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.
London is not England and many a foreign traveler has made the mistake of imagining it to be so. Here in the local papers one gets the feel of the reality of most people’s lives, for the local press, unlike the national, is actually filled with news. True it is not the news of war and revolution, but of by-pass proposals, petty crime and fires in which nobody is hurt; consequently it feels closer to reality than the national press.
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.’



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