Brit Tabloids - Why?

The middle market tabloids are much more sedicious than the low brow ones. i recon the mail must have caused its fair share of anorexia and bulemia for a start. It also seems to be very homophobic given its coverage of Portillo in the last week. This man ought to be the darling of the mail but instead because he admitted to 'homosexual experiences' whilst at university he is utterly reviled.

I get upset by how much these papers sell, but also I doubt the influence they really have over some matters.

It's difficult to say whether certain mass hysterias (Bulger Murder Vengeance, last year's paedophile witchhunts) have been fanned by the Tabs or not. Certainly they contribute, but these things have happened throughout history, before Gutenberg etc etc.

The lovely thing about the Tabs, though, is their Great Historical Contribution to the Soap Opera of British Life, which is indupitably CLASSIC.

Always intrigues me when the Sun's political editor is featured eg on Channel 4 news (Trevor something?): balding, bearded, thoughtful, scholarly — by no evident means a "sun reader". Isn't alot of its appeal that it dishes it cheekily out to the Libs and the Nobs and the Snobs = what *it* wd call "the establishment" = well-heeled do-gooder foax who from a v. safe distance are likely to argue that eg clearly released p//philes should of course be housed on this or that faraway council estate, and not in Hampstead Garden Sub*rb, and only a yahoo cd possibly think differently. (eg UK Tabloidism is a PRODUCT of the worst comfortably patronising weaknesses of UK BROADSHEET ELITISM etc etc...)

ps B•shell has just been kicked off the Sun.

pps What wd I think if a p//phile was housed in my block (where as it happens no children currently live — tho many live in the square...)? I wouldn't head up a cartoon Frankenstein-village mob with rages and burning torches, but would I sign a petition? I don't know. I don't want ever to have to make the choice, y'know? And if forced to, how easy wd it be for someone to exploit my resentment at being forced to?

I fear that Stevie's reference to the 'beautiful thing about the tabloids / soap opera of UK life' is just going too far. I think I know what you mean, Stevie, but... actually I think that the stuff you're on about is abysmal.

(Gay-mafia ploy = a damp squib at the time, and was shelved. However formation of new govt = gay-free: what's that abt? We quickly reach choppy waters: is the return of Mandelson a post-Stonewall triumph?)

Gareth: the reason why I focus on the Telegraph is that I live in one of the places over which it claims cultural sovereignty: broadly the Torygraph = shire Conservatism / the Mail = middle-class suburban Conservatism / the Sun = less strictly party-political prole suburban Conservatism now edging towards nu-lab (but not as much as it might: the Tories regained 3 seats in Essex last month). The 'Graph doesn't claim to "speak for the people" of Bradford or north London, so no wonder you find it irrelevant. It's only relevant if you're one of those people whose cultural choices it would seek to restrict, and I think my location makes me so.

But the Boy of Badgers is right about the unspeakable Mail. No other paper makes me feel physically sick simply through touching a copy.

I was very disappointed when I found out that the News of the World was not related to the Weekly World News. Now the WWN is a tabloid I can actually understand and enjoy. Considering that the WWN is actually a parody of the right wing "of the people" opinions espoused by other tabloids in things like "My America by Ed Anger".

And the saga of Batboy. Batboy is far more interesting than ANY member of the royal family.

But I think to be disgusted across the board at tabloids (except the Mail) is a bit dramatic.

Metro is a very interesting development in the Tabloid market as it aims to do all the Standard tabloid things in a slightly more concentrated way and without the weight of tradition on it. Traditional tabloids change very slowly as they are scared of offending or frightening off their audience. Metro is bright breezy and appears to have the IQ of a five year old - which makes it most amusing. It also wants you to buy the Mail and Evening Standard that day which is less amusing.

If it didn't sell, then it would suggest a difference between the reasons given by tabloid readers for doing so and the real reasons. I have heard it said that it is more difficult to write for a tabloid than a broadsheet and if "Trevor something" on C4 News is typical that would appear to be the case - not if the Garry Bushells of this world are more common than the Trevors, however!

Tabloid Independent, now there is an idea.... Broadsheets of course are full of endless so called analysis which keep them going. There really is only so much news as BBC News 24 have found out to their cost.

