Listen to what the man said<subtitle>McCartney and journalistic objectivity – a test case</subtitle>

Abstract

In 2009 the magazine Prospect published an interview with Paul McCartney in which he described a 1966 meeting with philosopher Bertrand Russell (Power 2009). McCartney recalled discussing Russell’s moral objections to the war in Vietnam and later reporting these back to the other Beatles in terms that impressed them, at a time when they had yet to become vocal on the subject. Press reaction was largely derisory, couched in terms that prompted the article’s author to publicly criticize a pattern of reflexive misrepresentation of McCartney in the press. Typically, journalists scorned McCartney’s account, to the extent of doubting that a meeting with Bertrand Russell occurred at all. McCartney was widely accused of rewriting history to cast himself in the kind of political and intellectual role more typically accorded to John Lennon. We attempt to clarify this dispute with reference to documentary and anecdotal sources, finding independent evidence not only that this meeting occurred but also that, upon learning that McCartney was pursuing an anti-war film vehicle for the Beatles, Bertrand Russell actively facilitated a meeting between McCartney and novelist and producer/screenwriter Len Deighton; in the same time frame McCartney was meeting with civil rights and Vietnam war crimes activist Mark Lane, then a director of Bertrand Russell’s Peace Foundation, to discuss the New York attorney’s controversial book on the Kennedy assassination, the film version of which McCartney subsequently offered to score. The fact that McCartney was apparently alone in pursuing projects of this sort at this time, months before film director Dick Lester announced John Lennon’s acceptance of a part in How I Won the War, is in tension with popular narratives in which he is portrayed as a follower and superficial tunesmith. Journalistic accusations of dishonesty on the part of McCartney in 2008 are here examined and rebutted, and specific questions raised about the claimed timeline of events in 1966 are addressed in detail. The argument is of obvious interest in Beatles historiography, as accusations of self-serving revisionism on the part of McCartney have become a commonplace of fan criticism, especially since the death of Lennon. More generally, it speaks in a timely way to wider concerns about declining journalistic professionalism and integrity (Newman and Fletcher 2017), and related issues of poor media literacy and an increasing public mistrust of traditional news and opinion sources (Gibson et al. 2022). This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0.

Keywords

• Paul McCartney
• Prospect
• Jonathan Power
• Bertrand Russell
• Mark Lane
• Len Deighton