British tabloids are notorious for being exaggerated, sensationalist, and stopping at nothing to get a good story.
In this episode, we’ll talk about the origins of tabloid culture, its early history, and how it persists in the modern day.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about newspapers.
[00:00:26] But not just any newspapers, we are going to be talking about a particular type of newspaper, the tabloid.
[00:00:34] It’s a form of small, concise newspaper famous for gossip and sensational stories, but this type of newspaper has gone on to become the dominant form of journalism in Britain.
[00:00:46] So, in this exploration of tabloids, and of tabloid culture, we’ll look at how it all started, who some of the key players are, the types of stories they write, the controversies they’ve faced, and what the future holds for this very particular type of newspaper.
[00:01:03] This is actually going to be followed by another members-only episode where we’ll look at some of the most scandalous tabloid stories in history, so keep a lookout for that one next week.
[00:01:13] Right, we’ve got a lot to get through, so let’s get right into it.
[00:01:20] The Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde once quipped, he once said, “the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing”.
[00:01:34] In other words, people don’t want to know what matters, they want to know things that don’t matter - gossip, rumour, and scandal.
[00:01:44] Oscar Wilde, as you may know already, or you might remember from episode number 215, was a man who knew all too well the danger of gossip and scandal, and of how one’s reputation can be destroyed in an instant.
[00:02:01] And it was, in fact, when Oscar Wilde was in prison, from 1895 to 1897, that the first “tabloid” newspaper was created in Britain.
[00:02:15] This was something called “The Daily Mail”, and was created by a man named Alfred Harmsworth, the 1st Viscount Northcliffe, in 1896.
[00:02:26] You might know that this newspaper, The Daily Mail, is still alive and well today.
[00:02:32] In fact, it’s one of the most popular newspapers in the country by circulation, and it also has one of the most popular news websites in the world.
[00:02:42] It’s popular with many, but hated by others; Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, described it as having mastered “fake news”, and Prince Harry referred to it, and the British tabloid press in general as “the devil”.
[00:03:00] So, why should a newspaper, or form of journalism, arouse such powerful feelings?
[00:03:08] Why are British tabloids so popular, but at the same time remain so hated?
[00:03:15] Well, we should probably start by defining what a tabloid actually is.
[00:03:20] A good way to understand this is to compare it to the other type of newspaper: a broadsheet.
[00:03:27] Broadsheets are, as you might have guessed from the name, physically bigger newspapers - broad means wide, and sheet refers to the sheet of paper. These types of newspapers generally focus on news through so-called ‘quality’ journalism based on research, facts and analysis.
[00:03:48] Some traditional British broadsheets. you might have heard of include The Times, The Telegraph or The Guardian.
[00:03:56] Tabloid newspapers, on the other hand, are generally smaller and contain a lot more pictures and advertisements.
[00:04:04] Broadsheets tend to focus on ‘hard news’, with articles about politics and economics, where the simple facts are stated. And there is normally a separate section of a broadsheet, where there is the opinion of various journalists.
[00:04:20] Tabloids, on the other hand, often do cover the same stories, but there are a few points to note.
[00:04:27] Firstly, there is a more sensationalist angle, the facts and analysis are less important, it’s the ‘story’ - that is, how dramatic or entertaining it is - that is the most important thing for the tabloids.
[00:04:43] Secondly, tabloids are unapologetic in mixing opinion with news, and there is no attempt to provide a balanced opinion, to report the story and allow the reader to make up their own mind.
[00:04:57] Sure, arguably any reporting of a story has some political bias, but the tabloids mix opinion and reporting, with journalists being free to intertwine their own views about current events with the reporting of the story.
[00:05:14] And thirdly, the tabloids also deal in a different type of story to the broadsheets.
[00:05:21] For many tabloids their bread and butter, what fills most of the pages in a tabloid, is “scandal and gossip”, stories of celebrities or famous people doing things that they shouldn’t be doing, or simply going about their daily lives, having coffee, taking out their rubbish bins, or, shock horror, wearing the same dress for the second time that month.
[00:05:46] So, where did they come from, where did it all get started?
[00:05:50] Well, the etymology of the word ‘tabloid', the origin of the word, isn’t actually entirely clear.
[00:05:57] Many people believe the term comes from another industry altogether, the pharmaceutical industry.
[00:06:04] In the late-19th century a tabloid was a type of medicine, a mixture of ‘tablet’ and ‘alkaloid’ in a condensed tablet, meaning made up of two or more parts or ingredients.
[00:06:17] Historians seem to think that the name could have been used to describe journalism too, one that focused on shorter, bite-sized articles more digestible to the reader, like taking a tablet.
[00:06:31] And the first tabloid arrived on the scenes, as you heard a few minutes ago, in 1896 when Alfred Harmsworth, the 1st Viscount Northcliffe, founded The Daily Mail.
[00:06:44] In one of its first editorials, one of its first opinion columns, the editor, Harmsworth wrote:
[00:06:51] “The World enters today upon the Twentieth or Time-Saving Century. I claim that by my system of condensed or tabloid journalism, hundreds of working hours can be saved each year.”
[00:07:07] Now, it’s not clear whether Harmsworth was talking about the fact that more dense journalism saved the reader time, or the journalist time in their research, perhaps both. In any case, Harmsworth wasn’t particularly concerned about long, detailed journalism.
[00:07:25] A few years later, in 1903, he created another famous British tabloid, one that is still in circulation today: The Daily Mirror.
[00:07:35] The aim of the Daily Mirror, Harmsworth wrote in its first editorial, was to be “entertaining without being frivolous, and serious without being dull”.