We had a big scary meeting with my editor, our managing editor, their chief sub and their editor. During the meeting my flies came undone and... hold on I think I've told this story.

Very suspicous of metro because, as already pointed out, stories come from the Mail. London could do with a citywide daily to go up against the standard, the manchester evening news would be a good model. Could do with some views from the left in the evening. However the standard seems mainly to be bought by commuters from the more tory home counties. Does anyone who lives in london proper buy it? Actualy to be fair I used to buy it now and then on the way home from work and it used to make me very irate.

1. its stories seem to come from a general news source / feeding off anything they can find, judging from the resemblance of their stories and the Guardian's.

2. The 60-second interviews are unusually good for what they are. They did LLOYD COLE only last month! LLOYD COLE!!!!!

3. And the letters in the Metro are surprising - they seem to be dominated by sarcastic progressives.

I'd be interested how the metro thing works

Any newspaper which gave us the story of the fingerknob is a great newspaper in my book (and yet no other paper picked it up. Basically a bloke in Georgia had his knob lopped off so they replaced it with one of his fingers - fitting urinary tract and spunk canal down where the bone would have been. His girlfriend was exceptionally pleased apparently...)

I hate the Mail but do not read it. I think what people mean is they hate the mentality of it and most people who read it seem to agree with it in a way that is not necessarily true of the Sun (i.e the allegedly ironiic reading of it).

Ed's point about Evening Standard readers: of course it has an editor who barely spends *any time at all* in London. No wonder it's a travesty of the paper London deserves.

Daily Mail headline: (somethingsomething) boost for Kerry
Telegraph: Bush prepare victory speech (or something)
Independant: (Bush blah blah Kerry etc.)

The Sun: Kat Has Her Kitten!! - Eastenders star Jessie Wallace (Kat) gives birth to baby girl, and named her Tallulah Lilac.

aw.

The Daily Star was great too - TERRORISTS PLOT TO BLOW UP BECKS! - 13 al-qaeda lunatics arrested for plots to blow up the Bernabeu

The print media are completely dependent on consumer confidence for advertising and that is taking a complete pounding right now. Both the Mail and Sun newsrooms (like newsrooms everywhere) are full to the rafters with self-hating liberals.

I'm not sure even the Sun execs expected the Leave campaign to actually win, the likes of Tony Gallagher are true believers but more generally it's one of those moments when they started out wanting to give the government a bloody nose and ended up accidentally killing it, with no idea what to do with the corpse.

More generally, there are so many people out there desperate for someone to tell them it's okay not to give a shit about the poor/starving/displaced so they'll lap up any validation from the tabloids. CF Lily Allen's "crocodile tears", Lineker's "lies" etc. This could still backfire on the Sun, Lineker is still probably more popular with their core readership than they are, which is why they've gone after him so vociferously. Plus any opportunity to knock the BBC obviously.

It's coming to something where expressing support for Gary Lineker of all people represents a progressive standpoint.

I know right?

I'm sure there are about a million reactionary dicks in football who are about to be wheeled out to provider a 'counter-argument'.

http://www.usefulvoices.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Richard-Keys-Commentator-Voice-Artist.jpg

Booming posts stet and Matt. Am too cynical at this point to think this will backfire for the Sun though. The fact alone that the Sun still exists boggles the mind.

The cognitive dissonance of working for a newspaper that just said on its front page that you should shut the fuck up must be blinding.

On a more puerile level see also the reference to Lineker's ears from a newspaper whose editor-in-chief's are significantly larger.

Let Lineker be the hill they all die on. I just want them to die tbh.

that's the spirit

tbf to Keysey, it wouldn't surprise me if he had fairly extensive experience of trying to work out which Arabs are 18 or not.

lol, shade

I'm sure there are about a million reactionary dicks in football who are about to be wheeled out to provider a 'counter-argument'.

I suspect Chris Kamara has been wheeled out for tonight's HIGNFY to talk about this very thing, as maybe the highest-profile football-punditing "comedy" employee of Sky. Though I suspect he won't say anything about it and it'll just be "hyuk, Harry Redknapp ran over his wife".

