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Sex and sensationalism: a history of the tabloids
00:44:02
Terry Kirby investigates the 500-year history of tabloid journalism – from the first gossip rags to the muckraking exploits of the 20th-century popular press
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Podcast Host
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC history magazine. Tabloid journalists often get a bad press. From publishing libelous headlines to hacking celebrities phones. Recent years haven't exactly done much to enhance Fleet Street's reputation. But where did tabloid journalism originally come from? And have media barons always had such a profound influence on current affairs? Well, in today's episode, journalism lecturer Terry Kirby talks to John Baucum about the evolution of the popular press, covering everything from Georgian gossip sheets to the rise of the empire of Rupert Murdoch.
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John Baucom
So Terry, your new book the Newsmongers covers the entire history of tabloid journalism right through to the digital age. Before we get going, what do we actually mean when we say the word tabloid?
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Terry Kirby
Tabloid is a word that is in very popular, well known use now, but it's a relatively modern word. It came into being in the latter half of the 19th century as a sort of portmanteau description of a new type of medicine that was being marketed by what became known as the Wellcome Drugs Company. Now quite again, quite a well known name. And it was a portmanteau word that described a tablet and alkaloi, and it became into popular use as something that was a sort of Concentrated form of almost anything. It had never been applied to newspapers. On the night of December 31, 1900, on the eve of what was then considered to be the start of the new century, January 1, 1901, Alfred Harmsworth, who was the founder of the Daily Mail and a sort of dazzling genius of popular newspapers, was invited by Pulitzer, who was the editor of the New York World, and the man who later gave his name to the Pulitzer Part Prize and founded the Columbia School of Journalism. And he asked Alfred Harmsworth to edit the edition of the New York World, which was a sort of popular newspaper in New York. And he gave him full control. And Harmsworth was a man of incredible self confidence and self belief and he thought he could do anything. And he'd always propounded this idea of a more concentrated form of journalism. And he created a paper and he put this manifesto on the front and he said, and I'm quoting it, he said, the world enters Today upon the 20th or time saving century. And I claim that by my system of condensed or tabloid journalism, hundreds of working hours can be saved each year by glancing down the list of contents and following the arrangement of the pages, the outline of the day's news can be gathered in 60 seconds. And that was his manifesto and he put it on the front page and it sold out. I mean, they had to print a second edition. It was a sort of novelty in those days. And that was really where the word tabloid came from. Its original conception was in a kind of condensed content rather than a kind of physical size of newspapers, which is how we know it today.
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John Baucom
So an entirely new approach to writing and publishing, rather than, as you say, the physical size of what we call a tableau format today. Yeah, yeah. So thanks, Terry. That's a really great starting point for, for the discussion. Now we've got that term. Let's dial back even further. Let's go back to the early modern period. What are the first publications we can conceivably call newspapers?
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Terry Kirby
Well, there's two things to that. One is the physical act of newspapers, but the other thing is the mentality of wanting information. You know, since society began to get organized and started communicating with each other, there's always been this sort of thirst for information. And in the kind of pre literary era, the pre written word era, this was always carried by traveling players and minstrels and bards going back to Roman times. They produced something called the acta diurna, was the daily acts which were kind of sent around communities and their colonies to tell people what was happening. In Rome and the price of grain and who was leading the legions and that kind of thing. So there's always been this sort of thirst for information, but until the invention of the printing press, this didn't happen very quickly. I mean, you might argue that the Bayo tapestry was the first graphic novel, but it took a long time to be created. But it depicted in pictures a piece of history. So people found out about things much later and in a much more kind of roundabout way. You know, there was sort of what is a myth, what is a story, what is a real thing that happened being kind of carried on by bars and minstrels. When we get to the invention of the printing press, everything changes. We've gone from handwritten scrolls, we've gone from the monks and kings and queens and leaders just knowing how to kind of re having their own information, to a much more widespread circulation of information. But it's not until the kind of Tudor times that we really get this early dissemination of the printed word through the invention of the printing press in Europe. So what you had then was a series of kind of news sheets which later became known as news books, which were printed around. And they were kind of entrepreneurial publisher writers who would create these. There was a whole load of them. They were called corinths, they were called Mercury's. They had a variety of different names and some of them became a bit political, but in a kind of oblique fashion. They couldn't criticize the crown too much. Publishers began jail and they really began to take off towards the end of the 15th century and more in the. In the 16th and 17th century because you have to remember, of course, that, you know, the vast majority of people at that point couldn't actually read. The potential circulation was relatively limited. But then we get sort of underneath the radar of these sort of official news, well, sort of semi official and approve news sheets or corantos or pamphlets. We get these other slightly more scurrilous news sheets that don't even attract the attention to the censor because the censors in the official are not really interested in them. They would kind of report things that today might seem like the kind of tabloid staples of the Daily Sport, the Daily Star, and a few years ago the National Enquirer in America. So they would use this phrase called strange news, news spelled N e W e s, which today we would actually just label that exclusive. So you get headlines that say things like strange news from Lancaster containing a count of a prodigious monster born in the township of Adlington in Lancashire, with two bodies joined to one back. That's clearly a case of a conjoined twins being born. But that became an event to talk about, and they were concentrated on crimes and punishments and so forth. So, you know, in the 16th century, people wanted gossip, they wanted information, they wanted scandal, they wanted the kind of nitty gritty of life. Yeah.
