Page 250 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

TALES OF TELLYLAND 239

television or the ways in which the exploitation of different delivery
systems might transform the structures of visual broadcasting. The
general preference seemed to be for stories about scandalous incidents
involving well-known personalities. Being more accustomed to, and
probably more at ease with, the conventions of broadsheet journalism I
found it difficult to understand this preference. What was newsworthy
about these stories? Maybe very little. Maybe they were there, as many
others have said, only to amuse, titillate and entertain readers. It was
difficult to imagine they had any kind of informative intent.
What I was seeking was an answer to the question, ‘why was there an
abundance of stories about the scandalous affairs of show business
personalities?’ The volume of them might be satisfactorily explained in
economic terms, but not the journalistic forms of representation they
regularly employed. Moreover, while market studies might with
reasonable success identify segments of the potential readership to be
addressed, they could at best only hint at the modes and forms of
address to adopt to attract and hold the attention of the desired
segments. Clearly some form of linguistic cultural explanation would be
needed, since the evolution and institution of these forms will have
required some reading and interpretation of the particular structures of
feeling and thought employed by the desired segments. That said,
cultural explanation of the sort outlined above hardly seemed adequate.
Like any other stories, those told by the tabloid press about TV
personalities almost imperceptibly articulated certain frameworks of
understanding, interest and emotion. One of the things the analysis
attempted was to describe what these frameworks were. As I do not
wish to over-excite expectations, I have to point out that with the time
and resources to hand, only the first steps to an adequate description
have been possible. They were enough, however, to realize that these
stories involved something more than the satisfaction of dodgy desires.
There were additional features which suggested a moralizing tone and a
considerable measure of condemnation of those involved in the
scandals. Having noted these features, it was difficult then to see the
stories as the means by which the base desires attributed to their
supposed readers could be easily satisfied.

NEWSPAPERS OR NOT
It proved extremely difficult to read the tabloid papers I selected as
‘news’ papers. In retrospect, it is clear that I was employing a model of
newspapers and a set of expectations derived from my greater