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Terry Kirby, "The Newsmongers: A History of Tabloid Journalism" (Reaktion Books, 2024)
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Marshall Poe
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Dr. Terry Kirby
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Dr. Terry Kirby
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Marshall Poe
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Mote Zahajizade
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Mote Zahajizade from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Terry Kirby about his most recent book, which is called the Newsmonger, A history of tabloid journalism. The book was published in 2024 by Reaction Press and Terry Kirby is Senior Lecturer in Journalism at Goldsmith University of London and also the author of the Trials of Barrenness 1991. He's been a journalist for more than four decades and he was a founder member of staff at the Independent where he worked for more 20 years in a number of roles including crime correspondent, night editor and chief reporter. Terry welcome to New Books Network.
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Dr. Terry Kirby
Good morning. It's good morning as it is in the uk. Here it's Very nice to be talking to you. Thank you.
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Mote Zahajizade
Before we start talking about the book, can you just briefly tell us the idea behind the book? Why did you decide to write a book about the history of tabloid journalism?
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Dr. Terry Kirby
Well, interesting enough, I was approached to write the book and by the publishers, and my initial reaction was no, this has been done before. I can't believe that no one has actually written a kind of a sequential history of tabloid journalism from sort of what you might call start to the present day. But actually there wasn't anything. There's lots of individual memoirs by. By various tabloid journalists. There's a number of books that sort of look at the tabloid world in a kind of very jocular way, like Isn't this Funny Kind of thing? And there's some academic works which analyze tabloid journalism in frankly, a very dry and functional way. There is one that was published only about three or four years ago, but it only looked at daily newspapers and it didn't look at Sunday tabloid journalism, which of course is a crucial part in the evolution of tabloid journalism, what I might like to call the tabloid mentality. So I realized there was a gap in the market for this and no one had really attempted it before. And once I got stuck into it, I perhaps realized a little why? Because you're telling a story of culture and history and how that evolves over several centuries. Because tabloid newspapers, all newspapers, are intrinsically involved in recording and reporting on the events of the era and the times. So you have to report, to write about that. You also have to understand certain things about the political climate of certain eras, things that went on that are long forgotten. That, for instance, when I was writing about the American tabloid in the yellow journalism era, I had to learn about the American Spanish war over Cuba, which I'd never heard about before. And so it took me quite a while. And I was helped in a way by the pandemic, which gave me some. Some freedom to work from home over a couple of years. And that gave me some of the time to do it. And I was fortunate to have some research lead from my university.
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Mote Zahajizade
Right, let's start with some definition. How do you define tabloid journalism and what distinguishes it from other forms of journalism?
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Dr. Terry Kirby
Well, this is not terribly easy. These are very generalized labels, as it were. And the distinctions were much more apparent when what you might call tabloid or popular journalism really began back in the sort of. As we understand it today, although its origins go back a long way before that, but in the. In what you might call the sort of late Victorian era. And you have to remember in those days you had, you know, certainly in the, in the United Kingdom there was low levels of literacy. There were, there was a sort of upper class money class of people that had leisure and time. Obviously before the era of television or even the Internet, they had the leisure and the time to read newspapers that had long dispatches in them, literary pieces, foreign dispatches, long reports on politics and courts and diplomatic issues and so forth. And the sort of Telegraph and the Times in that era dominated that kind of, that kind of journalism. There were attempts to produce what you might call informational news sheets for the new working classes which were demanding literacy and so forth. And then a more popular newspaper idea arose through what we would used to call in again in the uk, the Victorian penny dreadfuls, which were newspapers such as the Illustrated Police News, which had kind of rather gory and sleazy and explicit accounts of crimes and things like that. And there were quite a lot of those circulating in the kind of middle Victorian era. And they tapped into a sort of British amongst the working classes. They were very visual. They had lots of, they had drawings, etchings, images, and some of these sort of veered into titillation. There were pictures of sort of female victims of crimes that they were sort of dressed in their underwear. Nothing like we would see today. But you know, in Victorian terms this was pretty outrageous. And they were always, you know, they always had substantial bosoms and they were always kind of young, you know. And that sort of titillation thing became very, very popular. And so there was this sort of need again, it was about tabloids grew up with a changing society. There was a need, there were growing numbers of working classes. Once the railways came along. There were commute and eventually buses and so forth and trams. There was, there were, there were, we had the creation of the kind of commuting classes in the kind of explosion of industry and so forth. And so there was a need for newspapers to cater for that class who didn't have the time or perhaps the education to spend hours reading through the long gray columns of the Times and the Telegraph.
