NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
COMMENTARY
July 13, 2011
Something base
Let me not try to conceal the wicked pleasure I experienced upon learning that the British Sunday tabloid, News of the World, would be permanently folded.Normally I would shed a tear for a paper that had a continuous run of 168 years, most of those as a nominal broadsheet. But "Screws of the World," as it was sometimes called, or "NotWorld," as it could be abbreviated, was from its beginning, to its very end, something base. It not only appealed to the "lowest common denominator," but was designed to lower that further, generation by generation. It was also, if we must go into the history of journalism, the prototype for all the sleazier newspapers of England, and by extension, around the world. It was founded in the days before the stamp tax was lifted, and newspapers ceased to be items that only gentlemen could afford. And while there were other obscure and long-extinct essays in what came to be known as "yellow journalism" (when the Americans mastered the art), News of the World could reasonably claim to have dug the gutter. Cellphone and e-mail hacking did it in. But this was just the latest technological extension of what the paper had been doing through all the decades since 1843. Their first reporters specialized in "accessing" court records, which often included notes from police raids on brothels, from trailing streetwalkers, and other vice prosecutions. The reader was presented with lurid, and not necessarily accurate accounts of the London underworld, interlarded with puritanical moralizing. If the reader wants to know what life was like at the bottom of London urban society in the early Victorian age, he should read Henry Mayhew, whose extraordinary investigations, first published in the (respectable) Morning Chronicle, give a deeply moving view of human beings in abject poverty, struggling often brilliantly to survive. There is vice enough to be encountered in London Labour and the London Poor, but it is not presented in a way to titillate the semiliterate reader. There is instead a remarkable effort to find and present the truth about a world that the plush and comfortable only glimpsed with irritation as they passed it by. Papers like News of the World have never been interested in the truth, except in an extremely narrow, factual and factitious sense, to cover themselves against legal prosecution. They look, by instinct, for vice touching the top of society, where the greatest possible titillation can be found and where, in addition to the wet smell of sex, and the satisfactions of voyeurism, they can feed the reader's vindictive nature. He knows himself to be low; he delights in watching the high brought down below his level. He imagines himself to be sneered upon; this is his opportunity to sneer upon his betters. And with a fresh supply of dirt delivered to his news agent every week. The worst part of it is that puritanical moralizing, which has itself evolved with the times. The editors cite a public "need to know" when their paper publishes almost exclusively things the public does not need to know. And by focusing on the lurid, and on the destruction of reputations, an essentially false account is given of every subject presented. For everything is viewed through smeared spectacles; nothing is presented in the round. My sympathy for the staff, turned out of jobs that may resemble my own, is strictly limited. In my experience, "tabloid journalists" may sometimes start as exceptionally naive idealists (this is a moral danger in itself). But if they are to last in such an environment, they quickly become hard, jaded, mean in several senses, intensely hypocritical and self-serving. The argument is made that prurient journalism is necessary to keep people honest. That argument is implicit in the moralizing - again, "the public's need to know." The underlying assumption must be that those lacking moral fibre, or any other manifestation of the fear of God, will nevertheless fear public exposure. And while there is psychological truth in this, the effect of sleazy journalism is paradoxical. It makes the likely targets more calculating and deceitful; it adds a new layer of illicit pleasure, in escaping detection. It makes concealment into a game. My own wicked pleasure, in seeing the biter bit, will be shortlived. News of the World had already been made largely redundant by the copious flow of free sleaze through the Internet. The Murdoch empire, according to several reports, likely will simply replace News of the World with a Sunday edition of their daily Sun. They might even come out ahead on the transaction; though Rupert Murdoch himself is showing blood in the water, which tends to attract sharks. The issue isn't Murdoch, however; he did not invent tabloids. The issue is the moral slide by which such journalism prospers, and what, if anything, can be done to arrest it. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top