[00:07:47] Instead of focusing on hard news with articles about politics and economics and current events, The Mirror, as it’s widely known, featured gossip, crime reports and mysteries, as well as celebrity gossip, sports coverage and even puzzles and brain teasers.
[00:08:05] The Mirror’s pages were also filled with photographs and cartoon-like illustrations, far more than any of its broadsheet competitors, which were filled with wall upon wall of black and white text.
[00:08:18] And this more compact, easy-access format, it seemed, worked.
[00:08:24] By 1908 The Mirror was Britain’s second-largest morning newspaper, and together with The Daily Express, The Daily Mail, and later on The Sun, this tabloid format came to dominate the British newspaper market.
[00:08:40] The format for all of these newspapers was pretty similar: lots of pictures, bite-sized articles written in relatively simple language and short sentences, gossip and astrology columns, agony aunts, where readers write in and ask for advice, and even comic strips and comedy columns.
[00:09:02] In the case of some of the tabloids, most notably The Sun, it also included pictures of semi-naked women, with “Page 3”, the first page you see when you open the newspaper, containing a “Page 3 girl”, a topless model.
[00:09:20] The Sun finally stopped this in 2015, but it was, at this time, the most popular newspaper in the country by circulation.
[00:09:29] And in terms of what are the most popular tabloids today, well, the exact titles have changed a little over the years, but the top three almost always include some combination of The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Daily Mirror and The Daily Express.
[00:09:47] Now, we’re going to go into some of the actual details of tabloid stories in the next episode, but let me give you one recent example to illustrate the differences in reporting style, particularly with the language used by the tabloids.
[00:10:03] In this example, we’ll look at how two different newspapers reported on the same story, the story of the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, being caught and fined by the police for not wearing a seatbelt in a car.
[00:10:19] These stories were published on the same day, and both newspapers I'll be talking about are owned by the same person, Rupert Murdoch, who we’ll hear more about in a few minutes.
[00:10:32] So, in The Times, a broadsheet, the report goes as follows:
[00:10:38] “Rishi Sunak has been fined over his failure to wear a seatbelt in a moving car. Lancashire police confirmed this evening that they had issued a “conditional fixed penalty notice”. The force did not reveal how much the fine was, but the usual amount is £100.”
[00:10:58] Note the formal language, and the straight, unbiased reporting.
[00:11:03] The Times emphasises that though it wasn’t clear how much the fine actually was, they made a conservative estimate based on what the usual amount is.
[00:11:13] Sounds sensible, right?
[00:11:15] Well, the same story was reported in The Sun, a tabloid, and it had a bit of a different feel.
[00:11:24] I’m quoting directly here:
[00:11:27] “He was caught riding beltless in the back seat while filming a video,” The Sun wrote, “the offence carries a maximum £500 fine, but Mr Sunak had last night not been told by cops how much he must pay.”
[00:11:42] Can you see the difference?
[00:11:45] The informal language of ‘caught riding beltless in the backseat while filming a video’ in The Sun versus the “failure to wear a seatbelt in a moving car,” as it was worded in The Times.
[00:11:58] Cops versus the police.
[00:12:01] And in terms of the fine, The Sun chose to frame it as a ‘maximum’ of £500, sensationalising the story somewhat, whereas The Times went for the normal amount, though less scandalous.
[00:12:17] The difference here seems clear: the broadsheet reports the facts in a calm, conservative way, while the tabloid exaggerated, sensationalised, and used informal language to make the story more dramatic.
[00:12:32] The Sun tells an exciting story while The Times tells the facts.
[00:12:38] But Prince Harry surely can’t be labelling the tabloid press “the devil” for simply using sensational language and a bit of exaggeration.
[00:12:48] One of the mainstays of the British tabloid press, one of its key types of stories, of “news”, if we can call it news, is gossip and rumour, of prying into the private lives of celebrities and politicians and “revealing” it all to the public.
[00:13:06] Compared to lots of other European countries at least, the UK press has a pretty ferocious culture where almost nothing is off-limits to the press.
[00:13:17] In other words, the British tabloids will go to extreme lengths to get a story about anything from a celebrity doing drugs or having an affair or behaving in an unusual way, and then be very happy to publish it on the front page.
[00:13:34] And in many cases these lengths are extreme indeed, and have led to a huge backlash when the methods of the British tabloid press are revealed, creating a scandal far bigger than the original story the journalist was reporting on.
[00:13:52] We are going to look at several of these scandalous stories in great detail in our next episode, but I want to highlight one particular example of this today, a scandal about journalistic methods that illustrates just how far the tabloids would go to get a story.
[00:14:11] And that is something called the ‘phone hacking scandal’, which involved a popular but now defunct, now out of print, tabloid called the News of the World, a tabloid owned by the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, the man who owns The Times and The Sun.
[00:14:31] In 2005 allegations emerged that journalists from the News of The World were hacking into people’s voicemails, they were accessing them without permission, to get information for stories.
[00:14:45] They would hack the voicemail, listen to the private, often intimate conversations, record them, and then use that stolen information to write their stories before their rivals something known as getting a ‘scoop’ - that is, an exclusive story that nobody else has.
[00:15:06] For these tabloid papers, which we must remember are businesses, after all, getting scoops and exclusives are a hugely important part of the job and help sell papers.
[00:15:18] After all, if someone else has reported the “news” before you, your story isn’t really “news”.
[00:15:26] Now, sometimes these voicemails would be members of the Royal Family or celebrities, which would lead to stories like Prince William leaving funny voicemails for his younger brother.
