Tabloid Journalism: the debate on entertainment, popular culture and journalism

David McKnight


For at least the last ten years a growing number of voices have been raised criticising the 'tabloidisation' of the mass media. This is especially true in the United States where there is a vigorous tradition of serious discussion of mass media.

Some of the most critical voices have come from journalists. In 1992 the well known journalist of Watergate fame, Carl Bernstein, spoke of a movement away from real journalism toward 'creation of a sleazoid info-tainment culture'.

'Never before', he says, 'have we had anything like today's situation in which supposedly serioius people - I mean the so called intellectual and social elites of this country - live and die by (and believe) these [gossip] columns and [tabloid] shows.'

The media, he said, is powerful but has abdicated its responsibility and the result is 'the spectacle and triumph of an idiot culture'.1

When I worked on the Sydney Morning Herald in the late 1980s, a number of reporters complained about the preference for what we regarded as lightweight 'colour stories'. In response to a grouch from me, the then deputy editor explained that the reason was that the newspaper had to compete for an audience with television. With little elaboration, this seemed to explain why cute little 'science' stories about 'why the shower curtain tends to stick to your legs' were favoured over more traditional science coverage.

This debate in Europe and the US takes place against a boom in tabloid journalism in the formerly communist countries such as Hungary (where Rupert Murdoch has significant investments) and the market-socialist China, where classic sensationalist tabloid journalism is exploding.

While the rest of the world is lamenting the rise of tabloid journalism, two commentators are saying something new and different, in my view. They are Catherine Lumby and John Hartley. (In this spoken paper I will only have time to discuss Cathy Lumby's ideas.)

Incidentally, I prefer the term popular journalism and popular media to tabloid journalism. It is more accurate, literally since tabloid originally related to a newsprint size - and some broadsheets are well and truly in the tabloid tradition - but also because popular journalism accurately pinpoints its distinctiveness - it is journalism meant for a broad, non elite audience.

In her book Bad Girls: The Media,Sex and Feminism in the 90s, Cathy Lumby argues for a feminism which takes a libertarian stance and which ditches its exaggerated belief in the power of the media to shape consciousness.

She is rightly scornful of the intellectual snobbery which pervades much of academic theorising on the media. The attitude of many university educated people to popular media culture is often based on a distaste for emotion, for 'personal issues' and an elitist definition of what and who matters. She argues strongly that readers are far from passive creatures who are manipulated emotionally and politically by the tabloid press. This is an effective argument and one which is long overdue. In my experience many critics, both around the dinner party and in academe rarely read or watch popular media on a regular basis.

Central to her argument is that the recent rise of tabloid journalism has a beneficial effect: that the traditional male-centred public sphere is being conflated with the private sphere. She argues that 'much of the debate about the contamination of traditional news values by the irrational, indecently personal focus of tabloid journalism emerges as a desire to police the boundaries of a symbolic masculine space.'2

I think Catherine Lumby is right when she highlights the airing of 'private' issues such as domestic violence and child abuse on many popular TV current affairs shows and in womens magazines. This has implications for how we define politics as she points out.

But I think Cathy Lumby overstates the liberatory effects of tabloid journalism and tabloid TV culture and in part this comes from an absence of historical context. Later, I'll illustrate what I mean from my own study of tabloid journalism in Australia in the 1950s and 60s.

I 'd like to take one example from her book and disuss it. She points to the differing treatment of our bodies by the upmarket and popular media.

The media which is imbued with 'quality', high culture, Enlightenment values discusses human bodies in terms of expert opinion or aberrant behaviour, she says, whereas popular journalism approaches our bodies in an experiential way: ordinary people discuss being overweight, having drinking problems or being impotent. Stated thus, there is no excuse for the routine snobbish distaste for popular journalism's appraoch.

This issue, which is typical of the debate around 'new news' versus old news came up during that excellent Sixty Minutes program in 1993, 'Has the Media gone too far'. At one point, the host Jana Wendt asked the question, 'What is news'. The then EP of Today Tonight, Gerald Stone makes the standard response of many journalists - one which is usually brushed aside by media critics, especially left wing ones.

'Well I think one of the silliest statements made tonight was that the media decides what's news and the public accepts it, they're fed on it. Anybody who makes such a statement doesn't know what it is to run a competing program where somebody has an interview with a grief stricken family up against Madonna and the public decides.

