan what he thought of the way in which his fellow professionals reported the Craft.
    “Generally, I think the media treat Freemasonry pretty shabbily. It’s through ignorance rather than malice, though I think there is a touch of malice in it,” Doolan said.
    “Because of the nature of the perception of Masonry those who are within it don’t defend it as well as they should and those who are outside it attack it with full gusto because they know nothing about it.”
    I asked Doolan if he agreed that Freemasonry really is the last bogeyman, the last minority group that the press feels it can attack and insult with impunity. “It’s not the last bogeyman,” he said, “it's just the current one. There will always be somebody else. Once you've finished killing the Jews you then start on the homosexuals and the cripples. There is no end to persecution. As far as the media is concerned, encouraged as they are by self-seeking politicians in many cases, it’s open season. I blame a lot of it on the Freemasons who don’t stand up, as I do, and say ‘I'm a Freemason, any problem?’ I’ve said it on the radio and I’ve said in the press. It’s never been a secret and, what is extraordinary, it's never been an issue. Being a Freemason is not such a big deal.
    “I do get tired, though, of hearing things like ‘Oh, the Freemasons do favours for each other’ - like Rotarians don’t, like the Lions don’t, like your friends in the Labour Party don’t. Of course you do favours, everybody does favours. But would you do a favour that’s contrary to justice and law? Of course you wouldn’t. This idea that some old criminal can give a signal and the judge will find him not guilty is bizarre.
    “But Freemasonry is an easy target for journalists. They’ll hunt Glen Hoddle one week, Peter Mandelson another week. And if Glen Hoddle and Peter Mandelson are out of the way they’ll hunt the Freemasons.”
    Doolan is careful to differentiate between the national press and their provincial colleagues - a theme that will be taken up again in this article. “I think the provincial media tend to be far less hysterical and far more knowledgeable,” he said. “It’s possibly because the provincial media have to work closely with people and they take the trouble to find out what they are talking about, whereas the national media have these very highly paid smart-arses...to knock off a thousand words on the latest prejudice. It doesn’t have to fill in the space in someone’s head as long as if fills the space on the page.”

The naming of names

The ‘naming of names’ row that broke out in February 1998 certainly helped to fill newspaper space and television and radio air time. It followed the demand by the home affairs select committee, chaired by Labour MP Chris Mullin, that United Grand Lodge identify Freemasons believed to be policemen implicated in a series of miscarriages of justice, including members of the discredited and disbanded West Midland serious crimes squad, as well as those serving as judges and magistrates. The committee’s threat to jail the then Grand Secretary, Commander Michael Higham, if the names were not forthcoming, resulted in a rash of tabloid headlines along the lines of The Express’s “MPs MAY JAIL TOP MASON” and The Mirror’s “MASONS ARE WARNED: NAME CROOKED COPS OR YOU FACE PRISON”.
    The broadsheets’ reporting of the committee proceedings was generally less sensational and even-handed, although The Guardian provided a platform for arch masonry-hater Martin Short, author of Inside the Brotherhood, to air his opinion that “They [Freemasons] really are on the ropes. The impact on their membership could be quite serious.”
    Simon Hoggart, The Guardian’s parliamentary sketch writer, used his column to take a swipe at Higham: “I won't say that extracting information from Commander Michael Higham...was like getting blood out of a stone. He is, somehow, floppier than that. More like squeezing malt whisky out of a face flannel.” Hoggart also attacked Gerald Howarth, Conservative MP for Aldershot, the one committee member who expressed the view that Mullin’s demands could just, possibly, be a breach of Freemasons’ privacy.
    Howarth’s questioning of Higham, he wrote, “resembled one of those tennis machines which throw balls at players. His control lever had been fixed at slow lob”.
    Another Guardian columnist, Paul Foot, used the event to return to a subject close to his heart - the wrongful conviction of four men for the murder of 1978 murder of Staffordshire newsboy Carl Bridgewater. Foot wrote on 24 February 1998: “Was the boy’s murderer by any chance a Freemason? I only ask because so many of the police officers in the case were on the square, probably in the same lodge. I have always been suspicious of dark stories of masonic conspiracies, but I make an exception in the case of the late, unlamented West Midlands serious crimes squad.”
    Foot went on to state that there were about 30 cases of “gross injustice arising from fabrication of evidence, bullying and torturing suspects in custody” by a group of officers from that squad. “Many if not all the officers concerned in such cases were freemasons,” Foot continued. “Their masonic links did not automatically make them liars and bullies - but it did help to shield their behaviour from discovery and punishment.”
    Freemasonry Today would have liked Foot, a highly respected campaigner for the rights of minorities, to give us his views on how Freemasons are portrayed by the media. He did not return our call.
    A call to Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger was diverted to the paper’s media editor who did not respond to messages or faxed questions.

