Page 259 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

248 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

depictions of violence and of sexual intercourse (‘sex’), but the majority
of items did not manifestly concern themselves with issues, but in
various ways with the doings of TV personalities. Hardly a day passed
during the monitoring period without the majority of the tabloids (the
exceptions were Today and the Daily Mail) running personality items.
There were several different kinds of personality items. The bulk of
them can be classed as direct or indirect publicity or promotionals. The
papers made fairly liberal use of copy which had probably originated
with agents and promoters. Such items might consist of little more than
a good-sized photograph with a caption or short paragraph about
personalities attending some function or other. The ‘photo opportunity’
may have been arranged to promote either the personality, a new show,
or both. Such coverage tended to be reserved for personalities of some
standing. For those of lesser standing, there would be no photograph.
The copy for them might be a paragraph of some twenty to thirty
words, placed, usually, at the margins of a page. Such items were little
more than fillers.
Items of content such as these were not the cardinal ones dealing with
television. I identified as cardinal those which were prominently
featured, and I assumed a functional relationship between prominence
and importance. In short the more prominent an item, the greater its
degree of perceived importance. As a rough-and-ready measure of
prominence, I used a combination of such fairly obvious elements as
location in the paper, position on the page, size and number of
headlines, presence/absence, and size, of photograph and where
appropriate whether or not colour was used. The most eye-catching
were those that appeared on the first page, began in the top, left-hand
quadrant of the page, had at least one headline in a large point size,
were accompanied by at least one photograph of key participants and
may have been continued on subsequent pages. Of perhaps equal, but
certainly similar, standing were those billed somewhere at the top of
page one, but presented across two pages elsewhere in the paper. Two
examples of this were the Mirror’s serialization of The Bruce Willis
Story’ in January 1989, and the Sun’s ‘Secret Life of Dirty Den’, billed
on page one as ‘Another Exclusive’.
It was these cardinal items which took as their subjects the doings and
misdoings of ‘stars’. One of the striking features of the stories told was
their presumption that the central characters were well known. I would
suggest this was a presumption because few details were supplied to
place them. Typically they would be named. Their status in tellyland
was also provided as was the name of the show with which they were,