ADITIA BHALLA
MARCH 2007
CONTENT
1 Foreword 06
2 Sociology of Journalism 09
3 Journalism as Entertainment 24
4 Page 3 Journalism 29
5 Convergent Tabloidization of Media 32
6 The Tabloid Instinct 39
7 Who Are the Stars? 46
8 The Case of Tabloid Journalism 57
9 Tabloid Conversion of the Mainstream Press In India 64
10 Celebrity Journalism From The Eye of a Reporter 66
11 Paparazzi 72
12 Page 3 and Cinema 76
13 Demarcation of Page 3 Cult 83
14 Factuality and Celebrity Journalism 85
15 Dumbing Down of Media 96
16 Past and Future of Page 3 Journalism 100
17 Bibliography 104
FOREWORD
Life is one long party, if one was to go by Page 3. Both in its print and electronic avatars in India, Page 3 seems to take over as one’s only window to the world. Tsunamis, earthquakes, trains and markets being blown up by terrorists, or the rise and fall of governments, only momentarily slow down the inhabitants of Page 3. They are no more than an unwelcome hiccup in an unending round of parties, book launches, art vernisages, weddings, anniversaries, film premieres, wine tastings, the launching of perfumes, watches or cars, the opening of gyms, and even shoe shops. This is the land of air kisses and hedonism unlimited: champagne flowing like Niagara Falls, cigar smoke floating in the air like low-flying clouds, caviar and oysters being dished out as if they were mere namkeen (Salty Snacks).
The original Page 3, an invention of the British tabloids, was famous for its photographs of outsize-bosomed sexy women in various stages of undress. Sometime in the late '90s, the term got tossed into our media and redefined to include people whom the media thought were worthy of their notice. They included politicians, socialites, sports personalities and on occasions even the common man provided he was ready to party hard. Take one of the original Page 3 divas, Bina Ramani,a designer, entrepreneur, restaurant and club-owner and much else, she blew into the New Delhi of the mid-'80s from New York and revved up the party scene in the sedate capital with her reservoir of Beautiful People and Manhattan mores. Rarely does her name figure without the label 'socialite'. Ramani's brew of diplomatic envoys (American, British and French ambassadors and their spouses), politicos like former minister Suresh Kalmadi (also briefly her business partner), media tycoons, people from Bollywood fringes, jetsetters from Europe and the US, industrialists, assorted models and 'hot' heart doctors like Naresh Trehan, became the prototype for her successors on the party scene. Meanwhile, Bombay (Mumbai) was ruled by Parmeshwar Godrej and her tribe of jeterati, and select Bollywood members. This was still the age of salons, and Godrej's was the best. Former model, editor, and author Shobhaa De has, of course, always had a safe niche on P3.
Page 3 did not come of age until the late '90s. Initially limited to one page or snippets in newspapers, it expanded to reign over other pages. The millennium saw an explosion of the P3 phenomenon on small screen with NDTV's Night Out. Today almost every channel has a clone to create instant celebrities.
Like the camel with its foot in the tent, Page 3 began to nudge out news. Desi perestroika—the liberalization and the dismantling of the licence raj in '90s—contributed here, by bringing in its wake consumerism and an enduring obsession with brands. It also ushered in the age of if-you-have-it-flaunt it. It wasn't just your money that you wore on your neck and elsewhere, but your heart and sex life too. Cleavage and bulging biceps became accessories in the fame game.
An age of exhibitionism was upon us: and obviously, there is a bit of Paris Hilton in many of us. Just take a look at the glamazon evergreens: Feroze Gujral, Parmeshwar Godrej and Queenie Dhody, and more recent divas like 'socialite' blondezilla Ramona Garware. Or campily dressed duos like Yash and Avantika Birla.
Those dying to feature on society pages became desperate enough to slip gold chains into pockets of photographers covering the party and events beat. Money and favours began to be doled out so blatantly that some papers made it official, charging social wannabes for featuring them on their pages.
But where Page 3 was more discriminating and selective, it has now dumbed down and gone down-market. Losing class, as the old snobs being replaced by the new snobs, would say. Top drawer ambassadors and controversial diplomats once figured on these pages, and not just the second and third secretaries at the embassies of big countries, or ambassadors of obscure Latin American or Pacific-island nations, who do so now. Today, chhota peg rajas and ranis who divide their time between the polo grounds, fashion ramps and night spots have squatted on their space, which they share with people from the fringes of Bollywood, even 'item girls'.
Models and starlings now pontificate on all aspects of life on these pages, taking over from scholars and pundits. Where once you had corporate moguls like Bikki Oberoi walking on Page 3, you now have hotel general managers, along with disc jockeys, chefs, hairdressers and stylists, and of course the ubiquitous socialites. Mummy's boys and daddy's girls are here too—cigar man Chetan Seth's daughters, and various junior Punjs and Burmans, appear more frequently than their parents. Artists are latest entrants in this hallowed space, ever since the prices of contemporary Indian art hit stratospheric heights. The revolving door of Page 3 keeps turning. The pace has become frenetic: the society that creates celebrities fast also dumps them fast. There's nothing quite as sad as ageing socialites who've been discarded—despite their renovated botoxed exteriors.
SOCIOLOGY OF JOURNALISM
When news oozes 24 hours a day, it’s not really news anymore. The TV becomes an ambient noise. The newspaper becomes wallpaper. Finding the patterns of importance becomes hard. It’s easier – and more profitable – just to make the consumer gape.
Jonathan Alter - NEWSWEEK
Tickle the public, make’em grin,
The more you tickle, the more you’ll win;
Teach the public, you’ll never get rich,
You’ll live like a beggar and die in a ditch.
Before we set out to define the genre of page 3 Journalism or celebrity journalism as it is better understood, it is mandatory that we know how journalism and society are dependent on each other.
Traditionally, the sociology of journalism has taken the form of a debate between the ways of looking at how the social world is organized and the role of the media in sustaining that organization. These ways are referred to as
Paradigm of Competition and
Paradigm of Dominance
The competitive paradigm is associated with normative approach--that is, that which expresses ideal, or how things are supposed to be. On the other hand, dominance paradigm has been the province of critical analyst, who would argue that they focus on the things as they are, and the gaps between the real and the ideal.