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John Baucom
So it's already well established, then, before we get the penny dreadfuls and the illustrated police news.
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Terry Kirby
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, in Georgian times, there was an explosion of titles, there was an ending of kind of official censorship. And by the time you get to the Georgian era, you've got this very rumbustious London society. And so you had now a kind of society to write about. And so the kind of gossip of society became very, very sort of current for the newspapers of that era. You had the emergence about this time of literary journals as well, such as the Spectator and so forth, and things like the Gentleman's Magazine, where you had a letter that they carried saying that during this period, a man of distinction cannot steal out of town for a day or two, but the secret is immediately made known to the world. This correspondent said that newspapers should report when his Grace or his Lordship went to bed with his lady, when he broke his custom and kept his word with his tradesmen or dependents. So these were like, what a society of people doing. What are they? Well, they're scandals. Are they up with their bills? Are they faithful to their wives? And at the same time, you had a series of what were called dying confessions news sheets, which had started a tradition. This had started some years ago with Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe. And he was one of the number of journalists who would collect the dying words of convicts as they were being taken to the scaffold to be hung. And so their kind of last confessions were being noted and were distributed. And the dying confessions news sheets were circulated within hours of the hanging. And these became incredibly popular. But by now there was beginning to be quite concern about standards of the press. Already in 1730, a guy called Eustace Budgell complained about the contents of newspapers. He said they comprised robberies, bloody murders, accounts of Draymond's carts that run over people with the adventures of post boys, tide waiters and messengers, the promotions, deaths and marri of the nobility, gentry and clergy. And of the days when some of the royal family go to the playhouse or take the air. I mean, that's a kind of tabloid editor's news list today.
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John Baucom
Definitely parallels then throughout the Whole of this period. Of course, if we move into the 19th century, this is the age of the first media moguls. And on the other side of the Atlantic, I'm thinking of people like Pulitzer, who you mentioned earlier, and also William Randolph Hearst. How did those two figures carve out not an identity?
