PART 1
Debates, concepts, theories
SECTION 1
Origins, definitions and debates:
talking about the tabloids
Defining tabloid media is a difficult task as the term ‘tabloid’ refers not only to changing
formats in shifting historical and industrial contexts but also to the attitudes and values
that are commonly attached to these formats. The term ‘tabloid’ is quite often used in
a pejorative sense and there are many examples of academic debates that address
a perceived ‘crisis’, ‘threat’ or even ‘panic’ in response to the ‘tabloidization’ of contemporary media culture. Colin Sparks (2000) provides a helpful model for unpacking
the various ways in which the term tabloid is used and the values attached to them.
Firstly, and originally, the term refers to newspaper and then broadcast journalistic
output that prioritizes entertainment, human interest and commercial profitability and
which is usually presented as oppositional to ‘serious’ and socially responsible journalism. Secondly, the term can refer to changing priorities within a given medium such
as television leading, for example, to a diminution of serious programming or its marginalization in the schedules and the adoption across the board of entertainment-led
values. Finally, it can refer to tabloid content itself. Sparks gives the well-known
examples of the Jerry Springer Show and the work of American ‘shockjock’ radio presenter Rush Limbaugh whose shows are open to criticism for their voyeuristic and
shameless exploitation of ordinary people in the case of Springer and for controversial populist, highly conservative rhetoric in the case of Limbaugh (Sparks, 2000:
10–11).
There has been longstanding academic interest in the development of the popular
and later the tabloid press. From its inception, cultural studies has demonstrated an
abiding interest in journalism both for its capacity to articulate common concerns and
interests and as a resource when trying to analyse the ‘structure of feeling’ or the
culture of a particular historical period (Williams, 1961: 41). In Barbie Zelizer’s words,
cultural studies had a ‘default regard’ for journalism as a ‘key strain of resonance for
thinking about how culture worked’ (Zelizer, 2004: 180–5). For example, Raymond
Williams (1961: 171), a founder of what became known as British cultural studies,
suggested that the development of the popular press in particular was of major importance in understanding the general expansion of mass culture from the late seventeenth
century until the present day. The newspaper was, after all, the most widely distributed
of single-issue printed products, it was increasingly affordable, relatively easy to read
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and set the agenda for public debate on a daily basis. It became, in effect, part and
parcel of the common culture of everyday life.
One of the key concerns of scholarship has been the origins of the popular press,
the rise of radical politics via popular journalism and then the subsequent transformation of the popular press into distinctively tabloid formats in terms of style and content.
Williams observed that although newspapers were originally the creation of the middle
class (whose sound commercial footing gave them the resilience to become somewhat
independent of government and subsequently to help form public opinion on the events
of the day) other kinds of press reflecting the different social bases of the working
classes also emerged. Notably, during the late 1770s–1830s these initiatives included
attempts (under severe repression) to launch politically radical newspapers and also
the establishment of the Sunday newspaper. In the early nineteenth century the former
constituted a political voice that was independent of trade advertising and of official
political groupings (Curran and Seaton, 2003: 7). The latter was also somewhat radical
in tone but its main appeal was its inclusion of stories of fraud, thievery, seduction,
murder and executions, sports, human oddities and other diverting content previously
found in popular print culture such as ballad sheets, chapbooks and almanacs (Williams,
1961: 175–6, 189; see also Biressi, 2001).