The Competitive Paradigm
Those whose perspectives on the role of journalism are structured by the competitive paradigm view advanced, liberal capitalist societies of the North American and the Western European type as arenas of essentially equal competition between diverse groups of social actors, for whom the media function as resource and representative both – supplying information, articulating opinions and helping to resolve the political and ideological differences through the facilitation and organization of public debate. The editorial and the stylistic diversity of the press, for example, is viewed from this perspective as an expression and embodiment of the intellectual freedom which characterizes liberal capitalism, articulating and making possible the pluralism of its politics an culture.
In this model the journalistic media are also watchdogs, comprising in their collective function a ‘fourth estate’: an independent institution source of political and cultural power which monitors and scrutinizes the actions of the powerful in the other spheres. The concept of the fourth estate – the term was coined by English philosopher an pioneering theorist of liberal democracy, Edmund Burke, in the late eighteenth century – recognized that there were established social classes in the society – estates – whose potentially selfish use and abuse of their powers required limiting by society as a whole, or by those independent voices who could take on the task of representing society as a whole in the political process.
Journalistic independence to carry out these functions has been guaranteed, from this perspective, by two principal mechanisms. In the case if privately owned press and the electronic media, economic ownership brings financial independence from the state, while diversity of media ownership in a particular capitalist economy guarantees plurality of journalistic viewpoint and genuine competition of ideas.
Those media which are not privately owned (a declining proportion of the media sector as a whole) will usually have their political independence guaranteed by the constitution and organize their output within various notions of service to the public. The world’s best known public service journalistic organization, on which many others are modeled, is, of course, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), whose proclamations of ‘neutrality and impartiality’ constitute a different type of a mechanism for guaranteeing independence. The BBC is funded by the British taxpayer and is independent of the government of the day, at least in theory. By serving no political or commercial master, the argument goes, the BBC has since its establishment in the 1920s serviced pluralistic democracy in the United Kingdom by reporting events and issues from a uniquely non-partisan position, only abandoning its neutrality when the nation state itself has been perceived to be under threat, such as during the days of the Second World War.
In the United States, and other countries where broadcast journalism is commercialized, the main providers (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN) present their output as being independent of political parties and of government and free from proprietors or advertisers interference in editorial matters. The pursuit of ‘public interest’ in broadcast journalism is recognized in the United States, as it is in the case of the public service broadcasters of the Western Europe, to be a key element in the maintenance of pluralistic liberal democracy, even if the legal, regulatory and institutional routes to achieving this goal will vary from one country to the other.
The contemporary significance of journalism’s place in the preservation of pluralism derives from the role played by the emerging print media in the transition from feudalism to capitalism in early modern Europe. In this historical and rather lengthy process, which began in the late sixteenth century and culminated with the French Revolution in 1789, the first newspapers were the principal means by which the radical bourgeois developed, articulated and disseminated its liberal political and economic doctrines against the opposition of feudal despotisms and religious mythology. In the course of that struggle the defense of pluralism, political independence and intellectual freedom came to be associated with the routine practice of journalism in capitalism and has been accepted as a bench mark of high journalistic standards ever since.
The theory of liberal pluralism which underpins the competitive paradigm, remains to this day the preferred model of how journalism works in advanced capitalist societies – preferred, that is, by those for whom the kind of capitalist society we live in today is, if not the best of all possible worlds, very nearly the best we can reasonably expect. Within it, to repeat, the journalist is depicted as a servant of the public interest. Even those working in the commercial media sector are viewed as necessary, socially useful elements of a system which taken as a whole provides for genuine competition of thought, opinion and ideology and thus makes countries like the United States combine to provide citizens with the freedom of choice in their sources of news and analyses, from which they can go on to participate in the democratic process. The journalistic media supply information, forming collectively what many analysts call ‘public spheres’, after the German theorist Jurgen Habermas – communally accessible communicative spaces in which information, ideas and opinion can be debated and exchanged as a pre condition for rational collective decision-making.
The Dominance Paradigm
Unfortunately the theory of liberal pluralism which lies at the heart of the competitive paradigm, with its ideal of equal intellectual competition, has not always been matched by the practical performance of the media in capitalist systems, which even in their more advanced forms appear to all but he most blinkered observer as societies characterized by exploitation, injustice and thus inequality.
In capitalism the abstract liberal notion of ‘equal competition’ is fundamentally constrained by the concrete realities of capital accumulation and the accompanying forms of social stratification, which lead to major inequalities in the distribution of economic resources, education and political power amongst the population of any and every capitalist society, no matter how advanced and civilized it has become. These inequalities of life-chance, in turn, generate social tensions and pressures, which must be managed, in the context of relations of domination and subordination between the various categories, which structure the social stratification system. The liberal pluralist ideal has little to say about the role of the media in managing these tensions and social relationships beyond asserting that since all citizens have a more or less equal right to have their views expressed and debated social problems can be negotiated to the satisfaction of all.
Opposed to the competitive model, then, are a variety of approaches to the social role of journalism, which can be grouped together within the dominance paradigm. This approach asserts that, rather than facilitating equal competition between diverse ideas and value systems, journalism is a part of cultural apparatus, the primary function of which is to maintain relations of domination and subordination between fundamentally unequal groups in society who would, in absence of such an apparatus, tear each other and the social fabric as whole to pieces. Journalism in this model serves not the public, either as individuals or formed into groups confronting each other in equal competition, but the dominant, private, selfish interests of a society stratified along lines of class, sex and ethnicity, to list three criteria of differential resource allocation familiar to all who live in the capital systems.
All human societies are bound together by sets of agreed values and core beliefs – ideologies -- which function to regulate relationships ad behaviour in the various spheres which constitute a human life – social, professional, financial, sexual. Ideologies can be thought of as the ‘cement’, which does this binding; the content and the substance of the value systems, which underpin a society, helping it, manage its tensions and conflicts in a manner consistent with successful social reproduction.
Judaeo-Christian religion, for example, has regulated sexual behaviour throughout four centuries of capitalist social organization, favouring a particular form of family life, which has been, whatever, its constraints and limitations, broadly functional for capitalist development. The ideology of freedom, expressed in relation to commerce, intellectual activity or political and cultural life, has for more than three hundred years legitimized a particular type of economic and political activity which is peculiar to capitalism, expressing the conditions of existence of its dominant groups.