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Terry Kirby
I mean, what had happened in America was the first kind of newsletter. News sheets had come from basically from European immigrants. But there was a different model in America of newspapers. Whereas newspapers were sold on the streets in London and other cities in America, they were always connected to commerce and they were all tended to be available in the kind of 19th century by subscription. So the idea of kind of news vendors on the streets was just not known. But it became gradually more acceptable. And you've got the rise of these entrepreneurs. And particularly before you got Pulitzer and Hearst, you had a guy called John Gordon Bennett, who was a Scottish immigrant. And I use the quote from, from Bennett in my book, which, you know, to my mind espoused what journalism can be. And he said, I want to make the Herald, that was the newspaper that he set up, the great organ of social life, the prime element of civilization, the channel through which native talent, native genius and native power may bubble up daily. I shall mix together commerce and business, pure religion and morals, literature and poetry, the drama and dramatic purity, till the Herald shall outstrip everything in the conception of man. She's very high minded and very, very strong vision of what a great newspaper could be to encompass all of those things. But going back to politics, Pulitz again was another immigrant from Central Europe, from Hungary, Jewish immigrant, made his fortune in America in provincial newspapers. There was this sort of growth of the population in the Midwest and in the western newspapers serving those communities. And Pulitzer eventually bought a kind of framing paper called the New York Herald. And Pulitzer again had this vision of great journalism. But he also wanted to get to the heart of things. A bit like John Gordon Bennett, but he wanted to really investigate stuff. And he heralded what were known as the muckrakers. And at this point, New York was this teeming mass of immigrants and corruption and politics and politicians. It became this great metropolis of seething humanity. And Pulitzer was there to document it. And there was always this sort of dichotomy. There was always this sort of belief that his journalists would push things a bit. But he always had this, you know, he had a banner up on the wall of his newsroom which said, accuracy, accuracy, accuracy. Who, what, where, when, why and how, the facts, the color, the facts. So, you know, that was his mantra. And he had that up on newsroom. And you know, that's what I. The who, what, where, when, why now is what I teach to my journalism students now. You know, it's still as true now as it was then. Pulitzer, you know, became a bit eccentric at the end, but he had this great vision for newspapers. But then what happened was that in these early years, one of the people that he'd employed was a guy called William Randolph Hearst, who was a dropout from university. He came from a wealthy west coast family, completely different type of person, very establishment, very wealthy. His family owned, had owned newspapers in California purely for the purposes of political promotion from his father who wanted to be a local politician. Hearst inherited the family company, began to build it up, eventually rocked up in New York, bought his own newspaper in the Morning Journal. He set this up as a great rival to Pulitzer, who was the sort of established king of New York popular journalism. And this was when we got what was called the yellow journalism wars. And yellow journalism is still a popular term used to describe what we would call in the UK tabloid journalism. And the yellow journalism label came rather obscurely from a cartoon strip that Pulitzer had been running which featured sort of poverty stricken kids from the, the Bowery slums, one of whom wore a yellow shirt, a kind of overshirt. And this is very, very popular comic strip. Hearst nicked the cartoonist for his newspaper, the Morning Journal. Pulitzer then employed another cartoon is to produce a copycat strip. So that's where the phrase yellow journalism came from. And in the kind of 1890s, early 1890s, you had this period of intense competition between the two of them and there was generally accepted, there was, you know, boundaries got broken all the while. But what kind of brought this to an end was an aggressive campaign between both newspapers for a war between America and Spain. Now it's a fairly niche part of military history, but There was an eight month war between America and Spain in 1898 over Cuba, who owned bits of Cuba and so forth. And no one really wanted a war. But it was stoked up by Pulitzer and Hearst to create this kind of conflict. And America eventually felt, oh well, we'll better go and have a war. People seem to be demanding it. And it was all seen as a bit of a failure really. And they kind of shrank back from the sensationalism after that. Pulitzer founded the Columbia School of Journalism and the Pulitzer Prize. Hearst went on to become this massive magnate, newspapers throughout America, radio stations, and he became the model for Autumn Wells, Citizen Kane and Indeed, when Citizen Kane came out, Hearst used all his powers and all his newspapers to deny it publicity. He critiqued it. And that was why Citizen Kane never got a nod in the Oscar awards, because Hearst didn't like it for fairly obvious reasons. So Pulitzer then rediscovers his kind of moral compass, as it were, and is looking ahead. He sees that over in London, this boy genius, as it were, Alfred Harmsworth, has made a fortune out of newspapers, founded the Daily Mail, which does extraordinarily well, and then in 1900, in December, invites Harmsworth over to edit the New York Herald. And that's where we get the word tabloid from. So that's where we are. And then that heralds in the 20th century, which is the century of the tabloids.
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John Baucom
N rakuten.com Talking about the Daily Mail. It's founded in 1896 by Harmsworth and also his brother Harold. He becomes Viscount Rothermere later on. What made the Daily Mail unique, do you think?