The Daily Mail

Surprisingly, the Daily Mail, that voice of middle England, seemed to be aboard the anti-masonry bandwagon later in the year when the results of a voluntary survey of membership among magistrates were published. “One magistrate in seven confesses to being a mason” proclaimed a Mail headline on 11 November 1998. The use of the word “confesses” - which implied that the magistrates in question were owning up to unlawful deeds - resulted in a complaint to the Mail editor Paul Dacre from United Grand Lodge.
    “There was rather a humorous side to the complaint,” said Grand Lodge’s Head of Communications, John Hamill : “In later editions they shortened the piece, changed the headline and re-sited it on another page. When we put in the initial complaint we got a letter from the editor denying they’d ever used the word ‘confesses’, so we had to send him a copy of the cutting from his own paper.”
    Freemasonry’s relationship with the Daily Mail now seems to have improved following Grand Lodge's complaint, according to Hamill. A request to Paul Dacre for his views on whether or not Freemasonry gets unfair press treatment was answered by fax by the paper’s executive managing editor, Robin Esser. He said: “The Daily Mail has no policy, and certainly no animus, in regard to Freemasonry. As a newspaper we report, as best we can, any matters which concern the Craft just as we do with any other legitimate organisation.” Esser went on: “Personally, I recently spent a very interesting few hours at United Grand Lodge with the Grand Secretary, the Director of Communications and the Head Librarian, listening to their background briefing. I was encouraged to hear that the general policy of Freemasonry is to be more open about its own affairs. This, I am sure, will go a long way towards making it easier to report matters relevant to the Craft in an accurate way.”

Yorkshire

A grass roots view of the select committee affair has been supplied by Donald Davinson, Deputy Provincial Grand Master for Yorkshire North and East. In a speech he gave to the Harrogate and District Lodge of Installed Masters he pointed out that the original 1997 home affairs select committee report on Freeemasonry contained 56 paragraphs, 55 of which were “largely supportive” of the Craft.
    “It talks of ‘much paranoia’ about our affairs,” Davinson said. “It asserts there is nothing harmful in our activities. Many organisations responsible for the administration of law and order told the committee that they had no record of masonic interference in their affairs.
    “The 56th paragraph,” Davinson went on to say, “states that because there is a poor public perception of Freemasonry, judges, policemen and magistrates should formally register their interest in Freemasonry. This is a uniquely discriminatory measure that undermines the basic principles of freedom of association. Significantly this was the only piece of the report most of the media chose to report.”
    Freemasonry, however, did have at least one supporter in the columns of the national press. Writing in The Times, David Pannick QC, a barrister and part-time judge, stated his opposition to the Lord Chancellor’s insistence that judges declare membership of the Freemasons as an invasion of privacy. “Personal privacy is essential to our autonomy as human beings, whatever job we do,” said Pannick. “The Lord Chancellor would not normally expect candidates for judicial office to tell the public about their religious beliefs, political views or sexual preferences.”
    Just as the dust from the select committee row was beginning to settle, Freemasonry found itself under attack from another sector of the national press. Under the banner headline “Revealed: the Brothers of the City”, the national business newspaper Sunday Business recently devoted half a page to an article on the influence of Freemasonry within the City of London. The article was accompanied by a series of ‘snatched’ photographs of members arriving at Mark Masons’ Hall in St James’s Street, London; men who, in the words of Sunday Business have pledged a “secret allegiance to mutually support one another”. To its credit, Sunday Business devoted an equivalent amount of space the following week to a defence of the Craft by senior Freemasons.
    Richard Gillett, Grand Secretary of the Provincial Grand Lodge of Gloucestershire, for example, weighed in with the observation that talk of the mason’s pledge of mutual support by the press always leaves out that part of the ritual which goes on to stress that it should be for laudable (his italics) undertakings. Philip Barker, master of the Old Hamptonian Lodge, wrote: “One cannot fail to be startled by the way in which an otherwise rational and fair-minded newspaper should side with the forces of irrational prejudice in an article which, written on any other organisation or sector of society, would cause righteous outrage.”
    Before shifting the focus from the national to the provincial press, here are a few words of reassurance for Freemasons who remember Punch as a gentle and humorous publication. In its present incarnation, Punch recently published an ‘exposé’ of Freemasonry under the headline “BOYZ’N THE BROTHERHOOD”.
    “Its rituals and rites are both bizarre and secret, yet its members occupy positions at the highest levels of society,” its writers screamed. Punch recently published a similarly sensationalist account of Peter Mandelson’s alleged grand tour of the homosexual clubs and dives of Rio de Janeiro, virtually all of which was subsequently discredited. All that anyone upset by Punch’s attack on the Craft needs to bear in mind is that the title is now owned by Mohammed Fayed, the man who believes the British Secret Service murdered his son, Dodi, and the Princess of Wales.