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Mote Zahajizade
And it's not a new phenomenon. I mean, tablet journalism is not a new phenomenon. In your book. You sort of trace it back to Alfred Harmsworth and the idea of time saving news. Who was he for the. I didn't know him before I read your book. And I'm interested to know also how his version of the news is similar, different to today's digital world, the clickbait era, with people busy on this.
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Dr. Terry Kirby
Well, I mean Harmsworth, this is where kind of what you might call tabloids with the kind of ideas of sleaze and the ideas of titillation and glamour and women in revealing poses and a focus on crime and sort of rather prurient ideas of what people might want. This is where we get the introduction under Harmsworth of what we today would call more popular journalism of which you might say tabloid is part of that. Harmsworth was something of a prodigy. He was from a sort of middle class Irish background family in north London. He was, his father was a, was a barrister and a drunk. It was a large family. They weren't, they were sort of, weren't massively well off. They sort of struggled along in a suburban area of north London. Harmsworth, who was thrown out of his home for getting the chambermaid pregnant when he was about 17 or something, was this extraordinary figure who was immensely self confident and he was tall, good looking, clearly original intelligence, very ambitious. And he went to work for various sort of. There were magazines that arose in that era such as what Tidbits, one of them was called. And Harmsworth worked for them for a little bit. Tidbits kind of capitalized on this idea of, for the middle classes of kind of informational journalism. There'd be stories about discoveries, stories about strange animals being discovered during the kind of great Victorian era of exploring the globe and empire building. Kitbits of information, you know, how much does a diver suit weigh? I think was one of the things. How do you, how do you train, how do you train a guide dog? So it was all, it was all sort of fancy, that kind of thing. And these were bright popular magazines that sold quite well in the era. And Harmsworth went to work for one of those and then he started producing his own magazines. He'd already worked on these school magazine in north London. So he knew he could write a bit and he was entrepreneurial and he started producing his own magazines. And basically from his promise the house, when he, by the time he was in his sort of very early 20s, he married and his wife helped him produce his magazines and he, he, he was so confident of the success of these magazines that he numbered the, the, the first one, he numbered it as number two and said. And part of the kind of spiel on it was that this was the most amazing success and everyone had loved the first edition and the first edition never existed. So he was selling stuff very heavily right from the start anyway. He made quite a lot of money producing magazines for all kinds of eras. A lot of Them were aimed at young men. Things like, you know, sporting magazines, cycling. He was very big on cycling, Cycling magazines. He's very interested in new stuff that was emerging during this era. We're talking about the, the kind of the 1880s, early 90s kind of era. And, and Harmsworth made a lot of money as a very young man. He was helped by his brother who, who was more like the, the kind of money man. And together they, they then were invited at one point to run one of the many London evening newspapers. And that's when he really moved on to a kind of different stage and a different level. And he, then, he was very ambitious and he started the Daily Mail, which he started publishing in 1894 and recruited a. Some very well experienced journalists, some of those that worked with him on the, on the London evening newspaper. And the, and the Daily Mail was aimed at this, at this new middle classes. Basically it had more stu. More content aimed at women. He was very concerned about aiming for women. He was very much influenced by his mother with whom he'd been reconciled after the incident with the chambermaid. And his mother was always a strong influence on his life right up until his death. He was buried beside her ultimately in Princh the cemetery. And so, and you know, his mother's view on these papers was very important. The Daily Mail was an immediate success because it capitalized on this new class of commuters, mainly in the home counties initially, but also in the other big cities as well.
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Mote Zahajizade
And.
