FAMILY MATTERS: Britain And the Tabloid Press
I am currently taking a
short break in Shropshire , which is basking in
July Sunshine and the murmur of summer content.
Though here I now, the
first time in a while, I have regular access to The Daily Mirror. The Mirror
historically stood apart from the rest of the tabloids, being of the left. During
the 1960’s it enjoyed a reputation for radicalism. Now, befitting a paper recently
edited by that self promoting fraud Piers Morgan, it resembles all the other
tabloids and adopts the same tone.
The tone of the tabloid
press in this country is a curious mix of baby talk, squalid insinuation and
the intimate language of a national 'family.' In
pages containing little but gossip, that assumes a common currency; that, for
example, you know in the past who has been cheating on who, and the
implications of reconciliation. Loud in the fullest sense of the word, a
cacophony of the blathering of nonentities, wannabees and soap star actors, the
tabloids are the spiritual home of the cult of ‘celebrity.’ Celebrity you
understand being nothing to do with achievement or virtue but consisting solely
of the quality of being ‘famous.’ What you are famous for is purely a secondary matter; fame, an end in itself, can be
attained for being boorish or stupid, for being vain and opinionated, sexually promiscuous,
fat, ugly, beautiful, violent, glamorous or venal.
The platform on which
these ‘qualities,’ are brought to the attention of the national family is the television;
once television exposes some, preferably grotesque, variant of the human
condition the tabloids take up the story. Soon the whole family is gossiping
about some loudmouth, precocious child or semi literate television soap star.
Increasingly though this
pattern is being reversed, as TV apes the tabloid tone. Breakfast shows on the
commercial networks were the first to adopt this style, now even the BBC
morning news no longer differentiates between real and manufactured news.
Journalists, always a man and a woman, the woman personable and pretty, sit flirting
with one another on a sofa; invited into our homes, they are now part of the
great extended family. We ‘know’ them and they ‘know’ us. The language is
intimate and knowing. We are, to coin a phrase, all in this together.
Does any of this matter?
Well, a world in which the traumas of an Anglina Jolie, Katie Price or Jennifer
Anniston feel as immediate and pressing as your own concerns; where you feel on
intimate terms with a soap star whilst your neighbors are strangers to you,
does not suggest good mental health. It is also a world created and packaged by
the likes Piers Morgan’s, Paul Dacre and
Kelvin McKenzie. It is their values that we imbibe and the interests of the
like of Rupert Murdoch that are served.
However it is argued back,
with some truth, that they are only giving the people what they want,
triviality, frivolity and babble. It is true that the landscape of reality can
at times be hard on the eye, the existential hum too loud. We can all settle for the comfort of the familiar, all crave diversion,
entertainment, the razzmatazz of the circus. We can all seek to keep reality at
bay, lest ‘human voices wake us and we drown.’