Stone then argued that it was the media who discovered famine in Ethiopia and possibly saved millions of lives. At this point the then presenter of Today Tonight, Stan Grant butts in with possibly the most inept and tactless statement of the discussion:

Grant: I think it' s to much to expect one particular program to deliver what people perceive to be news and current affairs....Sure, you want to hear about corruption exposed and you want to hear about famine in Ethiopia, but there are lots of people out there who are dealing with the problem of being overweight...

Jana Wendt: Can I say that that sounds a touch absurd? Where famine in Ethiopia is on quite a different level of human concern....

Stan Grant: Of course, there is a place for that, as there is a place for shows about people who are obese and having problems with obesity...'

This exchange encapsulates a recurring issue in the debate about popular journalism. Stan Grant argues that because most people are more concerned about their bodies than the bodies of Ethiopians, then journalism is justified in doing stories on obesity, perhaps even favouring such stories. Wendt's reply states, in essence, that sometimes moral considerations over-ride majority taste. A similar argument occurs about the photos of Lady Di in the gym: the unethical invasion of privacy should over ride whether the photos and the story are fascinating to a large audience. The trouble is that this may become a slippery path that leads to a 'we know best' attutude by an elite towards a popular majority. It is ultimately the same kind of argument that justifies censorship of so-called immoral sex.

(One other simple observation about this argument relates to the historical shaping of journalism. Journalism which is preoccupied with diets and baldness cures is a departure from the news basis of journalism. They are what is called magazine piece. They are timeless. They have no relationship to the reporting of timely events (news). Such formulas rely solely on age-old fears about bodies rather than a connection with news. This is, I think, what Jana Wendt was getting at when she said, on joining the ill-fated Witness program, that she wanted to 'the original meaning' of current affairs.)

Catherine Lumby's argument about the public and private sphere goes further. She links this to the forms of knowledge which tabloid journalism uses. She points out that tabloid media 'also frequently spurns traditional forms of knowledge - medicine, science and economics - for their irrational populist counterparts, faither healing, astrology and psychics.' This is true, and arises from popular journalism own roots in folk tales, gossip and the pre-scientific era. At this point I part ways with Cathy Lumby. I'll illustrate this with a discusion about the issue she raised earlier: the discussion of bodies on public and the private sphere.

The vast number of diets in popular womens magazines are not conducive to weight loss, nor are most designed using the knowledge of human metabolism; they have another function. They are part of a package of sell dreams. It is clearly impossible to manufacture sufficient interesting articles about exercise and diets of fruit and vegetables etc. Does it matter how are bodies are discussed in the media? How health, diets and body shape are discussed? I think it does. It is too easy to look at how medicine has reflected a patriarchial society and how certain kinds of scientific knowledge have reinforced an imperial and patriarchal order - and to dismiss all scientific, 'expert' opinion.

My fear is the moral and intellectual relativism that says that it doesn't matter if a newspaper or program regards astrology with the same reverence as astronomy. Or that good nutritional advice is equivalent to mumbo jumbo. If the sum total of our response to this is: 'let the market decide' - and even if we say this using the latest reception theory and arguing that audiences make their own meaning, then we are engaging in another form of snobbery about tabloid journalism. That is, if the mass of people believe in aliens, then fine, so be it. Let's not worry about it - they are little people who don't count - except for Neilsen surveys and buying products.

If a newspaper or program is full of astrology and gathers a significant audience, that won't change the fact that astrology is fraudent but it will reflect a serious debasement of popular knowlege. What follows from all of this is a discussion about the nature of knowledge and how journalism fits within this - but I won't pursue this here.

(As an aside on the issue of public and private spheres, it is worth noting that the 17th and 18th century precursors of tabloid journalism the news books, ballad and pamphlets were far freer from control by governments and the state. (Stephens) The Description of a gruesome murder might have offend the sensibilities of rich and powerful but they saved their real ire for suggestions that democracy might be worth trying. Is it different today? Maybe not. The most severe legal restraints are still saved for investigative journalism which probes the rich and powerful, while the shackles on radical sexual and cultural media have weakened far more in the last 30 years.)

In making her argument about the transformation of the public sphere, Cathy Lumby makes a number of overstatements in my view.