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Terry Kirby
Well, what was unique about the Daily Mail was this idea of a more sort of concentrated newspaper which he would go on to call tabloids. Lloyd he always had this idea of the kind of the new breed of workers, the emerging middle class. The people that would be, particularly in London would be commuting on the, the new underground railway or they were on crowded trains. They had a limited amount of time to read. They would be office workers primarily, probably. And these were different to the kind of more leisured upper professional classes that would have previously have read the Times or the, or the Telegraph. So they had less time on their hands. And Holmes was very keen on that, that idea. So he wanted to produce a more accessible, we would call it today, probably, newspaper for this audience. And these were people in the kind of, you know, the growing suburbs of London which was spreading out in the 1890s. And you have to remember that the Times and the Telegraph and the other newspapers were all very, very gray, very straight, long columns of print. And there was this sort of scandal sheets of the Victorian era, the Illustrated Police News and so forth. So there was nothing in between, in the middle, catering for what were by now the middle classes. And the Daily Mail became, and still is, the ultimate newspaper of the middle classes and always knew its audience incredibly well, right from the start, and still does. I tend to say that these days, Daily Mail knows its audience as well as Taylor Swift knows hers. It's a complete understanding of the people it appeals to. And Harms was set out this vision right from the start. Part of that was the appeal to women because he was surrounded by strong women. His mother basically ran the family because her husband, his father, was a drunk. Everything he did was designed to appeal to his mother. He always wanted her approval for everything. He had a strong wife. And his wife, at their flat in West Hampstead helped him put together some of his earlier publications which allowed him the money to buy one of the London evening newspapers. And that led to have enough money to found the Daily Mail. And he was, you know, still only in his 30s. I mean, he may become extraordinarily rich alongside his brother. And the thing about the difference between the two of them was that his brother, later Lord Rothermere, was the kind of accountant figure, he was the kind of manager, he was the one who actually could make the numbers. And Harmsworth was this sort of, you know, he was described as very, very tall, very good looking, very striking personality. He was sort of the ideas man, he was the genius. He was the one who came up with these plans and ideas for newspapers. And he was the sort of figurehead of it all. And Rothermere was the sort of the bean counter in the background. And so the Daily Mail from the start was basically a huge success.
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John Baucom
Yeah, it's phenomenally successful. But Northcliffe also founds the Daily Mirror in 1903, doesn't he? And that's not quite a success initially, is it?
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Terry Kirby
No, Harmsworth was never a great sort of believer in women's liberation, as it later became known. He was not a particular believer in universal suffrage, but he knew there was a market there for women readers. I mean, women would become more active in public life. There was a kind of commercial market. Advertisers were appealing to women. They want, you know, dresses, recipes, all those sort of stereotypes, typical ideas. And he founded the. The Daily Mirror in the belief that he could create a whole new paper specifically for women. And it was also to use up the kind of emerging technology of images and pictures and, and engravings and so forth. And it was a disaster right from the start. Most women journalists at that point were employed in kind of literary journals and ladies magazines and these would be weekly or monthly publications. Producer newspaper on a daily basis is a very, very rigorous business and you need to be experienced to do that. And he didn't recruit the kind of people who happened to be women to do that. And he probably also didn't pay full attention to it because he thought he'd done it with the Daily Mail. They didn't get enough lead in time to produce dummy versions of the Mirror. And it was a bit of a disaster. Sales plummeted. He got a very poor critical reception. I mean, he invested a lot of time into this and invested a lot of his personal capital, as it were. And so he plugged it on the front page of the Daily Mail with a famous phrase, make sure you secure a copy for madam. Aimed at the Daily Mail's Mail readers, but also, you know, for their wives. Although the Daily Mail did have quite a lot of female content, had the first pages designed for women, first pages designed to appeal to the sort of the woman's market. So what happened within literally a few weeks was that he brought in a team of his more hard nosed journalists who'd been working on the Daily Mail and some of his other publications and basically all the women were sacked. And there was this phrase by one of the people, he said it was like drowning kittens. And the editor went back to the literary magazines and it took a few years, but eventually to become a success. And eventually he handed it over, he sold it to his brother, Rothermere and, you know, went on with these other ventures. By that point he owned the Times and he owned other newspapers as well. So he had a big empire to look after. Rothermere was given the Daily Mirror, which he ran for several years. Rothermere was not this inspirational figure, but he kind of managed it okay. And what he did was allow a breed of very good journalists to sort of thrive and prosper underneath him. That made the Daily Mirror what it became for many years, which was this amazingly strong, vigorous pub she with a very heavy emphasis on imitation imagery and photographs.