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Dr. Terry Kirby
The Daily Mail was, I mean, to look at it today, it seems extraordinary old fashioned and extraordinary conservative with a small C and its approach and its look and everything. But it was revolutionary in those days. Stories were short and kind of punchier. Again, there was a lot of, there was content on the household, the domestic word on women's fashions, on cookery, those kind of areas. And the Daily Mail, you know, is still very big on that. I mean, there's this old maxim in British journalism that, that, that, you know, who reads different newspapers and you know, I won't give you the whole one, but one of them was that, that, that, that the Daily Music rem. Daily Mail is read by the, by the wives of the people that run the country. The Times is read by the people that run the country, that kind of thing. But the Daily Mail was, was a big success in, in the year 1900. Pulitzer, Alfred Pulitzer, sorry, Joseph Pulitzer, who was the founder of the New York News, New York World Newspaper, who introduced this concept of yellow journalism, which was much more extreme than some of what we'd seen on the Daily Mail into the American climate, into New York. And there was a vicious sort of circulation war between Pulitzer and Hearst, who owned William Randolph Hearst, who was the model for Citizen Kane, who owned the rival newspaper in New York. And they really lowered standards between them because there was this vicious circulation war. And they. But in 1900, which many people. Which most people, at the end of 1900, most people viewed 1901 as the start of the new century. So in December 1900, on the. On the 31st of December, Harmsworth, who's this sort of genius from London, is invited by Pulitzer to edit the edition of the. Of the New York World for January 1, 1901. And Harmsworth is given sort of free reign to do what you want, do what you want. He orders that all stories should be shortened to, I think it was 500 words, that the newspaper content must be much more dynamic, much more shorter and snappier. And he has this mission on the front page where he says, this is time saving journalism. And this is where the word tabloid is used for the first time. And he calls it my tabloid version of journalism. And the word tabloid itself had been used at the time, not as a. Not in any connection with newspapers, but it had been used as a. As a means of describing anything small and concentrated. And it came from. The word. Was a portmanteau word coming from a combination of tablets and alkaloids. So it kind of originated in kind of, you know, proprietary pills that you might buy. So that's where the word tabloid comes from. And it's kind of stuck around really amazing history there.
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Mote Zahajizade
And you talk about Daily Mail, which still has a lot of influence, I guess, today. I personally hate that outlook. But anyway, I think at least.
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Dr. Terry Kirby
Well, as I always say. Sorry. No, go on, go ahead, go ahead. Oh, I was just going to say the Danny Mail, still owned by the fourth generation of the Harmsworth family. His descendants still run it. One of the few newspapers, you know, is still run by the family. They still exalt enormous control. They're about to. They put in the bid to buy the British Daily Telegraph newspapers, which would see an amazing concentration of newspapers in their hands. And the one thing about Daily Matt, you may or may not like its politics, it depends on the perspective you come from. But. But it's one newspaper that has such a firm identity and. And I always say it knows its audience probably better than Taylor Swift knows her audience, you know, so good, so good, so good. Give big, save big with rack Friday deals at Nordstrom Rack for a limited time. Take an extra 40 off. Red tag clearance for a total Savings up to 75% off. Save on gifts for everyone on your list, from brands like Vince Cole, Haan, Sam Edelman and more. All sales final and restrictions apply. The best stuff goes fast, so bring your gift list and your wish list to your nearest Nordstrom rack today. Take the next 30 seconds to invest in yourself with Vanguard. Breathe in. Center your mind. Recognize the power you have to direct your financial future. Feel the freedom that comes with reaching your goals and building a life you love. Vanguard brings you this meditation because we invest where it matters most in you. Visit vanguard.com investinginyou to learn more. All investing is subject to risk.
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Mote Zahajizade
You're right.
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Dr. Terry Kirby
Yeah.
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Mote Zahajizade
They know their audience. You're absolutely right. And that, I guess, is a perfect segue to my next lesson, which is about politics, British politics. Your book shows how deeply tablets have shaped British politics. Do you think these days this influence is waning? Or they're just operating through new channels like social media? Or maybe it's just the same as it was?