It's abundantly clear that there can be no accommodation with the tabloids (or the Telegraph) politically. They have the EU policy they want, they have a PM firmly committed to delivering the immigration policy they want, they have shifted public discourse to a point where the city boys on my commute home are comfortable in loudly saying that truck drivers should have carte blanche to run over any suspected refugees they see, they have the BBC and Guardian running scared, they have Labour moderates parroting their 'legitimate concerns'...and it's still not enough. The Lineker headlines aren't about shifting policy or perception, they're about ruthlessly crushing any squeaks of dissent.

In the long term, this might even help Corbyn to some extent. idk how long anyone will be able to maintain the argument that if you just 'win back The Sun', etc you can bring incrementalist progressivism in its wake.

Both the Mail and Sun newsrooms (like newsrooms everywhere) are full to the rafters with self-hating liberals.

'twas ever thus tho, surely, ffs.

"started out wanting to give the government a bloody nose and ended up accidentally killing it, with no idea what to do with the corpse"

boom

I liked this bit from the recent Guardian book review of a Cameron aide's referendum diaries - not really news but a concise summary:

At election after election, including the most recent one, the Tories could rely on the rightwing press to assassinate the characters of opponents and megaphone Conservative messages. Cameron had clearly not thought enough about having that firepower turned against him. He finds out what it was like to be Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg and hasn’t a clue what to do about it.

Initially hoped Cameron had taken this in, in a "you mean it wasn't just my birthright natural charm, oratory skills and political genius that won me some elections?" sort of way, but actually thinking about how much May has taken it to heart and seems to be operating entirely within the boundaries set by Dacre et al, I might wish it had been internalised a little less.

Surprised they turned on Lineker quite so immediately and viciously, and I v much hope that does not work out for them, but I won't hold my breath.

not for the first time
http://www.themediablog.co.uk/the-media-blog/2015/01/lineker-threatens-to-sue-the-sun-over-tax-story.html

Who are the big/high profile advertisers in today's Sun?

I don't know what the answer is but I don't see the UK going anywhere but further into the toilet while The Sun, the Mail and the Express continue to operate as they do, and continue to be read so widely here.

They're are all losing between 1-300K readers a year in print. Online subscriptions will probably increase at around the same rate (think they already for The Sun) mind you and the Mail site is insanely far ahead of anyone else in average daily visits.

I know it's partly "people saying stupid provocative things on the internet" but this state of affairs where it's seen as acceptable to actively wish death on refugees makes me despair.

Oh I think we should take people who say that at their word

The Lineker headlines aren't about shifting policy or perception, they're about ruthlessly crushing any squeaks of dissent.

This is the most chilling thing isn't it? I don't know enough about Lineker's popularity to know who'll come out on top this time but it's a warning to other celebrities, in perhaps more precarious positions, not to try it.

They should though

He's not that popular but, as an ex-footballer, he can't so easily be dismissed as just some arrogant middle class tosser, the way Lily Allen was.

As TV presenters go he seems very popular? I mean I guess he's no Clarkson...

He's pretty popular. But as the MOTD anchor and actually successful former England player he's in a position of power with people who wouldn't pay much attention to, say, Steven Fry or indeed Lily Allen saying much the same thing. Which is why they're trying to dismiss him as a luvvie, not very successfully.

The hysteria is being ramped up because we are at peak Brexit hubris right now. In the same way that support for wars collapses when people start coming home in body bags, they are terrified that support for Brexit (or at least a Hard Brexit) will collapse once the negotiations get difficult and the economy tanks. Ultimately there are lots of Leave voters who just wouldn't be told it would be a disaster, but increasing amounts will change their mind once they see with their own eyes that it'll be a disaster.

For the first time possibly ever they have a Prime Minister who is prepared to follow their agenda almost in its entirety but there is a hefty element of 'be careful what you wish for' here - but they have to whip up with-us-or-against-us sentiment now to entrench sentiment before things start going wrong.