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John Baucom
And were there ever concerns about how much influence these media barons were having on politics?
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Terry Kirby
Well, Harmsworth was nakedly political. I mean, he would mount campaigns against politicians in the same way that we see the Daily Mail mounting campaigns against politicians today that perhaps wasn't the public concern that we see today. It was very much more accepted, weirdly enough. I mean, then we had Beaverbrook coming along. Beaverbrook was a Canadian. He had some slightly dodgy dealings in Canadian industries. He had no training as a journalist. He came along, made his money, became an mp. The Daily Express had been founded some years previously as a sort of lightweight copy of the Daily Mail, and he bought the Express, reinvigorated it, and bought in some pretty smart journalists to run it when there was a period where the Daily Mail kind of slightly ran out of steam. The Express eventually became the biggest selling newspaper in the world for a brief period. But Beaverbrook was quite naked about what he wanted. He wanted power. He wanted to influence people. Harmsworth would always sort of suggest there was some kind of higher moral purpose of doing what he did, and that he was doing it in the interest of the public. Beaverbrook never made any pretense about that. And it was all in his own self interest. And all he wanted himself was power.
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John Baucom
And then, if we talk about Rothermere, so Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe dies in 1922, Rothermere takes over the media empire. I mean, today he's synonymous with that editorial from 1934, Hurrah for the Blackshirts, which is in support of Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. Did this go on to have a detrimental impact on the Mail?
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Terry Kirby
Yeah. I mean, the weird thing about the Farnsworth family is two of them began to have an obsession with fascism, in particular Oswald Mosley. What happened with Rothermere was that in the 1930s, he saw the rise of Hitler. He became friendly with Oswald Mosley, who was the leader of the British Union of Fascists, and he became obsessed with them as a sort of. As an ideal of civilization. And he went to Germany several times to meet Hitler. He got involved in a business arrangement with Mosley, which rather fell apart because they both didn't trust each other. And both in the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, he had these stories published which glorified the Black Shirts and the fascists, everything. And there was even an idea for a competition of a sort of Miss Black Shirt, which even Oswald Mosley thought was a bit of a rum thing. So it became just his obsession. To be fair, it's well known now that many other members of the British upper class and establishment actually also kind of quite got into the Nazi thing. You know, we know about the, you know, the Mitford sisters and so forth. At that point, there was sort of political turmoil all The While there was the great economic depression, so forth. And I think they tended to see Hitler as being a kind of, you know, as an organizing discipline force that would impose a, you know, a more organized society. And it is still used occasionally by critics of the day, frequently by critics of the Daily Mail, to hold it against them. And it's still there. It's still out there, that editorial, Hurrah for the black shirt.
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John Baucom
Just briefly, Terry, during the Second World War, what was the role of the popular press in that period? Was it about public morale, do you think?
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Terry Kirby
Well, yes. I mean, what happened during the Second World War is that the popular press was constrained because there were restrictions on newsprint, so the size of newspapers was much reduced. But also there was this other sense of, particularly with the expression of mail, of kind of patriotism. You know, we support the flag, we support Britain, we support Churchill. And that post, the kind of earlier flirtation with the fascists and Hitler, that was the kind of unifying force. It was always, you know, we're now well behind Britain. The only paper that kind of demurred slightly from that was the Daily Mirror. And the Mirror identified itself, as all the newspapers had done in the First World War, as the paper for our boys, for the troops and the Mirror campaign for the soldiers that had the right conditions and so forth, and was particularly very noticeable in its criticism of Hitler. And it was said that Hitler's invasion plans, should they have ever come about, that the Daily Mirror executives would be top of the list of those to be arrested. And they did get up the nose of the government a bit. There was a cartoon, a very famous cartoon by Philip Zeck of a sailor clinging to a raft in the sea. And it's a very graphic cartoon. And the caption written by a man who was later known as William Connor, who was later known as Cassandra, who was a very famous columnist then in the Daily Mirror in the kind of post war era. And the caption was, the price of petrol has increased by one penny official. And this was seen as both a representation of the cost of war, that these were sailors lives dying at sea to get fuel and supply to it. But also it was seen as an attack on black market profiteers. But there was a general concern and the Mirror executives got called in by Churchill's people and told to kind of calm it down a bit. And they did. But then they went off to the war and nothing much then happened until about 1945 when the Daily Mirror regained its strength. And it then it was in that post war era that it then became the paper most aligned with the labor movement, which, although it'd been sort of broadly sympathetic to the working men, it had never been aligned with the Labour movement quite that way until then, when it supported the Atlee government and the Labour victory in 45.