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Dr. Terry Kirby
Well, I mean, that's a very good question. I think it's, it's a bit difficult to say at the moment because the, the certainly, you know, in the recent election or the election last year of the new Labour Prime Minister, Kirsten Norton, the Labour Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, the Labour Party was petrified of doing anything, saying anything which might affect the, my anger, the tabloids. And really we're talking about the sun and the Daily Mail in the uk The Daily Mirror was, which is no longer the Daily Mirror, but it once was. And the Daily Mirror, of course, was originally founded by, by Harmsworth in 1904. And it was, it was not an immediate success. But that's a, that's a whole other story, which I can come back to if you want. But Keir Starmer and the Labour Party were paranoid about doing, watching the sun or the Mail. So they still have quite an influence. The influence isn't quite the same. I mean, the sun circulation is not published these days, neither is the Daily Mail, but it's a fraction of what it was when, when you're talking about sort of 10 to 12 million people reading those newspapers every day. And so it's, it's, it's a different climate, but they still have an influence that permeates through their websites, through social media and influencing public discourse. There's always been, you know, within the rest of the media, whether you're talking about BBC News or the B or or serious newspapers like, like the Times or the Telegraph they have to follow. If a story's making waves in the tabloids, they feel obliged to follow it. Whether it's about politics or whether it's about a celebrity, they, you know, having affairs or something. The rest of the British media eventually will catch up and will follow it. But you have to also remember that the British Made in particularly is dominated by a right wing influence consensus. The newspapers on the center and the left are very, very much in the minority. So if the sun, you know, if the sun takes on a particular position on politics, it's going to be followed by, it's going to be followed by the Times and by the Telegraph and by other, you know, we now have right wing television stations in the, in the UK such as GB News which follow a kind of more right wing agenda closer to the kind of agendas that you see being pushed by Fox News and so forth in the States. So the influence is still there, but it's much more diffuse than the others. The Levinson Inquiry of 201112 which followed the hacking controversy did expose a lot of the connections between politicians of all sorts, previous prime ministers such as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and their relationship with people such as Rebecca Brooks who is Reuben Murdoch's kind of leading light or runs the, Rupert Murdoch's Murdoch's newspapers in the UK or the Murdoch family's newspapers in the uk. And the closeness between her and various politicians was quite remarkable to be honest. And her ability to befriend people in power of all types, irrespective of, of their political persuasions was quite remarkable. But I think there is a general feeling that they've rode back from that quite a lot. But the influence is still there.
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Mote Zahajizade
And you were a crime reporter as well, I'm interested. And when you look at this history of tabloids, do you see any continuity or any similarities between say Victorian sensationalism or sensational New York journalism and modern tabloid culture?
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Dr. Terry Kirby
Oh yeah, I mean there's no question of it. I mean I was talking earlier about the kind of illustrated police news at other Victorian penny dreadfuls. I mean that still exists. I mean the News of the World which, which Murdoch owned and which bought and then closed in 2010 was, you know, made its name from the, it's reporting on crimes and there's a, there's a very famous quote by George Orwell in his essay in about the decline of English murder when he describes the sort of the, the traditional middle class English news, English home just before the war when you know every, everybody's settling down after their, their lunch of. Of. Of kind of roast beef and so forth and, and, and you know, what they want to do is read the News of the World and absorb all the stories about murders and court cases and, and so forth. And it's dominated the pages of the, of the News of the World and the, the, the. The. The tabloid reporting of cases is just the same. I mean and in fact that the, the, the broadsheets were always rather kind of a bit more hands off on the more salacious or more dramatic murder cases. They would report them but the report would be quite constrained and so forth. But over the last, you know, the time I've been a journalist, you know, things have changed hugely. I mean now they're much more likely to report on it on a murder case. The other thing that is noticeable is that because of the endless capacity of the website, particularly Mail Online but also the Daily Mirror and Daily Star and Sun websites, they now will pick up on court cases from other parts of the world which probably wouldn't have been. Which would not be reported in the print editions but would have and in the provisions of space or no relation to the British audience. But now with a much more kind of global approach of these websites, some of these cases are being. Murders are being you know reported at length on some of the, on. On some of the websites particularly as I say Mail Online. And that's a. Because that they want to have a more global reach but also because people will still click on them. So you might see a headline on, on the, on the, on the. On the Mail Online about something like you know, crime bosses mole gets murdered in gangland shootout and then some sub head about her being discovered in her underwear in a beachside condo in somewhere in Central Europe or something like that. So it'll be a kind of gory story about some kind of gangland or crime thing in could be some somewhere in center as I say somewhere in Central Europe, former Yugoslavia. Places like that or even, even in Australia or or other parts of the world have nothing to do with the, the UK but is a kind of gory crime story or a dramatic crime story. Maybe there's some sex in there, there's some drugs, there's some. Something else. And they'll go into enormous details on that because also they can now run all the pictures and images and, and everything and I write it like it happened in London or I'm sure you may discover similar things in Australia.
