ABSTRACT
Harold Evans began the account of his editorships of the Times and Sunday Times in London with a Saturday evening encounter with the newspapers’ proprietor Roy Thomson and his son Kenneth, as an issue went to press carrying extracts from the diaries of the former Cabinet Minister Richard Crossman, which the British government would rather did not see the light of day. To Evans, this was a clear case of the watchdog press, the so-called Fourth Estate, exercising the people’s right to know; combating ‘arbitrary power’; engaging in ‘necessary warfare’, and invoking a tradition associated with W.T. Stead and the transplantation of ‘aggressive’ New Journalism from the United States of America to the United Kingdom in the latter part of the nineteenth century (Wiener, 1996: 67-9). As editor, Evans nurtured the ‘famous’ Insight investigative reporting team at the Sunday Times (Neil, 1996: 46) – the ‘spearhead’ of a decade of investigations at the paper. Under Evans, Insight was charged with naming the guilty, exposing ‘evil practices’ and identifying failures (cit. in Spark, 1999: 8). Evans argued that ‘in the cases we investigated the law and the political institutions had failed the public’ (Evans, 1994: 1-8).