[00:15:38] Not so bad, you might think, not the end of the world.
[00:15:42] But this was just the tip of the iceberg, and it would turn out that there was no depth the tabloids would not stoop to, no limits they had, in order to get a scoop, get a story before their rivals.
[00:15:58] And this went far deeper than celebrity gossip.
[00:16:03] In July of 2011, another story emerged that shocked the British media landscape, when it turned out that News of the World journalists had hacked into the voicemail of a murdered teenager.
[00:16:20] Milly Dowler was a 13-year-old British girl who was abducted and murdered in 2002. It emerged years later that News of the World journalists had hacked her voicemails after she had been abducted, and published stories about the police investigation, stories that gave her parents false hope that she was alive. It was very nasty stuff indeed.
[00:16:49] Under intense political and legal pressure, The News of the World eventually closed down in 2011, costing Rupert Murdoch and the paper’s parent company a reported hundred million pounds in legal costs.
[00:17:04] And subsequent investigations revealed that this was no isolated incident; phone hacking had been commonplace at The News of The World for many, many years.
[00:17:17] Now, looking to the future briefly.
[00:17:20] As is the case all over the world, the internet and social media have completely changed the face of journalism and the newspaper industry.
[00:17:29] Gone are the days when you needed to go to a shop to buy a physical newspaper, and to many, gone are the days when you needed to go to a news website to get your news.
[00:17:42] Many people these days get their news from social media accounts and websites that aren’t run by journalists, or connected to newspapers in any way. Perhaps unsurprisingly, fewer and fewer people are reading newspapers - both broadsheet AND tabloid.
[00:18:00] To give you an idea of quite how serious this is in the UK, back in the year 2000, Britain’s daily and Sunday national newspapers had a total daily circulation of around 22 million.
[00:18:17] But by January of 2020, those newspapers were selling just 7 and a half million copies, a huge drop in readership.
[00:18:28] But between the tabloids and the broadsheets, the former, the tabloids, seem to be adapting best to the digital world, both digitally and in print.
[00:18:41] The Sun, for example, still has over a million daily readers.
[00:18:46] And the Daily Mail has almost a million, whereas The Times, which is a broadsheet, had only 365,000 in 2020, and The Guardian just 105,000.
[00:19:00] And it is a similar story online, for the most part.
[00:19:05] The Daily Mail is the country’s 11th most popular website, with 130 million monthly visitors being drawn to the website by its so-called “sidebar of shame”, with never-ending stories of celebrity gossip and rumour.
[00:19:21] The Sun, on the other hand, says it reaches over 30 million people a month between its print and digital editions.
[00:19:30] In true tabloid style, The Sun claims on its site, and I’m quoting directly, “the statistics leave rivals the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail in the dust as our loyal readers flock to us for their daily news.”
[00:19:47] Perhaps, you might say, it makes sense that the tabloids would make the digital transition more easily.
[00:19:54] Social media is all about hooking people in with a snappy headline, attracting them with a sensational story, even if that story might be incomplete, or fabricated slightly.
[00:20:08] It is, in many ways, a perfect fit for the form of journalism that tabloids have practised for over a century now.
[00:20:16] Short, snappy, elaborate, easy to digest, and often full of scandal and gossip.
[00:20:25] The British tabloid press has spent over a century perfecting this form of journalism, and while people might not be going to the newspaper stand in the morning, they are going somewhere for their news.
[00:20:38] And so long as the public wants news, the tabloid press will do its utmost to make sure that it's the place they get it from.
[00:20:50] Ok then, that’s it for today’s episode on British tabloid culture, the never ending stream of sensational stories and scandal, and journalists that will stoop to any depth to get a scoop.
[00:21:04] As a quick reminder, we are going to follow up this episode with one where we look at some of the most scandalous stories printed in the British tabloids.
[00:21:12] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:21:18] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about newspapers.
[00:00:26] But not just any newspapers, we are going to be talking about a particular type of newspaper, the tabloid.
[00:00:34] It’s a form of small, concise newspaper famous for gossip and sensational stories, but this type of newspaper has gone on to become the dominant form of journalism in Britain.
[00:00:46] So, in this exploration of tabloids, and of tabloid culture, we’ll look at how it all started, who some of the key players are, the types of stories they write, the controversies they’ve faced, and what the future holds for this very particular type of newspaper.
[00:01:03] This is actually going to be followed by another members-only episode where we’ll look at some of the most scandalous tabloid stories in history, so keep a lookout for that one next week.
[00:01:13] Right, we’ve got a lot to get through, so let’s get right into it.
[00:01:20] The Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde once quipped, he once said, “the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing”.
[00:01:34] In other words, people don’t want to know what matters, they want to know things that don’t matter - gossip, rumour, and scandal.
[00:01:44] Oscar Wilde, as you may know already, or you might remember from episode number 215, was a man who knew all too well the danger of gossip and scandal, and of how one’s reputation can be destroyed in an instant.
[00:02:01] And it was, in fact, when Oscar Wilde was in prison, from 1895 to 1897, that the first “tabloid” newspaper was created in Britain.
[00:02:15] This was something called “The Daily Mail”, and was created by a man named Alfred Harmsworth, the 1st Viscount Northcliffe, in 1896.
[00:02:26] You might know that this newspaper, The Daily Mail, is still alive and well today.
[00:02:32] In fact, it’s one of the most popular newspapers in the country by circulation, and it also has one of the most popular news websites in the world.
[00:02:42] It’s popular with many, but hated by others; Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, described it as having mastered “fake news”, and Prince Harry referred to it, and the British tabloid press in general as “the devil”.