The origination and intellectual elaboration of ideology is the subject of a whole branch of sociology. The political parties and the other lobby groups use the cultural institutions of the media to articulate their views and promote their platforms, in competition with others. The media thus disseminate ideology on behalf of the groups whom they report and publicize, and indeed this is acknowledged to be one of the core functions of journalism in a liberal democracy. But the media also function as an outlet for communicating the already existing ideological system: the cultural consensus prevailing in a given society at a given time. Media workers, like everyone else in a society, adhere with more or less willingness and certainty to a set of values which are embodied in their output structuring or ‘framing’ their accounts of the world.
Journalism has this effect, whether its practitioners are aware of it or not, just as in different ways and in different arenas parents communicate values to their children, ministers of the church to their flocks and college professors to their students. Journalists, indeed, have been collectively described as ‘the new priesthood’ in recognition of this aspect of their social role.
Whereas the competitive model stresses the underpinning equality and public interest driven nature of this ideological work, from the perspective o the dominance paradigm it is done in the context of a society divided in to dominant and subordinate groups. To use the language of critical social theory, the journalistic media are defined as the part of the ideological apparatus of the capitalist state, reinforcing the values of the dominant groups within that state and ensuring heir reproduction. To the extent that the media are perceived as purveyors to truth, journalistic discourse enjoys a persuasive power, which can influence the structure of ideas circulating in a given society.
The media, although by no means the only set of institutions, which facilitate the top-down transmission, and social reproduction of dominant ideas in this model, are certainly one of the most important. Journalism in particular with its special status as truthful information about the real world, fits into this model to the extent that its accounts of the world are assumed to be shaped and informed by the perspectives of the dominant groups in the society.
The Dominance Mechanism
There are three broad categories of mechanism by which this dominance is achieved. The first is economic. Material, wealth concentrated in the hands of a few individuals and organizations, buys ownership of media institutions, allowing direct proprietarily intervention in editorial policy, down to the level of ‘spiking – or more likely, not commissioning – unwanted or inconvenient stories. For those economically privileged individuals and organizations who do not themselves own media, economic power gives access to the means of influencing media such as the command of the advertising resources or the employment of public relation specialists.
A second category of control mechanism is political – the law-making, censoring, regulatory and otherwise intimidatory powers of governments, which in the most liberal democratic countries are regularly deployed against the unruly media on the behalf of big business, the government or the state itself. Sometimes, as during the Thatcher era in Britain, a tight alliance develops between government and key sectors of the journalistic media, as they combine to advance a particular variant of capitalist economic and social management. However, with or without the economic support of big capital, political instruments to influence the media are available to any political party once elected to the government.
A third category o control mechanism, argue critical theorists of the dominance school, is cultural. Although much less true than it was a few years ago, it is still the case that many journalists, particularly those who reach the top of their profession, are recruited from a relatively narrow and privileged sector of a society, where they have been reared to accept as ‘natural’, or as given, certain value systems and ideological positions which favour the dominant groups in society groups to which they themselves might belong, or wish to belong. Others learn these values in the course of their professional life and enculturation. Either way, these values and ideas structure their ways of seeing and reporting the world – their interpretative frameworks. Ideology in this sense is present in journalism as part of the environment within which it is made. Journalism itself contributes substantially to the maintenance and reproduction of that environment and the social system, which has generated it.
A successful ideology has to explain and make sense of the world – as it looks from the pint of view of those who are at the top of the hierarchy – to those who are less advantaged, for it is the latter that are likely to have the greatest problems with inequality and injustice. In terms of critical theory, dominant groups use ideology as one means – the most important means in modern liberal democracies where military suppression of dissent is generally frowned upon--of securing and perpetuating their privileged positions. Ideology both reflects the prevailing system of social stratification and tries to justify it. Patriarchal ideology, for example, has advanced many reasons for the differentiated social statuses of men and women. In earlier less enlightened times social and ethnic inequality was rationalized in relation to all manner of pseudo-scientific, quasi-religious notions.
Since the emergence of a critical sociology of journalism in the 1960s it has bee driven by the dominance paradigm, with its presumption of a social world characterized by relations of exploitation, into which categories such as class, sex and ethnicity are placed: the ruling class over the workers; men over women; white over black. In all cases advocates of the dominance paradigm argue that those who staff the journalistic media are more or less committed, more or less direct promoters of these hierarchies, articulating and disseminating dominant values as the pre requisite for the survival of systems of material, structural inequalities. From the content analytical work of the Glasgow University Media Group (GUMG) in the 1970s, through the writings of Stuart Hall and his colleagues at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Studies (CCCS), to the most recent discourse analyses, the sociology of journalism has consisted largely of efforts to theorise about and/or demonstrate empirically how journalists carry out these functions in practice; to show how, as John Fiske puts it, ‘the media…structure the range of public voices in a hierarchy of legitimation that is the product of the dominant value system’. These approaches have been consistently critical of the pluralist framework, and the competitive paradigm, which underpins it, denouncing these as themselves part of the dominant ideology of capitalism, rhetoric of legitimation, which mask the biases inherent to journalism in a stratified society.
The paradigm case, as it were, of the dominance paradigm concerns class, and was first systematically articulated by Karl Marx in the mid-nineteenth century when he set out his theory of historic materialism, which included the rudiments of an influential theory of the role of culture within capitalist societies. To quote from Marx and Engel’s German Ideology, ‘the class which has the means of material production at its disposal also controls the means of mental production’. By doing so the dominant economic class – the ruling material force of society’ – also becomes the dominant intellectual, cultural force. Its material domination is reflected in intellectual domination. For materialism, indeed, the latter is a precondition of the former. Although coercion has been, and on occasion continues to be employed as a means of maintaining the subordination of the economically and thus socially disadvantaged in society, persuasion is usually the preferred means of control. In the materialist model, subordinate social groups consent at some level to the system of stratification in which they find themselves. They internalize the dominant value system as it is articulated in the culture around them, adopting as the code for the organization of their lives even when the effect of that internalization is to perpetuate the domination of he wealthy and the powerful over them.