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Mote Zahajizade
That's right. The other Question might be a sensitive one as well, depending on the audience or who likes tablets or who don't. But tablets have usually been accused of appealing to the lowest common denominator. But, and, but yet you cite examples like Daily Mail's campaign for justice in the case of Stephen Lawrence. How do you reconcile these moments of public service with the industry's reputation, you know, or tapless reputation?
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Dr. Terry Kirby
Well, I mean, specifically the Stephen Lawrence case was seen by Paul Dacre, who's then the editor of the Daily Mail, as something, he saw it as a good cause, there's no question about that. But it was convenient that he, it was something to hold up against the critics of the Daily Mail who often accused it of both, you know, implied and obvious racism and discrimination against the black community in the UK and elsewhere. I mean, and the Daily MAH is still very much at the forefront of that, highlighting stories about crimes by asylum seekers in the UK and so forth. And I remember a former colleague of mine who did some work for the Daily Mail and she was sent out to report on a. She was sent out for a kind of night with the police on the beach somewhere in, in London as a sort of feature type piece. And she was owned, she was told, or it was made clear to her that they were really only interested in stories about asylum seekers committing, or immigrants of some kind committing crimes in, in, in, in the story. They weren't really interested in kind of routine kind of violence or crimes of any kind. But anything involving anything involving immigrants or people of color, as it were, would, would, would be the story. And that was relatively recently, within the last tenure, the Daily Mail. So the, just, the justice for Stephen Lawrence case was, was, was something they, people who would criticize them for that kind of tone towards black people. I mean, the Daily Daily Mail has always got an overwhelmingly white, lower middle, middle class audience in the uk, as I'm sure you know, we're all obsessed by class in the uk and the Daily Mail does define that class. It's sort of, it's sort of suburban communities, market towns again, a lot of places that up until recently would not have had many people, you know, from ethnic minority backgrounds, immigrant backgrounds and so forth, or even asylum seekers housed in hotels, which does happen now in some places. So that was very much the Daily Mail's audience. So to pick up on this case of an inner city murder of a young black man was quite dramatic, dramatic for the Daily Mail, but it was a case that needed highlighting, there's no question about that. I can't There aren't many other examples that come to hand of the Daily Mail or other tabloid newspapers taking up the cudgel in quite the same way. This served the Daily Mail very well at a particular time. And Dacre admits that it was something that, you know, at the point he thought, what have I done? Because he thought that they were going to get sued for libel. So it was a. It was quite a. It was journalistically, it was a huge gamble. But, you know, what was interesting was, you know, it was the story that drove them. And the sun, for instance, has taken up campaigns that, that are, you know, in the public interest over things like, you know, something called Sarah's Law, which is about identifying people with records of. Of. Of child abuse in public life or in public service and so forth. The Mail itself is. Did campaigns against ending plastic bags, which, you know, is quite important environmentally. So they have done it when it feels right and will appeal to the reader.
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Mote Zahajizade
So, again, in your book, you know, you talk about a number of different people, Harmsworth, that you discuss at length at the beginning of the interview. Maxwell Murdoch, that we all know. And they sort of dominate your narrative. How much tablet journalism evolution is uniquely British. And most of this part of your book is about England, of course, but I'm interested to know how much that reflects the global trend in media and politics and power.
