According to a YouGov poll, four out of five people think that the tabloid press is ‘out of control’. Ironically, this includes 71% of Sun and News of the World readers.
We don’t know how people would have answered the same question a year, or even a month, ago. We do know, however, that confidence in tabloid journalism was precipitously low even before the recent phone-hacking/detail-blagging revelations. Another YouGov poll last year found that 83% of people distrusted red-top journalism. Even amongst their natural C2DE territory only 13% were prepared to say that they trusted them.
So most people thought that tabloid journalist were a dodgy bunch, liable to engage in sharp practices. Yet according to National Readership Survey figures in the year to March 2011 around 24 million of us read their work on a daily basis. Disturbingly, it seems we have standards by which we conduct our own lives, and but we buy papers that do not share them. As if we needed reminding, Plato was wrong – to know the good is not to do the good.
As with the financial crisis, we inevitably turn to the question are we, ‘the public’, to blame? By buying these papers in their millions, haven’t we implicitly consented to and indeed encouraged their unwholesome activities, whether they be the plainly illegal (as in the alleged bribing of police officers for information) or the simply immoral (the attempt to strong-arm Gordon Brown for an exclusive on his young son’s illness)?
Yes on no. For the large part, red tops understand ordinary people and what motivates them better than their broadsheet counterparts. That’s why the Sun has over 7 million readers, and the Independent 562,000. Why have the tabloids fixated so much on tragic cases of missing children, if not because they know that the heart of every parent in the country reaches out in sympathy? Why do they run campaigns with organisations like Help for Heros and the British Legion if not because they sense the admiration that most people have for the professionalism of the armed forces, no matter what they think of the political decisions that lead to military conflict? Put bluntly, they know what makes people tick and that’s what they print.
Needless to say that the red tops – in terms coined by Augustine of Hippo – have taken people’s loves and distorted them. A sense of kinship and solidarity can so easily be coached toward hatred of the outsider, of needing to protect those close to us moved towards a ‘bang them up and throw away the key’ mentality. This does not mean that the instincts are bad, only that we have proved very biddable in allowing our proper desires to be indulged, inflated, titillated and then exploited for commercial gain in an ever more competitive market.
The News of the World may have closed, Rebekah Brooks may have resigned, but you can’t take ‘us’ out of the equation. Newspapers are cultural institutions; they don’t just purvey information, they shape and school the people that read them. Like the banks, tabloids are a kind of public utility and should be regulated according to the conditions of public good.
Paul Bickley is Senior Researcher at Theos.