Sociologists since Marx and Engels have laboured to understand the means by which intellectual order is maintained in the interests of the ruling classes and how potential threats to that order have been contained. Early in the twentieth century the Italian Antonio Gramsci proposed the theory of hegemonic class rule in which the values of the dominant economic groups spread through the family, church and educational and media institutions, coming to be accepted as being for the general good. French philosopher Louis Althusser proposed a theory of ideological interpellation, which borrowed heavily from Freudian psychoanalysis to suggest that media texts moulded their audiences’ subconscious minds, turning them into the manipulable subjects of the capitalist order. The form and content of the message he suggested – its very structure -- compelled a response of the reader/viewer, which was beyond his or her capacity to resist. Media, including journalism, ‘produced the bourgeois subject’ in the process of message construction and reception. Althusser’s theory was influential in the 1970s and early 1980s, but his intellectual credibility, and indeed, his sanity were thrown into question when he murdered his wife and then announced from prison his conversion to Catholicism.
Towards A New Sociology Of Journalism
Although both the competitive and dominance models still have many influential adherents and continue in their opposition to define the parameters of academic and professional debate, neither is any longer adequate in accounting for the complex realities of postmodern capitalism. On the one hand, the competitive-normative ideal of the fourth estate is fundamentally compromised by the realities of media ownership and control and the uses to which that ownership and control is put. But the dominance-critical paradigm is hardly a more accurate model. Capitalism has self-evidently been more successful economically, and at less cost to social cohesion, than Marx predicted in the nineteenth century. Its political structure at the same time tended to become more open and democratic as, after many decades of struggle by those hitherto excluded from citizenship rights, universal suffrage has been established in the course of the twentieth century as the minimum acceptable norm for all liberal capitalist countries. This has major implications for the way we understand the exercise of power in such societies.
Historically, the dominant economic groups in the society monopolized the means of ideological production through their control of the church and the limited media available to them. Until the invention of printing the absence of print media, which could challenge their domination, inhibited the development of alternative ideas. Until recently, therefore, the possibilities of critical, subversive media commentary were, for technological and political reasons, minimal. In the course of the twentieth century, however, dominant economic groups lost much of their power to monopolise the means of intellectual production. Newspapers and broadcast media are, as a rule, still the property of a very few rich men, but the content of these media is now so diverse and multisourced that no ideology can truly be dominant for any length of time if it does not correspond on some level to what ordinary people feel to be, and experience as, true. No account of events stands unchallenged any more. In the millennial age the media function not always or necessarily as a tool of ideological domination but often as an arena for a real competition of ideas and interpretations of events.
The expansion of media channels and the proliferation of the journalistic media in particular, have tended to erode the cultural and ideological power of elite groups in advanced capitalist societies. The modern journalistic media have become, over time, and particularly in the 1990s, less closed to views other than those which are at any given time ‘dominant’: they are more accessible to pluralism of views idealized by liberal theory than ever before. Socio-economic hierarchies remain, but their structures change, and the struggle between competing ideologies and belief systems, fuelled by increasing flows of information, continually intensifies.
At any given time, of course, with the exception of periods of revolutionary change such as occurred in Eastern Europe after 1989 or in South Africa after 1994, there is still media-fuelled consensus around key values, but no group can assume that economic or political power guarantees ideological domination or that any key idea is not subject to regular and vigorous challenge from the multiplicity of journalistic channels existing in the media marketplace.
In this sense, it is clear that the twentieth century proliferation of journalistic media – and the formal, stylistic and editorial diversity which has characterized their development at the end of that century – has been a force not only for ideological control but also and increasingly for democratisation , facilitating the emergence of genuine mass political participation from the empty shell of bourgeois democracy which Marx, Lenin and others so vigorously and justifiably condemned as a sham in the previous century. The speed and quantity of contemporary information flow, and its accessibility to mass publics, threatens elite power at its core. What US President J.F.Kennedy could get away with, President Bush must publicly confront.
At the same time as individual members of elites have become more exposed to journalistic scrutiny, governmental decision-making has had to become more accountable and responsive, simply because it is more widely and rapidly reported than ever before. The once confidential and secret information on which decision-makers act is now increasingly public property, transmitted by media around the globe at the speed of light. This threatens the very foundation of political control and reduces the potential for abuse of power by dominant groups. Instead of ruling class ideological control, in the late 1990s there is mass cultural information chaos.
All of this is complicated by the fact that although we can identify a dominant economic class in the abstract, materialist sense it rarely acts as a coherent political force. Because of mass education and social mobility the contemporary ‘ruling class’ is becoming ever more culturally diverse and, because of its different economic interests often divided in political terms, as revealed by the split over European union within the British ‘ruling class’. Intra-class fragmentation and lack of ideological unity lead to revolving political elites, within a range extending from left-of-centre social democracy to aggressive free-market capitalism.
This is a social environment in which, fuelled by the media, ‘dominant’ ideology develops in unpredictable and unexpected directions. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins refers to memes and their evolution in The Selfish Gene (1989), making the point that, like the biological clusters of genes, sets of ideas seem to prosper or die out according to their ‘fitness’ for survival in the prevailing social environment. The existence of media, it is clear, has accelerated this process of ideological evolution.
In contemporary capitalism, for example, patriarchal ideology has declined and is dying out, as a result of countervailing force of women’s growing socio-economic power and the ideology, which legitimizes that power. Capitalism survives, indeed goes from strength to strength, but against a backdrop of consensual feminism in which women are in theory, if not yet in practice, the equals of men. How has feminist ideology become consensual in such a short time? The answer to this lies in its acceptance as ‘common sense’ by the institutions of media and the people who work in them.
Racism too, is a dying ideology in modern capitalism, redundant and outdated where once it was a routine element of many ‘respectable citizens’ world-views. There are still racists in advanced capitalist societies, of course, but they are increasingly isolated, finding no endorsement of their views from the ‘dominant’ ideology, or the media, which are its carriers.
Even the prejudice which we call homophobia is in retreat, as being gay and having the right to proclaim and celebrate one’s gayness slowly but surely becomes part of mainstream culture in the world.
Adherence to the dominance paradigm, then, and the associated hypothesis that the media, and journalism in particular, perpetuate relations of exploitation and inequality within capitalism, implies a degree of conspiratorial intent, class/sex/ethnic-based unity and ideological stasis which conflicts with the experience of the late twentieth century.
