Page 249 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

238 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

Cutting down on the supply of such information not only
disenfranchises people, but runs the risk of cultivating political apathy,
if not barbarism.
My main aim here is to review and to clarify by questioning some
assumptions that have been made in debates about popular culture and
the way it interfaces with political affairs. Is it useful, for instance, to
continue to assume that many of the institutions of popular culture not
only stand apart from official political forms and processes, but also
cultivate a rather inchoate and disabling resistance to them? Resistance
is, perhaps, too strong a term, since it suggests deliberate action against
official political cultures and systems. The view more often adopted is
that the state cultivated is more akin to surly, alienated passivity. I wish
to explore such questions via a consideration of the relationship between
the ‘popular’ or tabloid press and television. In so doing, I will also
question some of the assumptions that are typically made about the
tabloid press.
Between December 1988 and February 1989 I read and analysed a
range of tabloid papers, including the Sun, the Daily Mirror, Today, the
Daily Mail, the Daily Star, the Daily Express, the Sport and, when they
existed, their Sunday equivalents. Not being a regular reader of any of
them, I was struck by the volume of material they contained about the
actors and presenters of television programmes. Apart from programme
listings and television columns, there were on average about two items
per day in each of the papers. In the Daily Mirror, there were often as
many as seven or eight items. In addition to those on television there
was an almost as abundant supply of similar material on figures in the
music and cinema industries.
It was not just the volume of material on ‘show business
personalities’ that was striking, but also its prominence. Such material
was often featured as the lead item on the front pages of these papers.
Public affairs stories, with which the broadsheets would have led on a
given day, were often relegated to a brief mention on the front pages of
the tabloids and/or to somewhat fuller treatment on other pages. In
short, then, figures from the world of entertainment were featured
extensively and prominently in the tabloid papers examined.
Another striking feature was the form of the journalism adopted. The
majority of the stories I read were constructed in very different ways
from those included in the broadsheets. Only very few had any of the
attributes of serious journalistic styles. Equally few could be seen as
serving an insider public with the information they needed to have an
informed view of such matters as the evolving editorial policies of