Page 252 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

TALES OF TELLYLAND 241

sent to help the poor’. At the foot of the column was a directive to the
effect that the remainder of the story could be found on ‘Page 2 Column
1’.
At the foot of the page, framed by the Cybill Shepherd photograph
above and the Princess Anne report to its right-hand side was another
report with the headline LABOUR FIRE SKY TV MP. This referred to
the ‘dismissal’ of the Labour Party’s ‘front bench spokesman’, Austin
Mitchell (pictured to the left with the caption ‘Defiant: Austin Mitchell)
on his acceptance of a presenter’s job with the then about to be launched
Sky TV satellite service.
With such a front page, not atypical of those to be found on other
tabloids, it is tempting to suggest that these papers really cannot be
treated as newspapers. It is not simply that they do not lead with this or
that story given front page prominence in one or other of the
broadsheets, but rather that they elect not to use any stories of the kind
used by broadsheets on the front page. If the essence of good journalism
is about seriously reporting serious matters—those which have been
accepted on to the state’s agenda of acceptable controversies—then the
tabloid papers must be seen as only vestigially newspapers. Given, for
the moment, this qualification, it is not surprising that the tabloid press
is judged to be debased, and to be set on a course which is lowering if
not trivializing journalistic standards.
To render this judgement on the tabloid press is, however, to grant
too much weight and authority to a particular set of journalistic
traditions. There is another set of traditions as ancient as that upon
which the present-day broadsheets in the UK draw. It has long been
dismissed as trivial and scandalous, in part because of its continuing
fascination for those private worlds which exist in the shadow of public
ones. From within the official strata of the public world it has been and
is strongly felt that the private should not be used for publicity, and it
has as a consequence long been insisted that serious journalism must be
conducted tastefully and decently. Popular journalism has, however,
revelled in turning topsy-turvy the preferred order of these worlds. The
‘invasions of privacy’ that are now commonplace have not been, and
are not, always waged by tabloid reporters against ordinary members of
the public suffering some grief or catastrophe. Much more alluring are
those situations where a ‘respected’ public figure has been caught out in
some private affair which public morality condemns as a transgression.
Even more alluring still are those occasions when a public figure’s
private actions flatly contradict his or her public pronouncements.