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| Spinners and losers |
| Comment |
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We live in an age of media overload; an age in which the interactive, immediate and fleeting nature of news can somewhat cloud genuine debate and newsworthy accountability with flippant and trivial nonsense. While the government and the media should cooperate to ensure proper debate and argument, the lack of real coverage in tabloid newspapers has threatened to undermine our position as a politically aware nation and has, consequently, opened the door to casual ignorance. The time in which political report and parliamentary interest sold papers has long gone; for the most part the tabloid industry understands that unless it’s a scandal or major news happening, politics can be ignored in favour of sordid tales of squalor and sex.
David Cameron's communications director Andy Coulson has recently become embroiled, once again, in the phone-tapping scandal that forced his resignation from the News of the World in 2007. This man at the “fucking heart of government”, as Malcolm Tucker would say, now has more control over what comes in and out of Downing Street than anyone else in the whole administration. Despite years of potentially illegal activity in the media, Coulson now acts as kingpin to the government’s media output. What’s more, he knows better than anyone the importance of the tabloid news, once quoting that “Tabloid newspapers in this country do more for its people than any other newspapers in the world.” This is undoubtedly true. The News of the World is currently running a series of adverts that attempt to sell their publication by bigging up its unyielding power of snooping and sneaking. In the past year, every football affair that has broken has been product of the News of the World and its dedicated team of bin-rooters. It’s a paper obsessed with the shiny despondence of British culture and the only tabloid that seems to still be chasing the scandal of the century; a scandal that the British people want more than anything. It seems strange that with Coulson and an obviously media savvy Cameron at the helm of the coalition's ship that the tabloid press is not being explicitly exploited as means of political point-scoring. Instead of using the considerable powers of the Murdoch Empire, the complacent attitude of the coalition continues to rumble on without any great championing of Cameron and only the occasional bludgeoning of Miliband. But it won’t always be this relaxed. The trivial pursuit of celebrity and dazzle will eventually come to an end at the next election. Then, there will be no such thing as “News of the World Sunday Exclusive” concerning footballers and pop-stars, instead these inconsequential tales will give way to political smear campaigns and inherently bias comment. The dismissive nature of The Sun and The News of the World and other papers largely devoid of political content plays directly into the apathy that British politics is so stunted by. If the only time for debate is election time and if that debate is then prejudiced and contrived, the election result will be one of lazy, tabloid driven calculation. The new age of spin has begun to twist, rotate and twirl and it threatens to be far more dangerous than the dark arts of Professors Campbell and Mandelson; theirs was gloomy, muddy, silly and ubiquitous in nature. The next chapter promises to be sinister, dangerous, underground and, eventually, fundamentally biased. A complete deterioration of our dearest democracy is at risk; the end of the media’s promise. It would be shameless to claim this inherent press corruption as something new. It’s been lingering for years, under Labour, under Conservatives and now under Liberal Democrats and Conservatives. It’s just now in this delicate age of national vulnerability; in which we care more for Rooney than the NHS or Twitter than the Taliban, an increasing Murdoch empire capitalising on the media’s obsession with celebrity at the expense of political debate will put us all a precarious step closer to Fox News style coverage. In America, it’s easy for Glenn Beck, leading anchorman, to quip that Obama is like Hitler before cutting to a pie contest hosted by a Hollywood sweetheart. This subliminal, sly, right-wing news coverage must not be allowed to slip into Britain. The tabloid papers must forget their obsession with celebrity, break their ties with the government and start again as a national voice of middle, working and upper class opinion; a complete spread of idealism and not just an ideological meeting place of style over substance, smears over smiles and fear over hope. Newer news items:
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