- [34:39]
John Baucom
Yeah, because after the Second World War, society was changing, wasn't it? So how does tabloid journalism evolve to keep up with the changing pace of society?
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Terry Kirby
Well, in the kind of post war era, the Mirror began to reflect all the changes of society, the kind of 50s and 60s, with the birth of what later became known as youth culture. There was an emphasis on younger people, there was more attraction to get young readers into the papers. The Daily Mail and the Express. The Express rallied quite a lot, but they were kind of competing for a very similar market of the kind of middle class suburban people. Then we get to the 60s and that's when the. The great Mirror era under Hugh Cudlip, later Lord Cudlip, you had a remarkable series of journalists working for the Mirror who became household names. And the. The Daily Mirror then made its name as the sort of paper of the labor movement. It's very strongly allied with Harold Wilson's government, which was seen as a bit of a kind of forward thinking movement. And there was this famous speech of Wilson's about the white heat of technology that we wouldn't harness to make the country great again. And that was. It was said, partially scripted by Hugh Cudlip, anyway. And they became very, very close allies between the Mirror and the Labour Party.
- [36:07]
John Baucom
Yeah. And at the other end of the spectrum, of course, we have the sun, which under Rupert Murdoch's ownership from 1969, becomes increasingly associated with the Conservative Party. And Terry, there's a lot of history to cover here, but the great irony, of course, is that it's actually set up by Hugh Cudlip, it's sold to Murdoch and it becomes the Mirror's greatest rival with its, its Page Three Girls and the sort of sensational headlines it published during the Falklands War, for instance. Was there ever a sense, though, even in these early days, that it was overstepping a line?
- [36:41]
Terry Kirby
Yes, very much so. I mean, the song was a bit dodgy when it launched, but it had the kind of seeds of its success. It was full of sex, sex and innuendo and a bit of sleaze, but there was always this kind of mantra of keep it sexy but not sleazy. So the Page Three Girls were always nice and wholesome looking. They were from the suburbs rather than Soho, if you See what I mean? And that started in their first anniversary, that this visionary editor, Larry Lam, who just pushed and pushed and pushed the paper drove the staff. Murdoch was always there behind them. They started advertising on television in a way that newspapers had never really advertised before. They had these extraordinary, energetic, compressed commercials, voiced over by someone who became most well known as an actor, Christopher Timothy. And they would sort of brand it each week, it's Knickers week in the sun, or it's sexy French week in the sun or something. And they would. There were lots of promotions and giveaways, competitions, all the rest of it, the whole armada of promotional material again, which set new boundaries, which had never really been done in quite the same way with the same kind of vigor. And Larry Lamb was eventually succeeded by a guy called Kelvin Mackenzie, who was even more energetic and even more driven. And by this time the sun had aligned itself very firmly with the Tories. And Margaret Thatcher came along in 79 with the Tory victory. They were very much behind that. They saw Thatcher's articulation of the kind of working class Tories want to buy their council house, wanted to kind of earn a living. And that was the blue collar movement. The blue collar Tories was very much seen as the kind of sun audience. So then we get to this period in the 80s when the sun is dominant, but they're still facing challenges. Danny Mirror. The Falklands War increased the sort of sense of patriotism, the kind of generation that still remembered the war, the kind of London Blitz spirit. It seems odd to think about it now, but even in the early 80s that MacKenzie and the kind of culture that he came from, working class, middle class, South London, still had met residual cultural memories of the war. So it wasn't just about the Falklands. It kind of tapped into lots of other patriotic ideals and so forth. And so the. The Falklands War became a big rallying point for the sun. And they were the paper that, as they said, that supports our boys. And the gotcha headline was this headline that they ran on the first edition. It was after a warship that been sunk by a British submarine. And they didn't know how many people had died. Obviously probably hundreds had. And it was seen as it was widely criticized at the time, it was toned down. Then in the later editions, Murdoch was told about it. Mackenzie went to Murdoch and said, I might have got this wrong. And Murdoch said, nah, I'd be all right, I quite liked it. And that was always the sense of Murdoch. Murdoch would often publicly touch a bit about some of the excesses of his journalists, but would say, look, they're the journalists, I'm not troll. And then privately would sort of say, yeah, it was all right, I'm not really worried about that. So he gave them that license to do what they want. But then McKenzie began to take it too far and there were a series of cases and incidences during the 1980s which really made people very worried about tabloid standards. And you, you ended up then with the Call cut inquiry in 1992, a great deal of concern about media standards, about particularly the tabloids, but the sun and the News of the World. But the Mirror was not entirely innocent of some of the kind of excesses.