It can thus be said, with some confidence that journalism is a disseminator of values as well as facts; that its narratives are built around assumptions which consumers and producers take for granted; that journalism is a moral and ideological force as well as a source of cognitive data. It is also true that liberal journalism is biased towards capitalism in general – as the form of economic, social and political organization within which it was born and has developed – but not towards a rigid capitalism in which relations of dominance and subordination is forever fixed and unchanging. The founding theorists and the political philosophers of capitalism, fearing a return to despotisms of feudal epoch, gave journalism an independent role. That independence is taken seriously and is the source of autonomous journalistic power.
Whether simplistic or complicated, rigid or flexible, twentieth-century attempts to formulate an all-embracing theory of ideological domination in which the media were inevitably central have failed to keep pace with developments and the way in which capitalism has been able to reinvigorate and reproduce itself by providing ever-rising standards of living and quality of life for the wage-labouring classes.
The dominance paradigm, and therefore the sociology of journalism based on it, has thus come under strain in recent years, not because there are no longer dominant and subordinate groups in society, nor value systems and ideologies which reflect the interests of competing social groups, but because these groups, values and ideologies no longer inhabit, if they ever did, the static positions suggested by traditional models. Marx himself never fully developed a theory of ideology to explain the mechanisms by which dominant economic forces realized their intellectual and cultural domination. Even if he had, the capitalism on which he based his work has changed, shifting its emphasis – at least in the advanced capitalist world – from production and consumption, from the brutal accumulation of profit to the maintenance of mass affluence and political consensus and, in the cultural sphere, from modernism to post-modernism, meaning in this context a media environment characterized by knowing, literate audiences familiar with, and resistant to, many of the codes of media production, including those of the journalist. These developments require a new sociology of culture and, within that, a new sociology of journalism. Sociology is not a predictive science, of course, nor one in which precise laws of motion can be discovered.
Sociologists have no laboratories in which to conduct experiments, and must study living systems of which they are themselves a part. But sociology cannot evade the responsibility to explain and account credibly for the social phenomena, which are its subject matter, even if in an ultimately unprovable way. The sociology of journalism, dominated as it has been by the dominance paradigm, has not done so, and has now entered a necessary period of rethinking its key concepts and models.
JOURNALISM AS ENTERTAINMENT
Journalism has always entertained as well as informed. Had it not done so, it would have failed to reach a mass audience. But today say the journalism’s critics, the instinct to amuse is driving out the will, and depleting the resource, to report and analyze in any depth. Obsessed with a world of celebrity and trivia, the news media are rotting our brains and in a sense, undermining our civic life.
There is no shortage of evidence to support the fact that today the media is becoming more and more celebrity frenzy. For Earth Day in 2000, ABC News invited the star actor and a dynamic environmental campaigner, Leonardo DiCaprio, to conduct an interview with President Bill Clinton for a prime time news show. It was a violation of journalistic values both on the grounds of the actor’s unfamiliarity with the art of rigorous interviewing and his partisanship on the subject, but the move was justified by the network on the grounds of engaging a younger audience resistant to ageing authority figures like news anchors Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather.
A similar technique was used during the 1997 general elections in Britain when leading political leaders including the future Prime Minister Tony Blair, were interviewed for BBC television by stand-up comedians and other popular entertainers. Gordon Brown, Britain’s stern and lugubrious Chancellor of the Exchequer has been interviewed about British membership of the euro by a Scandinavian born game-show hostess who subsequently enjoyed a further moment of fame when she conducted a brief and carefully publicized affair with the England football manager Sven Goran Eriksson at the time of the World Cup in 2002.
Meanwhile, this celebrity frenzy character of the media has been prominent after the advent of private news channels. Not to deny that the newspapers were doing their bit long before cable television came in to the country big time. The colored front page of the Hindi Daily Punjab Kesari is the best example of how the celebrities have ruled the roost in the Indian media. It was not the Page3 but the front page that catered to the news from the bollywood and the party circuit. With passing years other newspapers in the country have tried to cash in on this formula. Today, most of the leading dailies if not all, keep a keen eye on any development in the lives of the various celebrities.
Coming to the recent past it became clearer that celebrity journalism was going to be the money-spinner for the big media organizations. Once it was understood then there was no stopping the newspapers and the other media from making big money by giving weight to the news related to the famous celebrities. O.J.Simson, Princess Diana, Britney Spears, Oprah Winfrey and a procession of other ephemeral sport stars are the names that mark the sense of battle in the media’s celebrity wars: all have made their impact upon newspapers and news broadcasters, boosting audiences, but contributing to a sense that the news business is loosing its grip on reality and actuality, confusing popularity with significance, providing for readers and viewers what they appear to want and not what they really want or even need. At its prime this celebrity system is capable of inventing its own stars through specially concocted television events, which can then be exploited across all media platforms. Thus ‘reality television’ shows like Survivor, Big Brother, American Idol and others generate new stars who can be interviewed on the breakfast news shows and featured, day after day on the pages of various magazines and newspapers – and not just tabloids. Many websites across North America, Europe and Asia attracted record traffic when they allowed viewers to vote on the fate of the contestants in these games, which also can be followed, live, on 24 hour television channels or web casts, even when most of the contestants in the event are sleeping. A similar story is depicted in the Indian media with reality shows like the Fame X and Big Boss. Nothing happening now, but something can happen any moment. A lesson about how compartmentalized and safe so much television is now, enthused Mark Thompson, the former BBC journalist shortly after he became the chief executive of Channel 4 Television, owner of Big Brother rights in the UK. Even the terrors of global conflict sit in the spongy shadow of such fripperies. As the American satirical magazine and website, The Onion, put it in a spoof headline just months after the September 11 attacks on Manhattan and Washington: Shattered Nation Longs to Care About Stupid Bullshit Again’
To critics like Neil Postman, this is prophecy triumphantly vindicated. Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves To Death made the case that television is, by it nature, a medium of entertainment and that as it displaced print as the primary medium of news, it would result in a les informed and a less informed society: ‘Dumbing Down’ is the phrase that has come to signify this process. Television News, Postman says, with its music, drama and glamorous personalities, ‘is a format for entertainment and not for education, reflection or catharsis.
