Page 251 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

240 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

familiarity with broadsheets. As long as I did so, I could not avoid
comparing them unfavourably and viewing them as the impoverished
relations of the broadsheets. It is now clear that to expect of the tabloid
press articles that perform at least the basic journalistic jobs of
providing accurate information on, and some measure of dispassionate
analysis of, current ‘public affairs’ is bound to lead to disappointment
and frustration. Such material is regularly granted, at best, only a
secondary position in most of the tabloids. On finding that there is very
little such material in the most prominent positions in tabloid papers
some critics have been quick to dismiss them as newspapers. Is their
dismissal justified or not?
The places where public affairs stories would be found in
broadsheets, were in the tabloids occupied instead by ‘human interest’
stories and stories about personalities whose public visibility had been
occasioned by some dubious behaviour, often of a sexual kind. To
illustrate, we can take the front page of the Daily Express for Thursday,
2 February 1989. Immediately below the paper’s title, across the full
width of the page were the following elements:
ADULTERY INSIDE TODAY: THE MOST An affair in
REVEALING STUDY YET the office
See Centre Pages
Between these announcements and directions was a passport-size
photograph depicting a man kissing a woman’s hand as she is
conducting a telephone call.
Immediately beneath this section of the page was a photograph of
Cybill Shepherd smiling to camera with a baby in each arm (her twin
sons). This picture occupied two-thirds of the page width and about half
of its remaining depth. Superimposed on the top left of the photograph
was the caption ‘Star Cybill walks out on her husband PAGE 3’. A
further caption, immediately beneath, stated:

MOONLIGHTING WIFE: TV star Cybill Shepherd last night
walked out on husband Bruce Oppenheim, the father of her twin
sons

To the right of this picture and its captions, running the full length of the
page, and of one column’s width, was a report headlined ‘Anne attacks
charity cheats’. The report, set in bold, reported that Princess Anne
‘yesterday attacked Third World countries that squander western cash