Patrick Comerford
Today, I suppose, marks the 55th anniversary of the start of a long and fulfilling career in journalism. I was supposed to be training as a chartered surveyor with the College of Estate Management, then at Reading University, and with Jones Lang Woottom from soon after leaving school. But by late 1970, I was pitching occasional pieces at local newspapers in England and Ireland, including the Lichfield Mercury, the Tamworth Herald, the Atherstone Herald, the Coleshill Chronicle and the Kilkenny People, and magazines like Horse and Hound.
The Tamworth Herald published a substantial feature by me on the Comberford family and the Moat House 56 years ago, on 30 October 1970 (p 11). But my first real break came when the editor of the Lichfield Mercury, Neil Beddows, commissioned me to write a series of regular features on local history and local families. The first of these features was published on this day 55 years ago – a full page feature on p 13 of the Lichfield Mercury and the Rugeley Mercury on 15 October 1971.
I was still in my teens and I thought I had made it. My first feature was on Sir Charles Wolseley and the Wolseley family. That first commissioned feature, published on 15 October 1971), was well-edited, with a fine photograph of Charles and Anita and their young family, who welcomed me to Wolseley Park House. There were more features to follow in the ‘Famous Families’ series, one a month, including one on the Dyott family of Freeford in November and another on the Ansons and the Earls of Lichfield. I soon began to build up a portfolio that helped to set me up for a lengthy career as a journalist.
At the time, I was still training as a chartered surveyor, and Charles Wolseley was then a chartered surveyor with Smith Gore in Lichfield, driving a trademark red sports car around town, commuting daily between Lichfield and Wolseley. When we met, he was already a chartered surveyor with the Lichfield branch of Smiths Gore, known for its rural property consultancy services.
He could not understand why I wanted to move from surveying to journalism. I had already inquired about finishing my training with Wintertons in Lichfield, and he wondered why I would not join him at Smiths Gore instead. He was still in his 20s, and he had a lifestyle that I probably thought at the time was enviable.
I never joined the staff of the Lichfield Mercury, nor did I pursue the prospect of joining either Smiths Gore or Wintertons in Lichfield to finish my training as a chartered surveyor. Instead, mainly on the strength of that portfolio that included those first commissioned features and reports in the Lichfield Mercury, as well as the Tamworth Herald and Horse and Hound, the late Gerry Breen and Major Austin Channing offered me my first full-time job with a newspaper 54 years ago, and I joined the staff of the Wexford People in July 1972 as a sub-editor.
For a time, I continued to contribute occasionally to the Lichfield Mercury and to visit its new premises in Bird Street – and the King’s Head, just two or three doors away. The Lichfield Mercury had moved to 17 Bird Street, now the Ma Ma Thai restaurant, and was using what then we called ‘photo-typesetting’ – an early form of computerised production of newspapers. I was welcomed back in 1974 to see this process, and to learn about how the pages of the newspaper were designed and made up.
I probably thought then that I was going to find a full-time position with the Lichfield Mercury and return to live there. I never did, but I was always grateful for those early opportunities and that generous sharing of skills and insights – they later proved useful when I was with The Irish Times.
For all its modernity, the Lichfield Mercury was an old newspaper with a long history, dating back to 1815. A new version of a revived Lichfield Mercury was first published in September 1877 from premises at 36-38 Bird Street. It was later bought by WH Smith & Son in 1905, and had different owners and publishers down through the decades. Printing was transferred to Tamworth the mid-1960s, the old Bird Street premises were demolished in 1972, and the new editorial and advertising offices were opened at 17 Bird Street.
The Lichfield Mercury became part of Central Independent Newspapers and Northcliffe Media, a division of the Daily Mail. The Rugeley Mercury ceased publication in late 2010, but other titles in the group continued, including the Tamworth Herald.
An exhibition marking 200 years of the Lichfield Mercury was held in the Dyott Chapel in Saint Mary’s Church in the Market Square, Lichfield, in 2015. But the physical print edition was suspended in April 2020 due to falling advertising revenues during the coronavirus pandemic, and it has never returned although there is still an online presence, usually involving reports of Lichfield news from the Birmingham Mail.
I was on the staff of The Irish Times for almost 30 years, from December 1974 until September 2002, with the last eight of those as Foreign Desk Editor. I had uncles, cousins, members of my extended family and old schoolfriends who were journalists too, and I have remained a journalist at heart.
Journalists never stop being journalists. I was ordained a priest, had a second and very satisfying academic career in theology, and spent five years in parish ministry before retiring. But alongside writing books, chapters and papers for academic journals, I continued to contribute to magazines and newspapers – including the occasional feature in The Irish Times, the Wexford People and magazines in Lichfield and Tamworth.