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Dr. Terry Kirby
That's a very good question. I think that everywhere in the world, newspaper proprietors will want to. Influence public discourse, who want to influence politics. They will want to have politicians on their side for all kinds of, I think, both political and personal, economic, as it were, reasons, commercial reasons. I mean, Rupert Murdoch's opposition to Brexit, for instance, was not. It was about a kind of visceral dislike of big kind of conglomerates, but also it was about commercial interest. It wasn't necessarily about whether he's on the right or the left. It was about, you know, he didn't want, and has never wanted these newspapers to fall under, perhaps what might have emerged out of Europe of more focused controls on the media in terms of ownership, regulation and so forth. European newspapers, with some exceptions, tend to be much more sober than UK newspapers tend to be much more respectful of privacy, of politicians and, and celebrities or people in the public eye, which has never been the case in, in the uk. Elsewhere in the world, you see newspaper companies, magnets. There's a kind of. Again, there's a different arguments in different countries. In some places it's about loyalty to the state, which UK newspapers don't have in the Same way. I mean, you would say probably the Telegraph and the Mail are loyal supporters of the country and of the royal family and the institutions of the state and so forth. But that doesn't stop them going at the organs of the state, you know, as, and when they feel they want to. There's no, there's no holding back as it were, over the, over the, over criticism of, of, of the state and, and, and, and politicians and so forth. We don't, although again, newspaper said they're very patriotic. That again, that doesn't stop them having a go. We're much less respectful of the state than most other newspapers around in many other parts of the world. I mean I, I teach students from all over the world journalism and, and students from some countries just don't understand the idea of questioning the authority of the state. They don't understand the idea of, of actually writing stories which are critical of their, of their country in some way. They find it difficult to ask questions. It's about loyalty. It's considered unpatriotic to question the organs of the state. So there is something quite British about that attitude. But I mean, you can look at other countries and you'll see that newspaper proprietors and the media generally is very influential and very, you know, wants to be at the seat of power. I mean, the relationship between Fox News and Donald Trump is very interesting. It's a bit of a love hate relationship, but Fox News wants to be there, you know, getting the ear of the President and getting those exclusive interviews all the while because it serves their, their, their audience. And again, it's about commercial, commercial imperatives. And you know, you find in, you know, in kind of other countries that don't have the same kind of democratic process, it's that, you know, the media will be subservient and put over the, the, the, the, the, the, you know, the prevailing ideology of, of, of the, the rulers, you know, perhaps in less democratic countries.
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Mote Zahajizade
One final question. You predict that printed tablets will fade and the stories will be consumed by social media buffets, but how confident are you in this, your prediction that the tablets will kind of fade away? And also, do you think that this shift will make journalism more democratic, more reliable, rather than more vulnerable to misinformation, which is mostly the case these days?
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Dr. Terry Kirby
Well, I think that yes, eventually the printed tablets will fade. There will come a point when it's simply not economic to keep printing them because printing is in itself a very, and distribution is in itself a very expensive process. And that's not just the tabloids that applies to all newspapers. The newspaper that I work called for many years, the Independent a few years ago, went completely online. They dropped the idea of a printed version and is very successful online today. Although it's by no means the same kind of newspaper and the same kind of approach in terms of the tabloids. Yes, because traditionally people that buy tabloids are not, and not always the most wealthy, should we say cost? The cost of buying tabloids becomes important, whereas it's much easier to access them online. So the one or more of the tabloids will, will go online, I think, or perhaps shape themselves to maybe a once a week version. So you get back to the idea of kind of weekend popular almost like magazines. Does that make journalism more democratic? No, I don't think so. It's more open to fragmentation and misinformation. The kind of growth of the huge online platforms for the newspapers has become absorbed. They have become, I'm absorbed into the, the whole mass of information that people are picking up now. And again this is something that's kind of evolving all the while and I've seen it evolving now. People pick up from their feeds on their phones stories and those stories can come from anywhere. They can come from, from all parts of the world, from all kinds of sources. So people are attracted to the stories rather than say, oh, I will always read the sun or I will always read the Times or the Guardian or something, you know, people, people go and you know, there's been quite a lot of research to support this. People will go for the stories and then find their way onto the individual media platforms. And you've got things like, you know, for instance Sky News, you know, which has always been a, A, a television broadcast channel, now has, has websites that have, you know, sort of written content like the BBC website. So you know, the written content and the broadcast content do merge. And this does open up all kinds of opportunities for