I think Jon Gaunt won best non-sequitur with 'how can someone who advertises junk food to kids try to tell us what's racist'.

lineker is def popular, he'd be a national treasure in a decade or so if he would stop spouting his vile leftist views

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/oct/27/revenge-of-the-tabloids-brexit-dacre-murdoch

Several choice quotes

"Brown contacted the Sun … agreed to rearrange his diary so that he could go to their office that day … and sat down with the Sun’s outspoken rightwing political editor, Trevor Kavanagh, for an interview which … rapidly became a negotiation about policy.”

"During the Cameron governments, it felt like they (Murdoch and Dacre) were the adults, and the politicians were children.”

“When I look back at the words I used to use as a Sun sub,” James Alan Anslow remembered, “‘the gay plague’, ‘black gangs’. You’d get sacked if you used those now!”

A Sun journalist emailed me: “Just had massive compulsory redundos in editorial. Hardly enough bodies left to get out the paper. Mood is of the post-apocalyptic variety – survivors staggering around dazed and confused.”

I've always had a healthy disgust and anger against the Mail/Sun etc but today's front pages have really upset me. I can't concentrate on anything and I feel even more dispirited than ever. Fuck this country and fuck this sleepwalk into fascism. I never thought I'd see this kind of thing in my lifetime but I was obviously just being naive.

Stop Funding Hate... aka The Daily Mail

.. hit these cunts where it hurts. More of that please.

yeah keep it up

dismantling the tabloid press is pretty much the #1 priority for uk progress right now (aside from yknow education reform, mental health treatment etc)

corbyn should announce stringent press standards reform, he'd probably gain more support than he loses

dismantling the tabloid press is pretty much the #1 priority for uk progress right now

this

corbyn should announce stringent press standards reform, he'd probably gain more support than he loses

Hmm.

On the one hand, anyone who speaks out against our red-topped kingmakers will not have a happy political career (though perhaps this can't get any worse than now for Corbyn)

On the other, it's interesting how both sides of the Brexit divide and now the Trump divide blame media misrepresentation: the alt-right's ire for "mainstream media", Trump's remarks on a "rigged press" and angry Brexiteers railing against the MSM while somehow seeing the tabloids as on their side against a conspiracy of metropolitan elites; the anti-Islamic German right's revival of favourite Nazi word "Lügenpresse" (and when I first read it I thought, hmm, yes, useful word for the tabloids, only to look up its history and feel itchy all over), which the internet tells me is now an alt-right buzzword outside Germany too

so maybe people from across the political spectrum could be brought onside, but "moar govt/quango intervention" is going to be hard to sell to the anti-elite and small-govt crowds, and obv the higher-ups know exactly what they're doing with this MSM meme

"So today I had to write abt Jo Cox"
"Ah that sucks man"
"Sucks even harder if you work for the Daily Hail, like me"
"How did you tend to the expectations of yr readership on this very delicate matter?"
"Immigrants, mate, immigrants. And that her death was her own fault."

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CyBrtDRXcAA78CG.jpg

Bold of the Daily Mail to suggest that anyone concerned about immigrants is now a terror suspect.

can someone straight up firebomb the daily mail

also, hi theresa, i'm deadly serious

OMG, a Turkish person has a byline on that race-baiting - wonder if making someone w/foreign origins write shit about immigrants is the initiation rite at Dacre Towers?

The Mail have spent so much time pandering to repulsive right wing extremists they can't suddenly change tack and condemn one who murders an MP in cold blood, oh no.

How many angry articles have they written about the decline in social housing in the same time period? Just wondering...

If he'd got bedroom taxed or sanctioned out of his home, worrying that the next tenants might be immigrants would be classic fuckwitted legitimate concernism.

The Mail have spent so much time pandering to repulsive right wing extremists they can't suddenly change tack and condemn one who murders an MP in cold blood, oh no.

― calzino, Thursday, November 24, 2016 2:01 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

at this point i consider the mail and the sun to be part and parcel of the far right

I don't see any other possible conclusion.

I can confirm today that following that landmark libel case, Katie Hopkins has entered into an IVA to avoid bankruptcy. I knew for a while but could not say anything for legal reasons. The arbitrary defender of free speech didn't want anyone to know, ironically...

— Jack Monroe #bootstrapcook (@BootstrapCook) September 15, 2018

I've just spent the day at the hospital but that's cheered me right up that, thanks