IN THE past three weeks or so there must have been millions of words written about the nefarious activities in the Murdoch media empire and if current form is anything to go by no doubt there will be many more to come.

But much as I detest all that Murdoch stands for – as a matter of principle, along with many other former and current journalists who witnessed his activities around the British media in the Seventies and Eighties I don’t buy any of his titles – the dubious culture of the red tops isn’t down to Murdoch titles alone and has been going on even before he got his hands on Britain’s “popular” press and such august organs – as they were then – like The Times and The Sunday Times.

Well before the days of the Wapping war when Fleet Street papers really were in, or off, Fleet Street, I was a cub reporter on a weekly title in Berkshire some 30 miles away. As was the way then, if you landed a good scoop or two – through a nose for news and hard work with not a cash payment in sight – your offerings sometimes came to the attention of lofty news editors of the nationals who, like casting crumbs to the starving, would offer you a shift in their hallowed newsrooms.

This was giddy stuff for young reporters out to make a name for themselves and you turned down the offer of such a shift at your peril. Telling them you couldn’t do one because you always went to your mum’s for Sunday dinner was not what they wanted to hear. And anyway, it was 70 quid a time then, which was about a week’s wage for your average impoverished weekly newspaper hack.

On one such occasion I presented myself at the staff door of the News Of The World at its then home in Bouverie Street, nervous as hell and hoping I wouldn’t cock up big style. Because this was the stuff of dreams – if they kept inviting you back then they must think you were doing all right. And if they thought you were doing all right, in time the chances were they might offer you a staff job...

My one and only taste of working for the now-defunct News Of The World was far from auspicious and very much a let down in the dream stakes. Not for me calling up MPs or footballers and asking them what they were doing in a hotel room with a woman that wasn’t their wife. Not for me getting the lowdown on some would-be royal scandal and writing it up in flowing shock horror-style copy. Not for me furtively meeting a contact in a back street pub for an out-of-the-side-of-the-mouth tip-off about the criminal underworld. No, I ended up doing the horoscopes.

The normal task for this highly important, much pored-over column in the paper (apparently) was to re-write some syndicated copy into pithy 20 word sentences for each birth sign. And it had to be knocked off in about 20 minutes so you couldn’t sit there fulminating and fiddling about with words to create self-perceived perfection. It had to be perfect at the first go.

Except on this occasion the syndicated copy hadn’t turned up. “What should I do?” I bleated nervously to the news editor having sat for what seemed like an age at my desk plucking up the courage to be the bearer of bad news. He looked at me balefully, shrouded in swirls of cigarette smoke, ash quivering in a shallow downward arc on the end of his fag.

“What should you do?” he suddenly bellowed incredulously, as though I was the biggest idiot he’d ever laid eyes on. (That much, at least, was true). “Make the bloody stuff up!” he roared. “The readers will never know the difference.” Such contemptuous disregard for those who saw fit to buy the paper each week!

But now in red top world, instead of papers making things up, those journalists who have indulged in or condoned phone hacking have at least been giving their readers the truth. For by listening in to people’s actual private conversations as they happen you can’t be accused of making up quotes can you? So that’s all right then...

As for me, all those years ago, did I go away and do what I was told? Wet behind the ears and naïve to the extreme, I stood in front of said news editor and gasped: “But you can’t do that” and was shown the door. So ended my dreams of Fleet Street and I’m not sorry.