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The big Christmas celeb-story was the Katy Perry/Russell Brand divorce announcement. For tabloids it had everything- she’s a lipstick lesbian and his addictive personality means that there has to be something either up his nose or on his dick at all times.
It’s been the latter for years now which has made him the thinking woman’s sexual predator of choice and a tabloid favourite.
What the tabloids don’t like is not having the sleazy details.
It must be hard being Pippa Middleton; trying to be a serious business woman and gallivanting around London, made all the more difficult because everyone knows you for being the one with the arse that stole your sister’s wedding day.
Poor, poor Pippa.
But a tabloid picture editor has come forward and announced that newspapers would be offered around 300 or 400 pictures PER DAY of the fitter Middleton, none of which are of her arse.
The British tabloids, and the Daily Mail in particular got to indulge in one of their favourite, and least pleasant, pastimes last week- the vilification of women.
The Mail seems to think that what its largely female readership want is to see attractive young women demonised. Sadly they are probably onto something.
Sometimes you know that what they really want to do is just feature pictures of smiling girls with ‘whores’ crudely drawn over them in crayon.
Tabloid editorial philosophy dictates that when a story is too good to be true, then not only is it probably not, but it almost certainly won’t matter whether or not it is true.
Every so often a news story seems to tick so many of a newspaper’s boxes, but despite the exciting claims made in the headline, you find precious little information in the article itself that backs them up. Normally headlines are written after the story, but not always.
As long as the newspaper isn’t libelling any specific group or individual, then there’s nothing to lose except their credibility. Fortunately this isn’t a massive priority for tabloid newspapers [or us, in fairness, Ed.].
Over the summer we had riots and phone hacking. Everything’s gone quiet now and we’re left with the old bogeymen.
The Mail sees global warming as some kind of conspiracy that involves the BBC, the lib dems, Richard Dawkins and someone at a council who wants to rebrand Christmas as Winterval.
In fact on Monday they managed to combine a climate change story with another of their favourite topics when they discovered that wind turbines were immigrants (‘Two thirds of the UK’s wind turbines are foreign-owned’).
Last week was depressing as hell. Foreigners kept on dying all over the world with no respect for tabloid circulation.It was a week so full of human suffering that the announcement of the budget was comic relief.
The government got pretty much what it wanted from the right-wing tabloids on Thursday when they explained the budget to us stupids. The Mail happily put Osborne’s transparently phrased summary that the budget would “put fuel in the tank” of the economy on their front page. Do you think the Chancellor wanted our attention focused on any specific aspect of the budget perchance? The Mail were very keen to report on the 6p cut in petrol duty. 6p that consisted of delaying a planned 5p rise and cutting 1p from a price which had already been pushed up more than 3p by the VAT increase. You lucky people.
Anyway, sorry about that- budgets are boring. Creative accounting may be creative but it’s still accounting.
Much has already been said about the Andy Gray and Richard Keys story, with Charlie Brooker supplying one of more interesting slants on it, but we would like to point out The Sun’s sweetly optimistic approach to it on Monday, the day after Andy’s original on-air gaffe and was tucked away on page ten in a teeny article sharing a column with a three line article about falling prices in Portugal.
The incident was treated more like something from a television out-takes show than the final piece in the trinity* of inconvenience that’s got Murdoch’s News International into a bit of a tizz.
The story was over- he had apologised and everyone was laughing about it whilst slapping the arses of passing waitresses by lunchtime. Unfortunately, the same day the Daily Mail, those masters of creating broadcasting controversies from the sparsest of ingredients, dedicated page 3 to it, and a shitstorm was born.
That popular bogeyman, the BBC, has had to suffer the slings and arrows of British newspaper writers again over the last few weeks. It’s been very quiet since Christmas in tabloid-news terms. That doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been plenty of events that have been shaping the world- simply that there hasn’t been adequate stories to keep tabloid readers interested.
Nothing sells better than incensing people and given them that warm fuzzy glow that comes from feeling indignant. The Eastenders Cot Death Story Controversy should not be confused with The Eastenders Cot Death Story.
The latter revolved around one of its central characters losing her baby to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and then stealing anther character’s baby. The former asks some terrifying questions about the BBC about whether they hate all ‘right-thinking’ people.