The popular Sunday paper became an established British institution, a ‘scandal
sheet’ seemingly enjoyed (but perhaps for differing reasons) across the social classes
(see Orwell, 1946) and a pioneer of tabloid journalistic style. Competition between
papers addressing a working-class readership, such as the commercial battles that
took place in the 1930s, led to further developments in accessible style and content
(Conboy, 2006: 7). The tabloid tone of the Sundays influenced their weekday competitors with the Daily Mail perhaps becoming best known of the middle market papers for
its adoption of popular address and content. Of the more ‘downmarket’ papers, the
Daily Mirror, which was relaunched in the 1930s, was arguably emblematic of the British
style of tabloid journalism of the period (Conboy, 2006). The distinguishing features of
the tabloid newspaper included not only its content and tone (e.g. sensation, human
interest, sentimentality, prurience) but also a growing alliance with the entertainment
industries, which, in the United States for example, began as early as the 1890s and
was fully realized with the advent of movies and the establishment of Hollywood star
system into the 1940s (Ponce de Leon, 2002). The British press, along with many other
areas of cultural life, was increasingly marked by the influence of American popular
culture such as picture magazines, movies, comics and pulp fiction (see Hoggart, 1957;
Nuttall and Carmichael, 1977; Street, 1998). Indeed, since at least the nineteenth
century, British journalism had taken on board US tabloid initiatives such as populist
campaigning journalism and exposés and the growing coverage of celebrity issues,
human interest and scandal (see Ponce de Leon, 2002). In the early part of the twentieth century American journalists also pioneered moves into photojournalism and the
heavy deployment of illustration in news reporting (Conboy, 2006: 6) and it could be
argued that this emphasis on the visual over the written word in reportage has become
symptomatic of the tabloidization of news media in general. Indeed, one of the ways in
which the growing tabloidization of the press can be quantified is by tracking whether
there are more visuals and less text over a given period of time (McLachlan and Golding,
2000: 75–90).
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In the United Kingdom the tightening bond between the entertainment industries,
consumerism and the tabloid press became increasingly apparent during the 1970s
with the rise to prominence of the Sun newspaper, to take one clear example. The Sun,
acquired in 1969 by a market-wise media conglomerate headed by Rupert Murdoch,
made its mark in terms of its reciprocal relationship with the commercial television
industry, which is maintained to this day. It also devoted substantial amounts of space
to advertising, competitions, TV promotions and tie-ins, sports and lifestyle copy (see
Rooney, 1998 and 2000). From the Sun’s successful harnessing in the 1970s and
1980s of ‘permissive populism’ (Hunt, 1998) and political ‘authoritarian populism’ (Hall
and Jacques, 1983: 22) emerged three key components of the tabloid profile – sexual
vulgarity, the use of popular vernacular and a radical iconoclastic conservatism that
captured the attention of its non-elite audience. In terms of its address to readers it
employed a chirpy vernacular and knowing smuttiness and sexualization of content that
rendered it a highly distinctive brand in a competitive market. It was also vulnerable to
accusations of brandishing overtly jingoistic, xenophobic and sometimes even racist
attitudes (see Harris, 1983; Searle, 1989; Campbell, 1995; Law, 2002; Curran, Gaber
and Petley, 2005). As such the paper (along with similar competitor titles) has been
regarded as a ‘scandalous object’ (McGuigan, 1992: 175) inviting criticism with regard
to questions of representation and cultural politics. As Curran and Seaton (2003: 90)
argue, although the paper could all too easily be dismissed as simple minded, it in fact
‘evolved a complex editorial formula . . . which was both hedonistic and moralistic,
iconoclastic and authoritarian, generally Conservative in its opinions and radical in its
rhetoric’ and for many the Sun remains emblematic of the popular, often politically
influential, British mass market tabloid daily.
The Sun, which had started life as a trades union supported paper called the Daily
Herald, also offers a good case study of the ways in which formerly politically radical
papers can become transformed into vehicles of conservative values in tandem with
tabloid style and content. Many media scholars since Raymond Williams have been
concerned with identifying the point at which it could be said that the popular press
became the tabloid press or, to frame it another way, the stage at which the popular
press became ‘depoliticized’ and relinquished its commitment to collective workingclass politics and leftist values (see Curran and Seaton, 2003: 91–3). Media and
communication studies has addressed these questions in the context of broader
research into the political economy of the press, taking into account factors such as
newspaper ownership, regulation and control, political influence and the public sphere,
ideology and agenda setting and the changing commercial landscape of the newspaper
market place (see for example Curran and Gurevitch, 1991; Blumler and Gurevitch,
1995; Philo, 1995; Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen, 1998; McChesney, 1999).