[00:03:00] So, why should a newspaper, or form of journalism, arouse such powerful feelings?
[00:03:08] Why are British tabloids so popular, but at the same time remain so hated?
[00:03:15] Well, we should probably start by defining what a tabloid actually is.
[00:03:20] A good way to understand this is to compare it to the other type of newspaper: a broadsheet.
[00:03:27] Broadsheets are, as you might have guessed from the name, physically bigger newspapers - broad means wide, and sheet refers to the sheet of paper. These types of newspapers generally focus on news through so-called ‘quality’ journalism based on research, facts and analysis.
[00:03:48] Some traditional British broadsheets. you might have heard of include The Times, The Telegraph or The Guardian.
[00:03:56] Tabloid newspapers, on the other hand, are generally smaller and contain a lot more pictures and advertisements.
[00:04:04] Broadsheets tend to focus on ‘hard news’, with articles about politics and economics, where the simple facts are stated. And there is normally a separate section of a broadsheet, where there is the opinion of various journalists.
[00:04:20] Tabloids, on the other hand, often do cover the same stories, but there are a few points to note.
[00:04:27] Firstly, there is a more sensationalist angle, the facts and analysis are less important, it’s the ‘story’ - that is, how dramatic or entertaining it is - that is the most important thing for the tabloids.
[00:04:43] Secondly, tabloids are unapologetic in mixing opinion with news, and there is no attempt to provide a balanced opinion, to report the story and allow the reader to make up their own mind.
[00:04:57] Sure, arguably any reporting of a story has some political bias, but the tabloids mix opinion and reporting, with journalists being free to intertwine their own views about current events with the reporting of the story.
[00:05:14] And thirdly, the tabloids also deal in a different type of story to the broadsheets.
[00:05:21] For many tabloids their bread and butter, what fills most of the pages in a tabloid, is “scandal and gossip”, stories of celebrities or famous people doing things that they shouldn’t be doing, or simply going about their daily lives, having coffee, taking out their rubbish bins, or, shock horror, wearing the same dress for the second time that month.
[00:05:46] So, where did they come from, where did it all get started?
[00:05:50] Well, the etymology of the word ‘tabloid', the origin of the word, isn’t actually entirely clear.
[00:05:57] Many people believe the term comes from another industry altogether, the pharmaceutical industry.
[00:06:04] In the late-19th century a tabloid was a type of medicine, a mixture of ‘tablet’ and ‘alkaloid’ in a condensed tablet, meaning made up of two or more parts or ingredients.
[00:06:17] Historians seem to think that the name could have been used to describe journalism too, one that focused on shorter, bite-sized articles more digestible to the reader, like taking a tablet.
[00:06:31] And the first tabloid arrived on the scenes, as you heard a few minutes ago, in 1896 when Alfred Harmsworth, the 1st Viscount Northcliffe, founded The Daily Mail.
[00:06:44] In one of its first editorials, one of its first opinion columns, the editor, Harmsworth wrote:
[00:06:51] “The World enters today upon the Twentieth or Time-Saving Century. I claim that by my system of condensed or tabloid journalism, hundreds of working hours can be saved each year.”
[00:07:07] Now, it’s not clear whether Harmsworth was talking about the fact that more dense journalism saved the reader time, or the journalist time in their research, perhaps both. In any case, Harmsworth wasn’t particularly concerned about long, detailed journalism.
[00:07:25] A few years later, in 1903, he created another famous British tabloid, one that is still in circulation today: The Daily Mirror.
[00:07:35] The aim of the Daily Mirror, Harmsworth wrote in its first editorial, was to be “entertaining without being frivolous, and serious without being dull”.
[00:07:47] Instead of focusing on hard news with articles about politics and economics and current events, The Mirror, as it’s widely known, featured gossip, crime reports and mysteries, as well as celebrity gossip, sports coverage and even puzzles and brain teasers.
[00:08:05] The Mirror’s pages were also filled with photographs and cartoon-like illustrations, far more than any of its broadsheet competitors, which were filled with wall upon wall of black and white text.
[00:08:18] And this more compact, easy-access format, it seemed, worked.
[00:08:24] By 1908 The Mirror was Britain’s second-largest morning newspaper, and together with The Daily Express, The Daily Mail, and later on The Sun, this tabloid format came to dominate the British newspaper market.
[00:08:40] The format for all of these newspapers was pretty similar: lots of pictures, bite-sized articles written in relatively simple language and short sentences, gossip and astrology columns, agony aunts, where readers write in and ask for advice, and even comic strips and comedy columns.
[00:09:02] In the case of some of the tabloids, most notably The Sun, it also included pictures of semi-naked women, with “Page 3”, the first page you see when you open the newspaper, containing a “Page 3 girl”, a topless model.
[00:09:20] The Sun finally stopped this in 2015, but it was, at this time, the most popular newspaper in the country by circulation.
[00:09:29] And in terms of what are the most popular tabloids today, well, the exact titles have changed a little over the years, but the top three almost always include some combination of The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Daily Mirror and The Daily Express.
[00:09:47] Now, we’re going to go into some of the actual details of tabloid stories in the next episode, but let me give you one recent example to illustrate the differences in reporting style, particularly with the language used by the tabloids.
[00:10:03] In this example, we’ll look at how two different newspapers reported on the same story, the story of the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, being caught and fined by the police for not wearing a seatbelt in a car.
[00:10:19] These stories were published on the same day, and both newspapers I'll be talking about are owned by the same person, Rupert Murdoch, who we’ll hear more about in a few minutes.