- [40:46]
John Baucom
Yeah, because Moving into the 90s, we have scandals that embroil the newspapers themselves. They become the news. Much later on we have the phone hacking scandal which destroys the News of the World. As a kind of concluding point, as we round off the discussion, do you think that journalists have become more loathed as a result of these specific scandals? Or has there always been a fractious relationship between the public and the press?
- [41:13]
Terry Kirby
Well, there's always been a fractious relationship is the answer. As I said right back in the early days, there was condemnation of journalists. There was one correspondent who said that journalists were a filthy Avery of moth eating crew of newsmongers. Every jack sprat that hath a pen in strange news. And there was sort of. There was this great feeling that journalists were then distrusted from the beginning. Today, in a way, they're less prominent. In the last 12 years or so since the hacking scandal, the figures that lead the tabloids these days, the editors are no longer kind of household names in the way that Mackenzie was and the cudlit was not quite so names but well known. I'd be hard pushed to actually name the editors of the tabloids at this point. The Daily Mail still remains a force. It's become more diffuse. The online world, which has created these sort of huge websites which just hoover up massive amounts of content, it all sort of meshes together now and everything feeds on everything else. The idea of exclusives that drove so much of those sun headlines and that reporting in the 1980s that you have to have your own story, some of that has gone now because there's such a drive to get content up online very quickly that if the Daily Mail, for instance, has a story about Kim Kardashian doing something, the sun will, will not try and get its own story on that very much. They'll just repeat the whole thing on their website and attribute it to the Daily Mail. So that absolute kind of barrier that journalists always had about we can't repeat what the other one said. We've got to find our own story. So that has just sort of been eroded by the fact that we've got to get everything up online now because it's all just content to be hoovered up from somewhere. So they sort of lost all sense of proportion. Journalists are still. And I. I know this because I teach journalism and I have student journalists who work me still don't always get a great press, but. But you've got me on my high horse here because I always said that journalists are still absolutely necessary in society because we still hold truth to power. We're still there to represent the voice of ordinary people. And so much of that has been eroded. It's been eroded in other ways by reduced local newspapers. Journalists aren't quite as present in society out there as much as they used to be, and that makes them much more of a kind of strange beast when they do try and report on things. So there's still a lot of distrust and there's also a belief that journalists can be manipulated a lot more. But in that sense, what's changed? We're still there. We still need to be there asking questions of society every bit as much as they did in the past.
- [44:15]
Podcast Host
That was Terry Kirby, senior lecturer in journalism at Goldsmith's University of London. Terry's book the Newsmongers, a history of tabloid newspapers, is published by Reaction and he was speaking to John Baucom.
- [44:39]
Terry Kirby
And Doug.
- [44:40]
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Terry Kirby
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
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John Baucom
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- [45:07]
Terry Kirby
Hello, It's Ray Winstone. I'm here to tell you about my podcast on BBC Radio 4, history's toughest here, Heroes. I got stories about the pioneers, the rebels, the outcasts who define tough. And that was the first time that.
- [45:23]
Liberty Mutual Advertiser
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- [45:26]
Terry Kirby
It almost feels like your eyeballs are.
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Liberty Mutual Advertiser
Going to come out of your head.
- [45:29]
Terry Kirby
Tough enough for you? Subscribe to History's Toughest Heroes wherever you get your podcast.