'Television]', she says' gave everyone an opportunity to see world which they had formerly no clear picture of. The disadvantaged saw in side the homes of white middle class families portayed in sitcoms.'3

I think this it's historically wrong to suggest that there is something new in this. One clear part of the popular tradition and its roots within folk tales and gossip lies in the fascination and envy which poor people have for rich people. Ballads and pamphlets about courtiers and Louis XIV and the TV showLifestyles of the Rich and Famous are cut from the same cloth.

She makes a similar kind of point when discussing a very significant journalistic event : the global, live coverage of the O J SImpson criminal trial. The trial raised the significnt issues of domestic violence and institutional police racism.

It was good to see that the issues of domestic violence and racism publicly discussed and the coverage of the trial helped reinforce the status of domestic violence as a significant public issue. Cathy Lumby then goes on to say that issues such as domestic violence 'have been allowed to fester precisly because of this demand that the public and the private spheres be kept separate'. (132) I think this is quite an inaccurate argument.

If tabloid media is today blurring the line between public and private , then it has been doing it for almost two centuries. 'Private' issues have continually forced their way into the public sphere per medium of press coverage of public trials, especially divorces, for at least 100 years. They are objects of popular interest.

Cathy Lumby is right to point out that definitions of news are changing. The public sphere is undergoing a transformation largely due to the impact of feminism. Its message that the 'personal is political' and its ability to express this through shaping the agenda of governments (as with domestic violence) is being reflected in the mass media. Or in a deeper sense, the changes in the material circumstances of women over the last 50 years in regard to family (private) and work (public) may also be a driving force which is redefining the public sphere today.

The only way that existing media forms can handle the rise of 'private' issues into the public sphere is by applying traditional tabloid formats. That is the phenomena we are seeing now and we cannot understand it unless we study the roots of popular journalism.

Popular journalism in Australia

I want to now turn to my own research into popular journalism which concerns the press in Australia since 1945. This illustrates that much of the techniques of tabloid TV journalism is derived from this earlier tradition. It also highlights an often neglected element of the tabloid tradition, muckraking or exposure journalism. Its significance is that it may offer a path for reform which critics of popular journalism are looking for.

In this paper I will discuss my work on the Sydney Truth, which was a weekly newspaper and was part of the Ezra Norton empire.

Truth had a style of journalism was high pitched, sensational and melodramatic. These features are hardly remarkable in the popular press but Truth differed from later tabloid journalism because of its attitude to its readers. Truth not only claimed to stand up for its readers but actually had a close relationship with them. Readers would write, call or actually visit its offices with stories of injustice to tell - and Truth's journalists would listen. The result was a populist expression of the role of the press fourth estate with journalists as proto-ombudsmen. Truth's stock in trade was exposure of injustice or of fraud on the public.

For example, complaints by readers during the post war housing crisis led to regular Truth exposures of shady builders and conmen. The housing shortage also produced mini-exposes of poverty ('Truth finds couple living in wardrobe').4 Truth's reporters, like those of today, made use of public registers of company records and modern investigations of corporate malpractice have their roots in such exposures.5 Truth's role as a consumer ombudsman was by no means limited to housing: 'A drive yourself hire car company which sold out on Friday will be no loss to the community.... Atta Pty Ltd. sold out a couple of weeks after Truth started investigating its activities.'6

Truth's exposures were quite limited and often confined to small personal injustices. In some cases they related to larger social issues (e.g. the housing crisis) but in many cases no connection was hinted at with political and social issues. In the era in which Truth published, journalism, including crusading journalism, was narrowly confined to particular events and people Broader issues (government policy on hospital funding; doctors' criteria for admission to hospital) were rarely taken up. For instance, a number of stories in Truth and elsewhere implicitly cried out for a probing investigation into police bashings, 'verbals' and protection rackets - yet almost nothing systematic was done until the late 1970s.

Undercover methods of news gathering were used in Truth's frequent exposures of unqualified or quack doctors. These often relied on reporters presenting themselves as patients with a bogus complaint: 'The next patient to visit Rupert was the same man who had his gallstones tickled by "Gallstones" Hoffman, the quack who says he can remove gallstones by massage.... On a second visit the patient disclosed he was from Truth.....and Rupert came clean with his story of his quackery.'7 The exposure of sharp practices by the hire car company mentioned above was also achieved by a Truth reporter anonymously hiring a car.