[00:10:32] So, in The Times, a broadsheet, the report goes as follows:
[00:10:38] “Rishi Sunak has been fined over his failure to wear a seatbelt in a moving car. Lancashire police confirmed this evening that they had issued a “conditional fixed penalty notice”. The force did not reveal how much the fine was, but the usual amount is £100.”
[00:10:58] Note the formal language, and the straight, unbiased reporting.
[00:11:03] The Times emphasises that though it wasn’t clear how much the fine actually was, they made a conservative estimate based on what the usual amount is.
[00:11:13] Sounds sensible, right?
[00:11:15] Well, the same story was reported in The Sun, a tabloid, and it had a bit of a different feel.
[00:11:24] I’m quoting directly here:
[00:11:27] “He was caught riding beltless in the back seat while filming a video,” The Sun wrote, “the offence carries a maximum £500 fine, but Mr Sunak had last night not been told by cops how much he must pay.”
[00:11:42] Can you see the difference?
[00:11:45] The informal language of ‘caught riding beltless in the backseat while filming a video’ in The Sun versus the “failure to wear a seatbelt in a moving car,” as it was worded in The Times.
[00:11:58] Cops versus the police.
[00:12:01] And in terms of the fine, The Sun chose to frame it as a ‘maximum’ of £500, sensationalising the story somewhat, whereas The Times went for the normal amount, though less scandalous.
[00:12:17] The difference here seems clear: the broadsheet reports the facts in a calm, conservative way, while the tabloid exaggerated, sensationalised, and used informal language to make the story more dramatic.
[00:12:32] The Sun tells an exciting story while The Times tells the facts.
[00:12:38] But Prince Harry surely can’t be labelling the tabloid press “the devil” for simply using sensational language and a bit of exaggeration.
[00:12:48] One of the mainstays of the British tabloid press, one of its key types of stories, of “news”, if we can call it news, is gossip and rumour, of prying into the private lives of celebrities and politicians and “revealing” it all to the public.
[00:13:06] Compared to lots of other European countries at least, the UK press has a pretty ferocious culture where almost nothing is off-limits to the press.
[00:13:17] In other words, the British tabloids will go to extreme lengths to get a story about anything from a celebrity doing drugs or having an affair or behaving in an unusual way, and then be very happy to publish it on the front page.
[00:13:34] And in many cases these lengths are extreme indeed, and have led to a huge backlash when the methods of the British tabloid press are revealed, creating a scandal far bigger than the original story the journalist was reporting on.
[00:13:52] We are going to look at several of these scandalous stories in great detail in our next episode, but I want to highlight one particular example of this today, a scandal about journalistic methods that illustrates just how far the tabloids would go to get a story.
[00:14:11] And that is something called the ‘phone hacking scandal’, which involved a popular but now defunct, now out of print, tabloid called the News of the World, a tabloid owned by the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, the man who owns The Times and The Sun.
[00:14:31] In 2005 allegations emerged that journalists from the News of The World were hacking into people’s voicemails, they were accessing them without permission, to get information for stories.
[00:14:45] They would hack the voicemail, listen to the private, often intimate conversations, record them, and then use that stolen information to write their stories before their rivals something known as getting a ‘scoop’ - that is, an exclusive story that nobody else has.
[00:15:06] For these tabloid papers, which we must remember are businesses, after all, getting scoops and exclusives are a hugely important part of the job and help sell papers.
[00:15:18] After all, if someone else has reported the “news” before you, your story isn’t really “news”.
[00:15:26] Now, sometimes these voicemails would be members of the Royal Family or celebrities, which would lead to stories like Prince William leaving funny voicemails for his younger brother.
[00:15:38] Not so bad, you might think, not the end of the world.
[00:15:42] But this was just the tip of the iceberg, and it would turn out that there was no depth the tabloids would not stoop to, no limits they had, in order to get a scoop, get a story before their rivals.
[00:15:58] And this went far deeper than celebrity gossip.
[00:16:03] In July of 2011, another story emerged that shocked the British media landscape, when it turned out that News of the World journalists had hacked into the voicemail of a murdered teenager.
[00:16:20] Milly Dowler was a 13-year-old British girl who was abducted and murdered in 2002. It emerged years later that News of the World journalists had hacked her voicemails after she had been abducted, and published stories about the police investigation, stories that gave her parents false hope that she was alive. It was very nasty stuff indeed.
[00:16:49] Under intense political and legal pressure, The News of the World eventually closed down in 2011, costing Rupert Murdoch and the paper’s parent company a reported hundred million pounds in legal costs.
[00:17:04] And subsequent investigations revealed that this was no isolated incident; phone hacking had been commonplace at The News of The World for many, many years.
[00:17:17] Now, looking to the future briefly.
[00:17:20] As is the case all over the world, the internet and social media have completely changed the face of journalism and the newspaper industry.
[00:17:29] Gone are the days when you needed to go to a shop to buy a physical newspaper, and to many, gone are the days when you needed to go to a news website to get your news.
[00:17:42] Many people these days get their news from social media accounts and websites that aren’t run by journalists, or connected to newspapers in any way. Perhaps unsurprisingly, fewer and fewer people are reading newspapers - both broadsheet AND tabloid.
[00:18:00] To give you an idea of quite how serious this is in the UK, back in the year 2000, Britain’s daily and Sunday national newspapers had a total daily circulation of around 22 million.
[00:18:17] But by January of 2020, those newspapers were selling just 7 and a half million copies, a huge drop in readership.