The phrase ‘public sphere’ was first used by Jürgen Habermas (1989) to describe
the arena of debate in which ‘public opinion’ was formed; an arena provided by the
rise of the newspaper and its development as a vehicle for public political dialogue.
Habermas suggested that the particular circumstances of the emergence of the press
together with the circulation of political debate amongst literate society created the
conditions for a more democratic and distinctively modern social realm. Many media
critics, and indeed journalists themselves, have noted the increasing tabloidization of
the news media with dismay, pointing out what has been lost in terms of the media’s
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ability to operate effectively as a public sphere in which rational and informed reflection
about the political, economic and social issues of the day might take place. The argument has been made that an increasingly commercialized media, allied with consumerism as noted above, has transformed the public sphere of open citizenship
into a privatized sphere in which citizens are primarily defined as consumers (see
Garnham, 1986; Rooney, 2000; Street, 2001: 41–2; Campbell, 2004: 55–8; Lewis
et al., 2005).
The trajectory of these press analyses has generally been one in which the popular
press has been deemed to break away from its radical democratic roots towards a
more overt commercialism, which panders to the lowest common denominator in order
to sell copy and support a free-market ethos. As such it may be regarded as a process
that inexorably erodes serious journalism across all spheres, genres and platforms
such as radio and TV broadcast news, documentary, political reportage and online
journalism. Debate about tabloidization therefore necessarily addresses the tensions
between entertainment and information within an increasingly multimedia and globalized consumerist environment (e.g. Franklin, 1997; Bromley, 1998; Stephenson, 1998;
Campbell, 2004). Whether one takes a critical or more positive position in relation to
tabloidization one clear concern emerges: that the consumerization of news content
and competitive pressures of the media industries allow less time and space for the
conduct of serious political reportage and investigative journalism (Barnett and Gaber,
2001: 7).
From a different perspective the colonization of the public sphere and mainstream
media by tabloid values and aesthetics has arguably led to the democratization of
media by virtue of its frequent inclusion of non elite people, issues and values. It could
be said that the relationship between the ‘popular’ and the ‘public sphere’ has taken a
new turn with the advent of first-person media and reality television leading critics to test
and sometimes explicitly challenge outright condemnations of tabloid culture (e.g.
Gamson, 1998; Dovey, 2000; Holmes and Jermyn, 2004; Biressi and Nunn, 2005);
sometimes proposing new ways of conceptualizing ‘the public’ within the postmodern
public sphere (Hartley, 1992; Couldry, 2000; Moores, 2005). Many of these arguments
emerge from the conviction that even the most denigrated forms of popular culture
needed to be engaged with at a serious academic level; not merely as vehicles of
commercialism and ideological persuasion but also as potential sites of cultural struggle, transgressive pleasures and media visibility for ordinary people and common culture. Whatever one’s view of current media culture it is widely acknowledged that tabloid
values (e.g. production values, professional values and especially news values) and
tabloid content (sensation, the use of vernacular, sexualization, human interest, celebrity culture and so on) have permeated and/or transformed media culture more broadly
– producing what we refer to here in shorthand as ‘tabloid culture’. Media theory and
academic research have expanded to address the political, economic and social implications of the transformations that constitute tabloid culture. While tabloid culture
owes its nomenclature and its cultural roots to tabloid journalism it also draws on and
intersects with a range of other popular media including TV talkshows, popular factual
programming and the aforementioned reality television.
Since the 1990s it has been possible to find studies of journalism, therefore, that
have chosen to situate their research either in the context of tabloid culture or in relation
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to notions and concepts of the popular. In 1992 Colin Sparks and Peter Dahlgren’s
collection Journalism and Popular Culture contended that popular culture had become
one of the main sites of investigation not only for cultural studies but also for contemporary mass communication research (Dahlgren and Sparks, 1992: 1; see also
Sparks and Tulloch, 2000). Sparks and Dahlgren’s aim was to suspend the conventional academic and theoretical boundaries and established lines of inquiry that
operated in journalism studies in order to look at journalism from a fresh perspective.