Local newspapers

Now for some good news: Freemasons who rely on their local newspapers to keep them informed are far more likely to be presented with a positive image of the Craft than those whose staple diet consists of national publications. Major regional newspapers - with one or two exceptions - took the opportunity of the PR offensive launched by some provincial lodges in the wake of the select committee row to inform their readers of what Masonry is really all about.
    The Birmingham Post, for example, went on an open day tour of the Provincial Grand Lodge of Warwickshire in Birmingham and reported: “Freemasonry is steeped in tradition and ritual. Christian symbols and principles are a significant part of the customs involved in the society, with many of the beliefs derived from the Old Testament.”
    In Manchester, the mass circulation Evening News not only carried the first ever advertisement for Freemasonry, it devoted a page to explaining some of the Craft’s history and traditions. The Evening News followed up with a telephone poll of its readers on the subject of whether judges who are masons should declare their membership of the organisation. Three quarters of those who took part in the poll said they should not have to - a strong indication that the public, unlike some politicians and journalists, have a relaxed, live-and-let-live view of Masonry.
    When it comes to straightforward, unbiased reporting of Masonry’s charitable activities, regional and local newspapers have an even more positive record. Stories and photographs of charitable cheque presentations may raise a sneer on the faces of some national hacks, but they are an essential ingredient of the picture that any good weekly newspaper paints of its locality.

The trade I pursue

Writing this article has led me, as a journalist, to think deeply about the trade I pursue and about why Freemasonry should be held in such contempt in some sections of the media.
    When I trained as reporter on my local weekly paper in the 1960s the local Freemasons and their activities were reported in just the same way as were the activities of other worthy organisations like the Rotary Club, the WI, the Soroptomists and the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes. You sometimes heard mutterings from colleagues about an editor “doing his mates down the lodge a favour” whenever stories they were particularly proud of failed to be given the prominence they felt they deserved.
    My later experiences as a crime reporter, however, led me to the conclusion that most of the dodgy deals in this life are hatched on golf courses, far away from the eyes and ears of the law-abiding. But it now seems to be permanent open season on Freemasons and, like some newspaper columnists whose work I have read while researching this article, I am appalled by the witchhunt.
    Short of passing a law compelling masons to stitch some permanent symbol of their membership of the Craft (a yellow Star of David, perhaps?) to their coats it is hard to imagine just how they can be humiliated further. But how can this state of affairs be? After all, are we not living in Tony Blair’s politically-correct New Britain; a Britain which respects the rights of minorities - often to the extent of giving them privileges denied to the majority?
    In attempting to analyse the behaviour of the national press vis-à-vis Freemasonry, I have concluded that two unfortunate, but separate, trends have merged and created a monster. The first is the fact that many journalists in this country now receive little or, at best, inadequate, training in their trade. The second is the rise of the ‘investigative journalist’.
    Take training first. Until about 20 years ago there was really one route to a reporter’s job on a national newspaper. Even the most unscrupulous and ambitious of those who made it to Fleet Street had probably served a three-year apprenticeship on their local weekly paper and had had their remaining rough edges knocked off on a regional evening or morning paper before moving up to London. That meant they had been drilled in the old journalistic virtues of accuracy and even-handedness. Life could be hard in a small town for a local paper reporter who’d got his facts wrong.
    Sadly, the rise of free newspapers - for whom profits are more important than journalism - put paid to a large number of old-fashioned paid-for papers and their old-fashioned training schemes. Today, it seems to me, too many journalists are making it on to national papers without the basic grounding in the trade that previous generations took for granted.
    The phenomenon of the investigative journalist began to spread from the USA - where they take their journalism very seriously indeed - to the UK in the 1970s. Its impetus was the Watergate scandal and Alan J Pakula’s 1976 film All the President's Men.
    Overnight a generation of British hacks began transforming themselves into ‘wannabe’ Bob Woodwards and Carl Bernsteins (the Washington Post diggers who effectively put paid to Richard Nixon’s presidency) and began scouring the Establishment for scandals and, even better, cover-ups of scandals.
    The problem for investigative reporters is that in a comparatively honest society like ours, there are very few scandals to go round. It means that those whose job it is to expose these non-existent scandals, desperately want policemen to be corrupt and want organisations like Freemasonry to be sinister and secretive - otherwise they would have nothing to write about.
    In Yorkshire, Donald Davinson has tried to ensure that Freemasonry gets a fairer press by issuing a detailed briefing paper on the Craft to local newspapers. “Coverage of Freemasonry is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he said. “Because - apart from the occasional scandal that people try to whip up - Freemasonry is not all that interesting to outsiders, editors tend to put their newest, youngest and least experienced reporters on to our stories. They then go into the library, pull out the cuttings and rewrite the old stuff. I get the impression that some of them have seen far too many American B movies of the 1940s and want to present themselves as tough cookies who aren’t prepared to take any rubbish.”
    Yorkshire North and East’s briefing notes are beginning to have an effect however. “I won’t say it’s been an absolute breeze and that we’ve changed things around completely,” Davinson said. “But in places where editors have passed the notes on to their staff - and that has not always been the case - we have been able to hold a half-intelligent conversation with reporters and get one or two points across.” n