TRUTH: The Rise and Fall of the People's Paper
Redmer Yska
Craig Potton Publishing, $49.99, pbk
More than once, in the few months he was with us, Gault confided to me that it was his ambition to become a reporter on a tabloid newspaper.
He certainly fulfilled that ambition - and how! Readers of this revelatory history of Truth, the crusading New Zealand tabloid weekly newspaper which once instilled fear among many high-flyers, will learn how Gault (dubbed by his staff as "God") proved to be the most significant Truth editor of the postwar era.
The young Gault, in fact, was editor not once, but twice. Redmer Yska noted that his first editorship got off to a dramatic start.
In July 1969, he made an emotional call on behalf of "the ordinary, decent citizen of this country" to reinstitute flogging of violent criminals.
As the 1969 election neared, Gault worked to keep his flogging crusade alive, assailing "reformers" and "mollycoddlers" within the bureaucracy, Parliament and judiciary.
His overheated editorials against "bashers" invariably ended up next to a saucy snap of a 19-year-old London "lass" in hot pants, with naked, pointed breasts.
But Gault's lack of experience started to show, according to the author.
Labour justice spokesman (and lawyer) Martyn Finlay was awarded $15,000 in a libel action against Truth. Gault became erratic.
And despite the unceasing attacks on the judiciary and officialdom, support for Truth's crusade grew increasingly muted.
Editor for 16 months, Gault resigned "in an unseemly squabble over payment for his secretary's driving lessons".
Circulation had fallen to 216,978 in 1969, from 226, 517 in 1968.
But after returning to New Zealand after four years with The Star in Johannesburg, South Africa, Gault was reappointed Truth editor, in 1975.
Presiding over a paper in decline, Gault alienated staff as he used Truth to campaign against liberalised abortion laws.
His openly pro-Springbok tour stance was carried to extremes.
Its head office shifted to Auckland from Wellington, "Truth would sink further into irrelevancy and soft pornography".
Like many of his staff, Gault took redundancy in 1982, "fleeing back to his beloved South Africa".
Before joining the Otago Daily Times from Sydney as a subeditor and reporter - leaving under a cloud after distributing the editor's notepaper on a trip to Central Otago - Bob McCormick was responsible for Truth's greatest scoop.
Possessed of "an affable manner and a steel-trap recall", McCormick was the reporter mainly responsible for gathering evidence about a range of illegal police activity, including the bugging of private telephones.
In the aftermath, Police Commissioner Eric Compton took voluntary retirement.
Truth went through editors at a regular rate, possibly faster than incumbents in the editor's chair at the Ashburton Guardian.
It was the experience of my good Dunedin friend Gavin MacDonald to have his services at Truth terminated in 1967 after a mere 16 weeks in the post.
MacDonald recalls what happened: "After three weeks in the job, I was embroiled in a Parliamentary Privileges Committee hearing. After the hearing, I got a dressing-down in my office from one of the board members. I said he had one minute to get out of my office. Sure enough, half an hour later came a note from Dunn [J.H. Dunn, Truth's chairman and the supremo who exerted ironclad control over the paper during his countless years' tenure] saying: 'You're out'."
Truth, "the people's paper", was said to have one million readers by the mid-1960s.
But the arrival of television and the birth of Sunday newspapers, with their ability to initiate investigations on behalf of victimised viewers and readers, quickly blunted Truth's hitherto almost exclusive ability to go into battle for the rights of the "oppressed" citizen.
Declining circulations confirmed that sorry story.
Yska, once a Truth reporter, has done a sterling job in recounting how, as the blurb states, the paper "revolutionised the local newspaper industry by introducing a `new journalism' in 1905, which aimed a core diet of sex, crime, radical politics and random muckraking directly at the masses".
He ends his highly readable offering by reminding us that at the end of 2009, "after 104 remarkable years in New Zealand journalism, Truth quietly sank into liquidation. Truth Weekender, complete with 16-page sex industry pullout, quickly took its place. The wicked old title refuses to die."
Appropriately, The Rise and Fall of the People's Paper includes many apposite illustrations, including, of course, some of the weekly's outrageous, iconic billboards.
• Clarke Isaacs is a former chief of staff of the Otago Daily Times.
