There was a lot of important news going on yesterday. Mrs Windsor’s speech in parliament for example. Or George Galloway in front of the US Senate.
Not that you’d know that if you relied on the UK tabloids for your news. They’ve al decided that the really important news is a pop singer’s medical problems. If its front page is to be believed, the Sun has extended coverage on pages 1 to 7. The Mail and the Express both use their headlines to rant about the breakdown of society under New Labour but even they both manage to fit in photos of poor, brave Kylie.
Priorities people. It’s about priorities. This is not news. Tabloids are not newspapers.
Surely this is why you did technical work at the Guardian, rather than being on the editorial side! Let’s phrase these three stories a different way and see which one seems most compelling:1. Person you don’t like goes to an institution that you’re not even really aware of and talks to somebody you’ve never heard of about something you don’t care about.2. Person formally announces laws you’ve heard a hundred times before that have been rammed down your throat for the last two months.3. Person whose work you may well like and admire has potentially fatal disease, probably the same disease that you or your family have direct experience of.Put it like this and of course Kylie was the biggest story of the day. But newspapers only print what they think their readers will like (unless they want to do a Piers Morgan/Iraq suicide mission). The news agenda (for that’s what it is) down the pub isn’t going to be Gorgeous George, it’s going to be Gorgeous Kylie, so that’s what people want to know.Being honest, in my view politics doesn’t affect everyone directly every day. (Controversial statement, I admit.) So the so-called serious affairs get pushed back because they just don’t speak to people’s everyday lives.I think it’s interesting that tabloid people often refer to the broadsheet papers as “The Unpopulars”.