Harold Evans

But just quickly, what

are we going to see you in next apart from Widow's Bay Season 2? Well, I was about to say, hopefully I will see you soon because I'm coming back to England to do a piece for the BBC playing Sir Harry Evans, who was the editor of the Sunday Times in the 70s just before Murdoch bought it and was kind of...

You know, the great hero of journalism is that he went after big corporations and real injustices and took on governments.

You know, something I think needs to be told in this

They'd done some very good work together on the Stewart case, and then they had a falling out over an issue, and Murdoch sacked him.

Famously, about a couple of decades later, Harold Evans at the Sunday Times, famous crusading, accomplished editor at that newspaper, was courted by Rupert Murdoch to be the editor of the Times, which he was in the process of buying.

And over the next, he only lasted about a year.

And if you haven't read it, his Harold Evans memoir, Good Times, Bad Times, goes into this in exhaustive detail.

Evans was used to having debates with proprietors and others in the newsroom about the issues of the day that the newspaper was going to be reporting on and writing editorials on and so on.

And what he found was that not only were his views different from Rupert Murdoch's views, well, okay, that's going to happen, but that Murdoch had no appetite for anything other than a couple of colliding assertions is how Evans puts it in his memoir.

And they got sacked.

And Harold Evans, who... had been a very prominent, well-regarded, crusading editor of the Sunday Times in the 1960s and 70s.

Rupert Murdoch courted him in much the same way he did Eric Beecher to be the editor of the Times when he took over the Times in 1980 or 81.

And within a year or so, Harold Evans was out.

And there's a really, I mean, Harold Evans' memoir, Good Times, Bad Times, is still worth reading.

And there's a kind of key passage in it from our point of view in that he talks about an argument that he's had one night with Rupert Murdoch about economic policy.

Okay, no big deal.

But his reflection on the argument is that Murdoch didn't want to engage in debate about an issue, whatever the issue was.

Yeah, but I think that's great.

But over the last 25 years, those people like Kathy Ryan or Brodovich or Lieberman or certainly back when your wife would know, she would work with Harold Evans.

And so I learned from Harold Evans and she worked with Tina Brown and so forth.

So there are all these great people who do give space.

I think what we have seen over the last 25 years is is a movement, a way, those people are very, very rare nowadays, if they exist at all.