[00:18:28] But between the tabloids and the broadsheets, the former, the tabloids, seem to be adapting best to the digital world, both digitally and in print.
[00:18:41] The Sun, for example, still has over a million daily readers.
[00:18:46] And the Daily Mail has almost a million, whereas The Times, which is a broadsheet, had only 365,000 in 2020, and The Guardian just 105,000.
[00:19:00] And it is a similar story online, for the most part.
[00:19:05] The Daily Mail is the country’s 11th most popular website, with 130 million monthly visitors being drawn to the website by its so-called “sidebar of shame”, with never-ending stories of celebrity gossip and rumour.
[00:19:21] The Sun, on the other hand, says it reaches over 30 million people a month between its print and digital editions.
[00:19:30] In true tabloid style, The Sun claims on its site, and I’m quoting directly, “the statistics leave rivals the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail in the dust as our loyal readers flock to us for their daily news.”
[00:19:47] Perhaps, you might say, it makes sense that the tabloids would make the digital transition more easily.
[00:19:54] Social media is all about hooking people in with a snappy headline, attracting them with a sensational story, even if that story might be incomplete, or fabricated slightly.
[00:20:08] It is, in many ways, a perfect fit for the form of journalism that tabloids have practised for over a century now.
[00:20:16] Short, snappy, elaborate, easy to digest, and often full of scandal and gossip.
[00:20:25] The British tabloid press has spent over a century perfecting this form of journalism, and while people might not be going to the newspaper stand in the morning, they are going somewhere for their news.
[00:20:38] And so long as the public wants news, the tabloid press will do its utmost to make sure that it's the place they get it from.
[00:20:50] Ok then, that’s it for today’s episode on British tabloid culture, the never ending stream of sensational stories and scandal, and journalists that will stoop to any depth to get a scoop.
[00:21:04] As a quick reminder, we are going to follow up this episode with one where we look at some of the most scandalous stories printed in the British tabloids.
[00:21:12] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:21:18] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about newspapers.
[00:00:26] But not just any newspapers, we are going to be talking about a particular type of newspaper, the tabloid.
[00:00:34] It’s a form of small, concise newspaper famous for gossip and sensational stories, but this type of newspaper has gone on to become the dominant form of journalism in Britain.
[00:00:46] So, in this exploration of tabloids, and of tabloid culture, we’ll look at how it all started, who some of the key players are, the types of stories they write, the controversies they’ve faced, and what the future holds for this very particular type of newspaper.
[00:01:03] This is actually going to be followed by another members-only episode where we’ll look at some of the most scandalous tabloid stories in history, so keep a lookout for that one next week.
[00:01:13] Right, we’ve got a lot to get through, so let’s get right into it.
[00:01:20] The Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde once quipped, he once said, “the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing”.
[00:01:34] In other words, people don’t want to know what matters, they want to know things that don’t matter - gossip, rumour, and scandal.
[00:01:44] Oscar Wilde, as you may know already, or you might remember from episode number 215, was a man who knew all too well the danger of gossip and scandal, and of how one’s reputation can be destroyed in an instant.
[00:02:01] And it was, in fact, when Oscar Wilde was in prison, from 1895 to 1897, that the first “tabloid” newspaper was created in Britain.
[00:02:15] This was something called “The Daily Mail”, and was created by a man named Alfred Harmsworth, the 1st Viscount Northcliffe, in 1896.
[00:02:26] You might know that this newspaper, The Daily Mail, is still alive and well today.
[00:02:32] In fact, it’s one of the most popular newspapers in the country by circulation, and it also has one of the most popular news websites in the world.
[00:02:42] It’s popular with many, but hated by others; Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, described it as having mastered “fake news”, and Prince Harry referred to it, and the British tabloid press in general as “the devil”.
[00:03:00] So, why should a newspaper, or form of journalism, arouse such powerful feelings?
[00:03:08] Why are British tabloids so popular, but at the same time remain so hated?
[00:03:15] Well, we should probably start by defining what a tabloid actually is.
[00:03:20] A good way to understand this is to compare it to the other type of newspaper: a broadsheet.
[00:03:27] Broadsheets are, as you might have guessed from the name, physically bigger newspapers - broad means wide, and sheet refers to the sheet of paper. These types of newspapers generally focus on news through so-called ‘quality’ journalism based on research, facts and analysis.
[00:03:48] Some traditional British broadsheets. you might have heard of include The Times, The Telegraph or The Guardian.
[00:03:56] Tabloid newspapers, on the other hand, are generally smaller and contain a lot more pictures and advertisements.
[00:04:04] Broadsheets tend to focus on ‘hard news’, with articles about politics and economics, where the simple facts are stated. And there is normally a separate section of a broadsheet, where there is the opinion of various journalists.
[00:04:20] Tabloids, on the other hand, often do cover the same stories, but there are a few points to note.
[00:04:27] Firstly, there is a more sensationalist angle, the facts and analysis are less important, it’s the ‘story’ - that is, how dramatic or entertaining it is - that is the most important thing for the tabloids.
[00:04:43] Secondly, tabloids are unapologetic in mixing opinion with news, and there is no attempt to provide a balanced opinion, to report the story and allow the reader to make up their own mind.
[00:04:57] Sure, arguably any reporting of a story has some political bias, but the tabloids mix opinion and reporting, with journalists being free to intertwine their own views about current events with the reporting of the story.
[00:05:14] And thirdly, the tabloids also deal in a different type of story to the broadsheets.