If all of this has a familiar ring to it - you are right. The parallels between the muckraking of the tabloid press and modern TV are extremely close. Television journalism (after a period of trying to ape the respectability of the press for some time) has taken over pre-existing tabloid forms of journalism and has turbo-charged them with the extraordinary emotional impact of TV.

Where Truth used undercover reporters, A Current Affair uses hidden cameras; where Truth exposes quacks and conmen, a Curent Affair does the same and throws in TV repair men to boot. Not surprisingly the men who run TV current affairs at commercial networks usually had their grounding in the popular presss - Peter Meakin at Chanell Nine is probably the most prominent example.

Conclusions

Clearly the revival in the former communist world of tabloid journalism should tell us something. It is an answer, for example, to the critics who say that the public likes popular journalism only because it knows nothing else or because its tastes have been formed by that self same product. The official culture of communist countries was high culture with an emphasis on ballet, classical music and great works of literature. Popular journalism revived because this simply did not appeal to most people.

The liking by a large number of people for popular journalism is the biggest single problem for its critics and I now want to deal with this. I said earlier that I think Cathy Lumby has seized on the democratic side to popular journalism. She has assailed its critics as snobs and highbrows. But there is another element to the market which she doesn't address. If our rule of thumb is 'let the market decide' then are there any limits to this? Put another way, can we ever be genuinely critical of popular journalism or what Bernstein called the 'sleazoid infotainment culture' without being snobs?

I believe we can but I think that most critics have no idea how to answer the argument that the market is right because it is democratic, and that therefore the worst excesses of popular journalism are justified. I believe it is vital to develop an answer to the defenders of bad tabloid journalism. In part, because they are one small part of a wider argument about the market which pervades every aspect of culture thanks to the neo-liberal policies which have swept all before them for the past 15-20 years.

To answer the market argument we need to be able to confidently assert a thought out moral position. That is, that there are times when the majority taste can be condemned on a moral basis. If the majority of the public wanted to watch public hangings, this could be condemned on this basis. Just how do we ground this? This is not as easy as it sounds - almost automatically one seems to cast oneself as an elitist. In the case of journalism it meams among other things developing a strong professional culture incorporating a code of ethics and a public right to know.

Second, we need to point out that though democratic, markets can be tyrarranical and conformist. If our journalism follows the market, then it is almost always a captive of popular prejudices. A Current Affair rarely does stories which might depict Aborgines and prisoners in a positive light. Why? Not because of some reactionary Packerian stance but simply because its viewers don't like it. It must remain popular (high rating) at all costs.

Third we need to understand that within popular culture and popular journalism there are contradictory tendencies. One of these is the muckraking tradition - the desire to stand up for the battler. This itself can be contructed in many ways - from targetting unemployed youth who are bludging on the rest of us - to stories about rich tax avoiders who are doing the same.

Similarly within popular consciousness. While one part of popular consciousness was aroused by Truth's moral panics about crime in which police were held up as heroes, Another part of that popular consciousness knew very well that police were often brutal and suspected them of corruption.

Finally we need to be clear in our analysis. If we see a particuarly sleazy appeal to base prejudices - say a popular talk back host - we need to be clear that when we criticse him we are also (and even mainly) criticising his audience. That is, we need to realise that when we criticise "the media" we are criticising part of soceity. Consequently, the answer to sleazoid journalism does not ultimately lie in the media but in the attitude of wider society.

In short, the answer to bad popular journalism is not to condemn all popular journalism but to develop a form popular journalism which seizes on the progressive elements of popular consciousness. A kind of journalism which does not intellectualise everything or disdain emotion.. We need to support a kind of popular journalism which John Hartley talks about in his book Popular Reality which embodied the sovereignty of the people, which was agressively democratic and egalitarian. We need to find elements of popular consciousness whcih support a fair go and which support tolerance and all those other ideals usualy held by people who are the fiercest, but often ill thought out, critics of popular journalism.

Notes

  1. Guardian Weekly, 14 June 1992
  2. C. Lumby, Bad Girls, 130.
  3. Bad Girls, 171-72
  4. Truth, 27 April 1952.
  5. For example see Truth, 28 Sept. 1947.
  6. Truth, 4 June 1950
  7. Truth, 17 August 1947.

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First placed here December 1997; revised version placed here November 1998.