Yet this is no open-and-shut case. Television News is, especially in countries where it is protected by strong regulations and backed by large public investments regarded by most people as not only their main source of news but also the most trusted one. Might be possible that today’s proponents of ‘Tabloid Television’ are merely following the path their tabloid newspaper forebears did: namely widening access to news and topical debate, and engaging with audiences who would otherwise be even less informed about, and engaged with, the events which shape their lives.
Entertainment Values
It is observed that most of the editors all over the globe favour stories, which have the capacity to entertain and amuse. The relentless push towards entertainment values has meant that the definition of what defines news is constantly changing. The carefully established distinction between fact and opinion is now easy to maintain. The need for accuracy has become dissolved into the excess of headline, through a joke, an ironic exaggeration or an expression of outrage.
A number of components go together to form the entertainment package that influences news selection in the erstwhile ‘serious’ media as well as the tabloids. These entertainment values include; humour, showbiz, sex, crime and pictures.
Humour
Humorous stories are very popular with the audience as well as the news desks. When council workers took an unusually long time to mend a street lamp, it became national news not because of any particular significance, but because it echoed jokes about how many people it actually takes to repair a lamp: FOUR MONTHS, 16 MEN AND 1000 POUNDS TO MEND A LAMP (The Sun, September 16, 2002), as the tabloid editors would say, ‘sometimes the opportunity for a headline pun is enough to warrant a story’s inclusion.’
Showbiz
Stories about TV stars and other celebrities are rife on the Page3, but all UK national papers – with the exception of Financial Times – carry large number of showbiz stories. There is in fact a practice of introducing characters or plots from films or TV to enliven the straight news reports. A story about working hours in the Sunday Times business section referred to ‘northern bosses’ attitudes as being ‘more akin to that of Coronation Street’s Mike Baldwin’, illustrated with a picture captioned: ‘Northern boss: Mike Baldwin’ (BOSSES WORK HARDER IN SOUTH-EAST, Sunday Times, February 24, 2002).
Sex
If there is a sex angle to a story it is regarded as more casual and amusing and is therefore more likely to be used, with the sex angle emphasized even if it is marginal to the events described (Harcup and O’Neill 2001:274) court cases and employment tribunals with sex angles are more likely to be covered, all other things being equal, than are those without. A typical example is: WREN HUMILIATED BY SUPERIOR’S SEX BANTER (Daily Telegraph, March 23, 1999).
Crime
It has been more than half a century when George Orwell recorded the complaints of newspaper readers that ‘you never seem to get a good murder now days’ (Orwell 1946a: 10). But crime stories continue to fascinate the readers and journalists alike. During the wall-to-wall coverage of the unfolding drama in the village of Soham in August 2002, when two girls disappeared and were eventually found dead, every national tabloid newspaper increased sales through out the UK (ABC 2002). But David J Krajicek of New York Daily News argues that the validity of the news about crime is compromised if it is told in such a way as to put entertainment before information and analysis.
Pictures
Many of the stories would provide opportunities to include entertaining, amusing, dramatic, tragic or titillating pictures. Sunday Express editor John Junor once remarked that ‘a beautiful young woman lifts even the dreariest page’ (quoted in McKay 1999: 188), and his unreconstructed views live on in today’s newspapers. Why else would events like the Cannes Film Festival receive such huge coverage every year? And how many newspapers would have written about Aishwarya Rai if the camera had not been invented?
PAGE3 JOURNALISM
Page 3 journalism is more a practice than any established theory. Initially, all the newspapers across the world dedicated the third page of the newspaper to news originating within the city. Due to this, most of the space on this page was filled with developments in the city. In metropolitans, the eminent people including politicians, artists and other socialites. Film stars and sportsmen also attracted media attention at large. They were mostly the favorites amongst the media men in framing a story. The presence of the famous people in the story ensured a curiosity on the part of the readers. The practice of Page3 journalism, according to many experts is believed to have started by New York Times in the latter half of the twentieth century. But it didn’t do as well as it was supposed to do. However, it showed a way to the world to go about the job of covering celebrities in a certain way. The presentation of the news was in a form, which excites sensations amongst the readers. Violence, Sex and Crime became frequent and gossip was a regular in this genre of journalism.
There are others, however, who feel that Joseph Pulitzer sowed the seed for sensationalism in the news, when he came out with the cartoon ‘yellow kid’. His competition with William Randolph Hearst to win the race for readership meant that the ‘sensationalism in news’ was here to stay.
Be it Pulitzer or Franklin or Murdoch, the fact remained that people running the newspapers were convinced by the fact that the readers are interested in knowing about their favourite stars and celebrities, so it is not of great significance as to who takes the credit for introducing the readers to the concept of Page3 journalism, rather what is important is to see the developments in this genre.
C.P. Scott, the founder editor of the Manchester Guardian, once said: “News is sacred, opinion is free”. In India, news in a written format had always been considered the truth and has been more powerful than the spoken word. But such position is not anymore.
Media is an integral component of democratic polity and is rightly called fourth limb of democracy. It is not merely what the media does in a democracy, but what it is, that defines the latter. Its practice, its maturity, and the level of ethics it professes and practices in its working are as definitive of the quality of a democracy as are the functions of the other limbs. With tremendous growth and expansion, prospects of mass media are today viewed as more powerful than ever before.
However some feel that the media has gone too far ahead of itself, and today media has become more show rather than the medium. Media has created its own world of glamour, gossip, sex and sensation, which has played a major role in distracting attention from the real issues of our times.
Former Chief Vigilance Commissioner N. Vittal in his article in Bhavan’s journal June 30, “Journalism is losing……” has indicated that special problem faced by journalists these days relates to journalism itself. The page 3 culture can make people live in a make-believe world and as a result, instead of journalism connecting people, it may result in the people losing touch with reality being connected through the media. He has noted that in the media, print or electronic, glamour has become a part of day-to-day life and that has led to the development of the Page 3 culture. It was the crystallisation of the concept articulated by Andy Warhol that in future “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”.
The combination of television and Page 3 culture has also made a very curious impact on public persons many of whom do not enjoy the public esteem in real sense and need to be seen to be remembered. In the past to become public celebrity lot of groundwork was involved including physically meeting people, indulging you into public relation and connecting with them in their needs and aspiration. But thanks to the electronic media and the print media, it has become possible to reach a wider audience quite often and thus attaining the status of celebrity without having to undergo the drudgery of travelling along the dusty roads and to standby the people in their needs to get results.