This agenda enabled both television and print journalism to be scrutinized as a form of
popular culture per se as well as considering its relation to issues as diverse as celebrity, melodrama, popular knowledge and folklore. Ten years later the title of Martin
Conboy’s book The Press and Popular Culture (2002) is indicative of the enduring
importance of this juxtaposition of journalism studies and popular culture. In this book
Conboy begins by reflecting on Sparks and Dahlgren’s argument that journalism and
popular culture are indissolubly linked. He suggests that the fact that mainstream
journalism is a mass media product does not preclude it from being understood as a
legitimate form of popular culture. Conboy (2002: 1) notes, ‘Successful popular newspapers, like their popular print predecessors, have always managed to articulate a
real relationship between the reader and the commercial enterprise and at their most
effective involved the reader symbolically in that venture.’
The pieces we have selected for this section all address tabloid journalism and
touch on many of the issues we have signalled here. We begin with Bob Franklin’s
classic exposition of the pressures on news providers to entertain within the context of
a highly competitive environment. This account of the emergence of ‘newszak’ charts
the media terrain in which the defining opposition is between news and entertainment
and investigates why and how soft news, entertainment and human interest are making
inroads across all news genres and formats and on every media platform. This is
followed by Anna Maria Jönsson and Henrik Örnebring’s reassessment of tabloid journalism as necessarily ‘bad’ journalism. By tracking the historical development of tabloid
journalism and some of the roles it has played in undertaking a populist critique of
authority the authors make the case for regarding the tabloid press as an ‘alternative
public sphere’ that may, on occasions, serve the public as well as, if not better than, its
more respectable rivals. The piece by Jostein Gripsrud also scrutinizes the value judgements formed about tabloidization and popular journalism; adopting an open-minded
but carefully critical evaluation of the functions of popular culture in the context of the
ideal of a democratic media sphere. He does this by testing positive (John Fiske) and
highly critical (Pierre Bourdieu) views of popular journalism and finding them both wanting in terms of their ability to help us arrive at a sophisticated and pragmatic understanding of what popular journalism can and cannot offer ordinary people. The section
concludes with an extract from Martin Conboy’s book The Press and Popular Culture,
which usefully presents an analysis of the current cultural scene by exploring the postmodern dynamics of late capitalism and the ways in which this has fostered the breakdown of established cultural hierarchies and oppositions such as those between elite
and popular culture, politics and spectacle. By this route he is able to situate our
understanding of the popular press in the context of complex processes of globalization,
commercialization and a media sphere in which rhetorical flare and visual images
predominate.
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Further reading
Calhoun, C. (ed.) (1992) Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Conboy, M. (2006) Tabloid Britain: Constructing a Community Through Language, London:
Routledge.
Curran, J. and Seaton, J. (1991) Power Without Responsibility, London: Routledge, 4th edition.
Engel, M. (1996) Tickle the Public: One Hundred Years of the Popular Press, London: Victor
Gollancz.
Habermas, J. (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge: Polity.
McGuigan, J. (1992) Cultural Populism, London: Routledge.
McNair, B. (2000) Journalism and Democracy: An Evaluation of the Political Public Sphere,
London: Routledge.
Sparks, C. and Dahlgren, P (1991) Communication and Citizenship: Journalism and the Public
Sphere, London: Routledge.
Sparks, C. and Tulloch, J. (eds) (2000) Tabloid Tales: Global Debates Over Media Standards,
New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
Stephenson, H. (1998) ‘Tickle the public: Consumerism rules’, in H. Stephenson and
M. Bromley (eds) Sex, Lies and Democracy: The Press and the Public, Harlow: Longman.
Turner, G. (1999) ‘Tabloidization, journalism and the possibility of critique’, International
Journal of Cultural Studies, 2(1): 59–76.