[00:05:21] For many tabloids their bread and butter, what fills most of the pages in a tabloid, is “scandal and gossip”, stories of celebrities or famous people doing things that they shouldn’t be doing, or simply going about their daily lives, having coffee, taking out their rubbish bins, or, shock horror, wearing the same dress for the second time that month.
[00:05:46] So, where did they come from, where did it all get started?
[00:05:50] Well, the etymology of the word ‘tabloid', the origin of the word, isn’t actually entirely clear.
[00:05:57] Many people believe the term comes from another industry altogether, the pharmaceutical industry.
[00:06:04] In the late-19th century a tabloid was a type of medicine, a mixture of ‘tablet’ and ‘alkaloid’ in a condensed tablet, meaning made up of two or more parts or ingredients.
[00:06:17] Historians seem to think that the name could have been used to describe journalism too, one that focused on shorter, bite-sized articles more digestible to the reader, like taking a tablet.
[00:06:31] And the first tabloid arrived on the scenes, as you heard a few minutes ago, in 1896 when Alfred Harmsworth, the 1st Viscount Northcliffe, founded The Daily Mail.
[00:06:44] In one of its first editorials, one of its first opinion columns, the editor, Harmsworth wrote:
[00:06:51] “The World enters today upon the Twentieth or Time-Saving Century. I claim that by my system of condensed or tabloid journalism, hundreds of working hours can be saved each year.”
[00:07:07] Now, it’s not clear whether Harmsworth was talking about the fact that more dense journalism saved the reader time, or the journalist time in their research, perhaps both. In any case, Harmsworth wasn’t particularly concerned about long, detailed journalism.
[00:07:25] A few years later, in 1903, he created another famous British tabloid, one that is still in circulation today: The Daily Mirror.
[00:07:35] The aim of the Daily Mirror, Harmsworth wrote in its first editorial, was to be “entertaining without being frivolous, and serious without being dull”.
[00:07:47] Instead of focusing on hard news with articles about politics and economics and current events, The Mirror, as it’s widely known, featured gossip, crime reports and mysteries, as well as celebrity gossip, sports coverage and even puzzles and brain teasers.
[00:08:05] The Mirror’s pages were also filled with photographs and cartoon-like illustrations, far more than any of its broadsheet competitors, which were filled with wall upon wall of black and white text.
[00:08:18] And this more compact, easy-access format, it seemed, worked.
[00:08:24] By 1908 The Mirror was Britain’s second-largest morning newspaper, and together with The Daily Express, The Daily Mail, and later on The Sun, this tabloid format came to dominate the British newspaper market.
[00:08:40] The format for all of these newspapers was pretty similar: lots of pictures, bite-sized articles written in relatively simple language and short sentences, gossip and astrology columns, agony aunts, where readers write in and ask for advice, and even comic strips and comedy columns.
[00:09:02] In the case of some of the tabloids, most notably The Sun, it also included pictures of semi-naked women, with “Page 3”, the first page you see when you open the newspaper, containing a “Page 3 girl”, a topless model.
[00:09:20] The Sun finally stopped this in 2015, but it was, at this time, the most popular newspaper in the country by circulation.
[00:09:29] And in terms of what are the most popular tabloids today, well, the exact titles have changed a little over the years, but the top three almost always include some combination of The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Daily Mirror and The Daily Express.
[00:09:47] Now, we’re going to go into some of the actual details of tabloid stories in the next episode, but let me give you one recent example to illustrate the differences in reporting style, particularly with the language used by the tabloids.
[00:10:03] In this example, we’ll look at how two different newspapers reported on the same story, the story of the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, being caught and fined by the police for not wearing a seatbelt in a car.
[00:10:19] These stories were published on the same day, and both newspapers I'll be talking about are owned by the same person, Rupert Murdoch, who we’ll hear more about in a few minutes.
[00:10:32] So, in The Times, a broadsheet, the report goes as follows:
[00:10:38] “Rishi Sunak has been fined over his failure to wear a seatbelt in a moving car. Lancashire police confirmed this evening that they had issued a “conditional fixed penalty notice”. The force did not reveal how much the fine was, but the usual amount is £100.”
[00:10:58] Note the formal language, and the straight, unbiased reporting.
[00:11:03] The Times emphasises that though it wasn’t clear how much the fine actually was, they made a conservative estimate based on what the usual amount is.
[00:11:13] Sounds sensible, right?
[00:11:15] Well, the same story was reported in The Sun, a tabloid, and it had a bit of a different feel.
[00:11:24] I’m quoting directly here:
[00:11:27] “He was caught riding beltless in the back seat while filming a video,” The Sun wrote, “the offence carries a maximum £500 fine, but Mr Sunak had last night not been told by cops how much he must pay.”
[00:11:42] Can you see the difference?
[00:11:45] The informal language of ‘caught riding beltless in the backseat while filming a video’ in The Sun versus the “failure to wear a seatbelt in a moving car,” as it was worded in The Times.
[00:11:58] Cops versus the police.
[00:12:01] And in terms of the fine, The Sun chose to frame it as a ‘maximum’ of £500, sensationalising the story somewhat, whereas The Times went for the normal amount, though less scandalous.
[00:12:17] The difference here seems clear: the broadsheet reports the facts in a calm, conservative way, while the tabloid exaggerated, sensationalised, and used informal language to make the story more dramatic.
[00:12:32] The Sun tells an exciting story while The Times tells the facts.
[00:12:38] But Prince Harry surely can’t be labelling the tabloid press “the devil” for simply using sensational language and a bit of exaggeration.
[00:12:48] One of the mainstays of the British tabloid press, one of its key types of stories, of “news”, if we can call it news, is gossip and rumour, of prying into the private lives of celebrities and politicians and “revealing” it all to the public.