Wexford and Lichfield have remained home in many special ways and for many reasons, and in my heart I have never ceased being a journalist. So it is in grief that I watch the daily assaults on journalists, journalism and the freedom of the press that is a directed and intense policy of the Trump regime in America.
Trump frequently attacks the US media as having a left-wing bias and being corrupt, and he uses a variety of insults when speaking about outlets that he sees as giving him unfavourable coverage. He has sued many media outlets, and has used his position as president to pressure outlets he dislikes by interfering in their business operations, launching investigations, threatening to revoke broadcast licenses, and cutting funding for public broadcasting.
In a talk at the Deadline Club of New York in 2018, Lesley Stahl recalled Trump explaining in 2016 why he discredits and demeans the press: ‘You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.’
In a special report in 2020 for the Committee to Protect Journalists, Leonard Downie Jr. said: ‘Trump has habitually attacked the news media in rallies, responses to reporters’ questions, and many hundreds of tweets. He has repeatedly called the press fake news, the enemy of the people, dishonest, corrupt, low life reporters, bad people, human scum and ‘some of the worst human beings you’ll ever meet’.
His tweets constantly target specific news organisations, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NBC and MSNBC, and Fox News. He says the New York Times is fake, phony, nasty, disgraced, dumb, clueless, stupid, sad, failing and dying, and that the Washington Post is fake, crazy, dishonest, phony and disgraced.
Last year (14 November 2025), when Catherine Lucey of Bloomberg News asked him a question, his response was: ‘Quiet, piggy’. Four days later (18 November, 2025), he told Mary Bruce of ABC News ‘You’re a terrible person and a terrible reporter.’
He has threatened to charge media outlets with treason, called them the enemies of the people, and often threatens to silence journalists and to send them to jail. He abruptly banned reporter Jim Acosta of CNN from the White House after he asked a difficult question, he has cancelled the credentials of most of the White House press corps, and he has banned Associated Press from pooled press events in the Oval Office and aboard Air Force One because it continued to use the term Gulf of Mexico.
Last month (18 September 2026), Trump banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico reporters from the White and warned that other outlets that they too would also be targeted. The White House television pool responded by suspending its television coverage of pool events. Still later in September, Trump told a female reporter from MS NOW that she was ‘fake news’ and then told her to ‘be quiet’.
Judge Timothy J Kelly granted a 14-day temporary restraining order requiring the White House to restore the journalists’ press credentials, the order has been extended and a final ruling is awaited. Meanwhile, the White House continues to ban reporters from CNN and MS Now from events and from Air Force One.
Trump has sued ABC News, CBS News, the BBC, CNN, the Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the journalist Bob Woodward, the publishers Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House, Meta after it suspended his accounts following the 6 January Capitol attack by a mob of Trump supporters, Twitter and YouTube.
He has blocked federal funding for NPR, PBS and the CPB, he habitually complains about shows that criticise him, such as Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, and following reports on his Qatari jet, he has tried to demand the phone and text messaging records of many New York Times journalists and their family members.
When he was speaking in Arizona yesterday about the US military operation against Iran, Trump referred to the leak to the press about the B-2 bombers were sent and how someone had leaked to press their departure time to the press. Trum declared, ‘Leakers should be shot … In the old days, we used to shoot leakers.’ He called them ‘the scum of the earth.’
He then turned his attention to the reporters at the event, pointed at them and said they are ‘almost as bad as a leaker because they leak false information. That makes them a leaker, right?’ The crowd heard the President of the US say that leakers should be shot and that the press were leakers.
In her analysis, the writer and commentator said: ‘Not too long ago, if a President of the United States even suggested that journalists should be harmed, they would have faced immediate consequences because freedom of the press is protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution … Congress would be demanding answers and the country would be outraged if the President of the United States started suggesting that reporters deserve to be shot simply for doing their jobs. But because this has become a near-daily occurrence, it will likely be forgotten or pushed aside by something just as sinister that he will say tomorrow.’
The world seemed a freer and more open society when I began working as a journalist 55 years ago, despite the Vietnam War and even though the Iron Curtain still stood, apartheid was still in place; Europe was still not the democratic society we presume on today: Franco was still in power in Spain, Salazar had died but his regime was still clinging on in Portugal, and the colonels still ruled in Greece. But there was hope, the colonels would fall, the Watergate Papers would soon be published, Nixon would be brought down, the Vietnam War would end, Franco would die.
Given the standards of journalism and theexpectations of freedom of the press in the those heady days in the early 1970s, I wonder how long this assulat on freedom and liberty is to continue to US, and I fell compelled to speak out, for all journalists remain my colleagues.
No comments:
Post a Comment