The term ‘Page three’ originates from entertainment news in daily newspapers supplements appearing usually on the third page that chronicle parties and gossip of the glitterati – the country’s equivalent of tabloid journalism. Page 3 features colour photo spreads of celebrities and the novae riche at parties and of course, captured indulging in activities far removed from life of the general public. There are lots of people who only read Page 3 sheets and discard the main newspaper, specially the young. The range from fashion designers to models, artists of the silver screen and glamorous celebrities. Today, the flashy supplements are a mix of celebrity news, party pictures, movie gossip and juicy stories on private lives of celebrities.
Page 3 has become a phenomenon and is believed to have arisen out of sensationalism. People may love to love it or love to hate it, but cannot ignore it. Observers say that India’s runaway Page 3 culture reflects two distinct levels of an aspirational society. One is the need for leisurely passing time without any serious reflection on issues of national importance. The second is the desire to be seen to be famous by featuring on Page 3. One Page 3 sheet claimed in a recent self-congratulatory article that everyone wanted to be in it but nobody wanted to admit it. In a way, Page 3 reflects the interdependence of media and celebrity.
CONVERGENT TABLOIDIZATION OF MEDIA
A tabloid originally meant ‘small tablet of medicine’, then it was used figuratively to mean a compressed form or dose of anything, hence tabloid journalism (1901), and newspapers that typified it (1918), that has small pages, short articles, and lot of photographs. Tabloids are often considered to be less serious than other newspapers printed on large sized paper (broadsheets), and qualified to be called entertainment journalism.
Tabloidization is a shift by the media away from national and international issues of importance to a more entertainment or gossipy style of journalism that focuses on “Lifestyle, celebrity, entertainment and crime/scandal”. This shift is really a matter of concern because it gives rise to fear for the future of the media and the role and responsibility attached to it.
The fear behind this shift towards tabloidization lies in its implications. The effect of this shift to a more entertainment based journalism style is that the important issues such as health care education and issues relating socio political reforms which require to be addressed with seriousness have been given the back seat. The nation is deprived of information vital to reaching sound policy decisions. Our perception of society can vary greatly depending on the source of news and that bad information will inevitably lead to bad public policies.
There are some persons with lot of confidence in media who argue that Tabloidization has, in fact, not occurred and that the media is the same today as it was thirty years ago, but, there are some facts, which tell a different story: A survey reported on the net showed that in 1977 less than 1% of the stories covered in network news were about scandal; by 1987 they were 17%, and straight news declined from 51% in 1977 to 34% in 1997. During the same time period ‘Time Magazines’ stories about government declined from 15% to 4% while entertainment stories rose from 8% to 15%. Even though this survey covers a decade that is already two decades back and the magnitude of the shift may be arguable, but clearly a shift has been taking place in the manner in which the media present the news. It is not unreasonable to think that the position today has changed by leaps and bounds extending the horizon of tabloidization. The question needs to be addressed is what then has caused or led the media to move in this direction.
One view is that the corporations that own the satellite channels are responsible. The other view is that competition between networks is responsible. Another view is those public people only interested in their glamour image have encouraged the whole process to draw away the attention of the public from serious issues.
The news journalists “follow orders” from the corporate owners and shape the news accordingly. The result is news media, which “manipulates information” to push the agenda of the corporations which is based on marketing themselves and their products. Covering up of the news that may be detrimental to the economic health and/or reputation of the company guides such marketing. This is where tabloidization comes into play. In order to push their interests or to draw the attention away from the news that may in fact ‘hurt’ them, the corporations have created a news media that concentrate on attracting audiences through stories about sleaze, scandal and personal lives.
Another lamentable feature is erosion of the importance of the office of Editor. In olden days, editor used to enjoy a special position in a newspaper. Even if a particular newspaper had leaned towards a particular socio-political ideology, the editor had always enjoyed enough freedom to articulate his view and comments on contemporary events. Some newspapers, as a matter of fact, used to be known by the excellence of their editors. In this age of tabloidization and pursuit of extreme commercial interest, advertisement or commercial directors of a newspaper enjoy special position and often decide to what extent general news will be covered.
Has corrosive competition lead to the Tabloidization of the news? The major fear of the media having this speed – based mentality is that it is at the cost of accuracy and that the attitude has become “never let the facts stand in the way of a good story”.
Corporate ownership also has played a role in the process of Tabloidization. Marketing has become a large part of both television and print media. Tabloidization is much less expensive than traditional reporting. It costs less to run a news clip than to send a reporter to the scene.
The technology factors have also played major role in the process of Tabloidization. The technological improvements and editing technologies made the “packaging” possible.
The dominance of Page 3 people in the news content of newspaper and its ever-increasing horizon especially in national level newspapers is a negative trend, visible in the media as a whole irrespective of being print or electronic. In fact, on the electronic media, cinema trivia control the prime time bulletin. Regional media has by and large exhibited till now greater restraint in carrying trivialized material in their news content.
The colour picture supplements with Page 3 meet the requirement of both the patrons and clients. They can bring in everything – Publicity for products – without even raising an eyebrow. Exaggerated pressures from the television/satellite channels are used as a pretext by print media for supposed felt need propelled by competition for further trivialization of news columns which, in turn, encourage more cross commercialisation. Indeed, this vicious circle though highly reprehensible, rules the field.
Insensitivity to the content and focus on trivia are rampant today with media focussing more and more on illness and accidents of the famous at the cost of developmental issues. The coverage of personal life of celebrities more than needed only leaves the message that nothing else was happening in the country, which deserves its place in the coverage of news. Yet it is worth nothing that young viewers polled by Mid-Day agreed that the Volcker Committee report was more important. This indicates the divide between what people want and what the media thinks that people want. They would do well to recognize the pulse of the people.
Criticising trivialisation and sensationalisation of news recently on a news channel Shri Jaipal Reddy, former Minister for Information & Broadcasting pointed out that Media scene in the country had undergone not only a “dramatic” change but also a ‘traumatic’ one. Page 3 people are increasingly trying to get into page one by joining politics. Further he emphasised that entertainment should be distinct from information. Instead of discussing the dressing sense or appeal, the media should focus on their work. He advised media to do “collective and cool, introspection” besides building up its credibility and urged print media not to compete with electronic media glamorisation. Reddy’s comments deserve a serious thought.