[00:13:06] Compared to lots of other European countries at least, the UK press has a pretty ferocious culture where almost nothing is off-limits to the press.
[00:13:17] In other words, the British tabloids will go to extreme lengths to get a story about anything from a celebrity doing drugs or having an affair or behaving in an unusual way, and then be very happy to publish it on the front page.
[00:13:34] And in many cases these lengths are extreme indeed, and have led to a huge backlash when the methods of the British tabloid press are revealed, creating a scandal far bigger than the original story the journalist was reporting on.
[00:13:52] We are going to look at several of these scandalous stories in great detail in our next episode, but I want to highlight one particular example of this today, a scandal about journalistic methods that illustrates just how far the tabloids would go to get a story.
[00:14:11] And that is something called the ‘phone hacking scandal’, which involved a popular but now defunct, now out of print, tabloid called the News of the World, a tabloid owned by the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, the man who owns The Times and The Sun.
[00:14:31] In 2005 allegations emerged that journalists from the News of The World were hacking into people’s voicemails, they were accessing them without permission, to get information for stories.
[00:14:45] They would hack the voicemail, listen to the private, often intimate conversations, record them, and then use that stolen information to write their stories before their rivals something known as getting a ‘scoop’ - that is, an exclusive story that nobody else has.
[00:15:06] For these tabloid papers, which we must remember are businesses, after all, getting scoops and exclusives are a hugely important part of the job and help sell papers.
[00:15:18] After all, if someone else has reported the “news” before you, your story isn’t really “news”.
[00:15:26] Now, sometimes these voicemails would be members of the Royal Family or celebrities, which would lead to stories like Prince William leaving funny voicemails for his younger brother.
[00:15:38] Not so bad, you might think, not the end of the world.
[00:15:42] But this was just the tip of the iceberg, and it would turn out that there was no depth the tabloids would not stoop to, no limits they had, in order to get a scoop, get a story before their rivals.
[00:15:58] And this went far deeper than celebrity gossip.
[00:16:03] In July of 2011, another story emerged that shocked the British media landscape, when it turned out that News of the World journalists had hacked into the voicemail of a murdered teenager.
[00:16:20] Milly Dowler was a 13-year-old British girl who was abducted and murdered in 2002. It emerged years later that News of the World journalists had hacked her voicemails after she had been abducted, and published stories about the police investigation, stories that gave her parents false hope that she was alive. It was very nasty stuff indeed.
[00:16:49] Under intense political and legal pressure, The News of the World eventually closed down in 2011, costing Rupert Murdoch and the paper’s parent company a reported hundred million pounds in legal costs.
[00:17:04] And subsequent investigations revealed that this was no isolated incident; phone hacking had been commonplace at The News of The World for many, many years.
[00:17:17] Now, looking to the future briefly.
[00:17:20] As is the case all over the world, the internet and social media have completely changed the face of journalism and the newspaper industry.
[00:17:29] Gone are the days when you needed to go to a shop to buy a physical newspaper, and to many, gone are the days when you needed to go to a news website to get your news.
[00:17:42] Many people these days get their news from social media accounts and websites that aren’t run by journalists, or connected to newspapers in any way. Perhaps unsurprisingly, fewer and fewer people are reading newspapers - both broadsheet AND tabloid.
[00:18:00] To give you an idea of quite how serious this is in the UK, back in the year 2000, Britain’s daily and Sunday national newspapers had a total daily circulation of around 22 million.
[00:18:17] But by January of 2020, those newspapers were selling just 7 and a half million copies, a huge drop in readership.
[00:18:28] But between the tabloids and the broadsheets, the former, the tabloids, seem to be adapting best to the digital world, both digitally and in print.
[00:18:41] The Sun, for example, still has over a million daily readers.
[00:18:46] And the Daily Mail has almost a million, whereas The Times, which is a broadsheet, had only 365,000 in 2020, and The Guardian just 105,000.
[00:19:00] And it is a similar story online, for the most part.
[00:19:05] The Daily Mail is the country’s 11th most popular website, with 130 million monthly visitors being drawn to the website by its so-called “sidebar of shame”, with never-ending stories of celebrity gossip and rumour.
[00:19:21] The Sun, on the other hand, says it reaches over 30 million people a month between its print and digital editions.
[00:19:30] In true tabloid style, The Sun claims on its site, and I’m quoting directly, “the statistics leave rivals the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail in the dust as our loyal readers flock to us for their daily news.”
[00:19:47] Perhaps, you might say, it makes sense that the tabloids would make the digital transition more easily.
[00:19:54] Social media is all about hooking people in with a snappy headline, attracting them with a sensational story, even if that story might be incomplete, or fabricated slightly.
[00:20:08] It is, in many ways, a perfect fit for the form of journalism that tabloids have practised for over a century now.
[00:20:16] Short, snappy, elaborate, easy to digest, and often full of scandal and gossip.
[00:20:25] The British tabloid press has spent over a century perfecting this form of journalism, and while people might not be going to the newspaper stand in the morning, they are going somewhere for their news.
[00:20:38] And so long as the public wants news, the tabloid press will do its utmost to make sure that it's the place they get it from.
[00:20:50] Ok then, that’s it for today’s episode on British tabloid culture, the never ending stream of sensational stories and scandal, and journalists that will stoop to any depth to get a scoop.
[00:21:04] As a quick reminder, we are going to follow up this episode with one where we look at some of the most scandalous stories printed in the British tabloids.
[00:21:12] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:21:18] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
