Page 254 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

TALES OF TELLYLAND 243

hope for. They lead easy and seemingly glamorous lives which again
sharply contrast with the lives most of us are able to lead. It may be that
these figures have been granted rewards which, to many, may seem ill-
deserved. The revelations of their troubles and tribulations may be the
only means available to bring them down a peg or two.
Whatever the reasons for the attractiveness of such material to these
papers, it cannot be dismissed as trivial. Contrary to what is usually
assumed, these papers are not unserious. Those of us who have come to
analyse journalism have perhaps allowed ourselves to define the serious
in far too narrow a fashion. To be serious, journalism would appear to
have to deal with only those matters which are already on the agendas
of parliaments, major corporations, organized extra-parliamentary
political groupings and various kinds of pressure groups. We have also
tended to work with rather narrow conceptions of what is political. So, a
matter is political only if we can detect some organized presence
advocating a particular course of action and mobilizing support for it. We
have forgotten that politics is about all and any manifestation of power,
whether or not that manifestation assumes the dominant forms available
within parliamentary democracies. There is a very real sense in which
the stories in the tabloid papers are political. In their peculiar, brash and
bawling ways they bring to visibility that which the variously powerful
would prefer to ignore, would choose to consider ‘by the way’ or would
dismiss as regrettable, loutish traits. They remind us that in the midst of
sometimes quite desperate poverty and impotence, there are those with
everything.
Nor can we forget that in dealing with the tabloid press we are
dealing with a species of journalism. Much of the criticism which would
deny these papers the status of journalism is far too rationalist. What I
have in mind is the kind of criticism which would strictly separate
entertainment from information, which finds the tones of the tabloid
press too lurid and bombastic. This is a criticism which would have
reporting concentrate on fact and analysis, unadorned by allegory,
metaphor and allusion. Whatever such criticism might celebrate as an
ideal, the fact is that it is very difficult to identify passages of journalism
from broadsheets that are utterly devoid of such characteristics. No, the
stories I shall be looking at in more detail from the tabloid press can be
considered informative even although they do not read as scientific
reports. And, moreover, they are newspapers in that they chronicle
unfolding events just as much as their broadsheet relations. Where they
differ is in the nature of the events they consider worthy of our note.