misinformation. Stuff get stuff gets put on a level playing field. It's like the, the kind of Spotify. You have Spotify in, in Australia I'm sure it's like Spotify with music in the sense that there's no discrimination in terms of source or age of the material. So if you've got a playlist, you can have something that comes from a completely unknown source on a, that might date from 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, right up next to the latest tune from Taylor Swift or, or you know, the Rolling Stones. So there's that. It's all on that kind of one, one level. And it's very much like that out there on the kind of the news feeds and there's not much of a hierarchy of stories. And you know one of the things that newspapers did was would put stories, put stories in order so you could look at from the top of the page to the bottom of the page or from front page inside you get some idea of the, of the priorities of news. Whereas now, you know, a story that might be buried on page 15 of the Daily Mail we get prominence on the social media field. So hierarchies of news and importance of different stories of rather are being dissipated non under undermined. So it becomes much more fragmented. Arguably that gives people access to makes a much more level playing field. So there is a counter, there is a counter argument that you know the continue the parallel with Spotify people can. It gives people access to music that they might not previously have heard the it is but it does give greater opportunities for misinformation. The other thing that's happened is that certainly, you know, in the heyday of newspaper throughout the world, I'm sure it's the same in Australia. Newspapers and particularly the tabloids would obviously compete with each other for stories. Stories that were exclusive to one newspaper would be trumpeted and broadcast. Other newspapers, publications would either ignore them completely or try and out exclusive them. Get ahead of the game by putting what we call spoilers in the trade or afterwards getting their own angle on the story. What they would rarely do is credit their rival organ with that exclusive story that has now eroded because in the 24 hour news cycle there's no time to do that. So what you will see, see for instance on say the Mail Online, which is the Daily Mail's great global website. One of the kind of it's up there with the top two or three websites in the English speaking world is they will take stories from other newspapers absolutely regardless, they just hoover it all up and they will say as reported in the Australian perhaps or in the Times or in the Daily Star or in the Sun. And the imperative is not to get your exclusive story. The imperative is to get that information out there to get the clicks from it. So there's a different dynamic driving this and in that newspapers lose that sense of trying to get exclusives. So you get again, I mean there is still a drive to get exclusives but the exclusives get lost in this kind of morass and we'll just grab everything from everywhere and happily credit it in a way that would never happen certainly in my days in the industry. And this Kind of taking stuff from other sources then leads to kind of errors figuring it. And coincidentally, there's a very good example of this in the. Which is satirical magazine Private Eye, which reported a case of an interview in the Times which quoted someone in a. And it was a perfectly straightforward interview. It quoted a rugby player who was in a British reality show called Celebrity Traitors. I don't know whether that has penetrated its way to the Australian media landscape, but it's a very popular reality show currently in the uk and there was a rugby player who was in that. And he was interviewed by the Times in a proper set piece. Interview. Fine. That was published. The Daily Mail took some of that content from the interview and published it in a diary column. That diary column made the mistake of getting the second name of the rugby player wrong. And that was. That was published in the Daily Mail the next day. Reach, which owns a whole load of websites and newspapers in the uk, owns the Daily Mirror of the Daily Style, the Daily Express, so owns a huge chunk of the tabloid market and has got websites for all of these papers repurposed in the words of Private Eye, that bit from the Daily Mail diary and repeated the mistake of getting the name of wrong, referring to another person who was in the reality show. That remained online for some time before people noticed the error. But another branch of Reach repeated it and it's not been corrected. So errors like that. This is an error of fact rather than a really simple error of fact. But I think it illustrates how in the kind of demand to keep recycling stock and getting clicks for celebrity names will drive, you know, will lead to errors and to misinformation.
- [51:12]
Mote Zahajizade
Is there any kind of book that you're currently working on that might be published sometime soon?
- [51:17]
Dr. Terry Kirby
The next project will you say Nothing. Nothing can. Nothing can be. I'm still bearing the scars of four years of work.
- [51:29]
Mote Zahajizade
Yeah. Writing a book is difficult. Yeah. Writing. You just recently published this book, so it takes some time to recover.
- [51:36]
Dr. Terry Kirby
It's difficult. Yeah. Yeah.
- [51:40]
Mote Zahajizade
Thank you very much for taking the time.
- [51:43]
Dr. Terry Kirby
I'm in recovery at the moment.
- [51:46]
Mote Zahajizade
Right. Thank you so much, doctor.
- [51:49]
Dr. Terry Kirby
My pleasure.
- [51:50]
Mote Zahajizade
Great to be able to talk to you. Have a very good day.
- [52:09]
Marshall Poe
And Doug, here we have the limu emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [52:24]
Dr. Terry Kirby
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
- [52:27]
Marshall Poe
Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com.
- [52:34]
Dr. Terry Kirby
Savings Ferry, underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company affiliates excludes Massachusetts.