In today’s media scenario, there is growing practice of masquerading paid publicity as genuine news. A large amount of media’s contemporary problems flow from the greed of a section of it. Surprisingly, the established ones with decisive market domination are very often alleged, indulge in this pernicious practice of selling news columns. In this era of economic opening up, lobbyist or even foreign powers can fill news columns with inspired stories.
If the present trend catches on, there will be no way to stop it. We need to be alive to the danger before it is too late. The threat has to be met, not by trivialisation, but by more in depth and public interest stories and background on which the print media is on a stronger wicket. Market surveys create cherished myths like the ‘Generation Now’ is disinterested in serious political and economic news and everyone is casual glance of colour advertisements. But the popularity of the “competition” pages, intelligent quiz programmes tell a different story.
It is not the free market competition but competitive marketisation of the media that creates a generation of false notion. Mindless marketisation by interested sections can be countered only by better understanding of what the public want. Media should not forget that its main aim is to provide information to create a sound citizenry.
Instead of an imagined “generation now” mindset, newspapers will have to spread horizontally – like consumer producers exploring the vast rural market. Newspapers will have to sell the news to the readers, the ultimate consumer of news for whose benefits the whole task is undertaken.
This shift from journalism to the market is not a good or healthy sign. In the United States, where marketing was invented, journalism and television and the Internet have had the same pulls and pressures of the market. Still they have the ‘New York Times’ and ‘Washington Post’ and several other magazines doing extremely well. In India also there are few papers, which can boast of their quality of contents.
In our country we seem to have somehow deviated from the core mandate of journalist. We have commercialised, we have trivialised, and we have indulged in pernicious attempt to make all the pages as Page 3. Such state of affair is to be noted with anxiety and grave concern. To say the least, this trend is not good because journalism is one of the continuing thought processes of civilisation. The redeeming feature is that by and large the regional media, or the regional language media, which is also called the vernacular media, has not yet fallen to a reasonable extent to this trend of trivialisation. But anxiety is how long this last pasture will remain comparatively green.
Following the commercialisation of the media, the adage ‘mirror of society’ associated with journalism is perhaps no longer relevant. Therefore the immediate task is to grapple with an ethical question: Is there a “this far and no further” in commercialisation of news? It is no secret that the columns of newspapers are handed out on a platter to suit personal interests by planting favourable stories and killing negative ones. In the process, objectivity has taken a holiday.
The time perhaps has come for the P.R. man to rise to use his skills for an image makeover for the newspaper industry and I do not mean just a cosmetic make over but that which will have depth and touch the society at large. Public Relation is certainly an asset to any venture and I am sure that the members of the society that I am addressing today are alive to their larger responsibilities to the country over the interests of the company they serve.
Last but not the least, the role of readers, assumes great importance in combating the malaise being discussed. The readers have an important role to play. If they remain callous and meekly accept whatever is given to them by the media without any protest or critical estimate of the role of media, this unfortunate trend would continue unabated and perhaps with greater ferocity ultimately leading the readers to be insensitive to the real role required to be played by the media in building up a vibrant and progressive society. Eternal vigilance is not only the price of democracy but also the price for effective role of the media. I appeal to all right thinking citizen to raise voice of protest against the malady of tabloidization and page three syndrome as effectively as practicable. I am confident that such protest and constructive criticism of the role of media cannot go unheeded.
Celebrity Criminal Cases
The hype associated with celebrity criminal cases is not hidden from anybody. Through out the 1990s the US public repeatedly focused on a series of high profile, often celebrity based criminal and investigation trials. Each of these cases became something of national obsession and was associated with a lot of mass media coverage. Although such media trials have been there since the early part of the twentieth century, the last decade has witnessed a great increase in the number. Arguably with William Kennedy Smith’s trial in 1991, and reaching a fever pitch during the O.J.Simpson’s trial in 1995, the public’s appetite for such events has steadily risen, as has the media’s devotion to their presentation. If the following of Simpson’s case was thought to be the end of the road, the scandal involving President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky proved everyone wrong. Though the scandal was not even a criminal case it seemed to push aside most of the political and legal news all of 1998. This scandal was a sort of inevitable culmination of the decade’s previous media cases, as it involved most of the elements which indicate both media attention and public titillation: politics, sex, crime, law, gender dynamics and celebrity participants.
The media seems to have a control over the people’s mind, due to which the public knowledge and awareness of these events is far more than those subjects which many experts would deem much more important and worthy of a national focus.
Media organizations have now become the willing transmitters of extensive and in-depth coverage of these events. Although stories of tawdry criminal trials and detailed account of the private lives of the trial participants have historically been the stuff of the tabloid press, the mainstream press and the television have joined in the act. Also, the phenomenal growth of Internet has resulted in the numerous websites that offer coverage and discussion about controversies surrounding the private lives of people. For instance, in late 1998, a cursory search of the key words ‘Monica Lewinsky’ on Yahoo, a leading search engine resulted in the listing of over fifty dedicated websites, and an additional 94,000 individual references, including everything from fan clubs to pornographic satire.
Media Effects On Public Attitudes
Central to our agreement that tabloid style coverage of these events has important consequences for the American society is the question whether mass media presentations have important effects on the people’s attitudes. Most observers fully agree that both factual and fictional media stories help shape the public opinion. Many theories of mass media effects assert that heavy exposure to the media generated images may eventually convince the person that that the symbolic reality presented is an accurate reflection of objective social conditions. But to see the world as the media portrays it would be embracing a lot of incorrect views. Assuming that the mass media do affect public attitudes and beliefs, it is important to make distinctions among these media, as many of the differences hinder the construction of a general theory of media effects.
THE TABLOID INSTINCT
The tension between the news instinct and the entertainment instinct certainly isn’t new. When William Randolph Hearst launched his New York Mirror in 1924 to take on America’s first successful daily tabloid, the New York Daily News, he made it aptly clear that the Mirror would provide ‘90 percent entertainment and 10 percent information – and the information without boring you’. If we are to understand the so called ‘tabloid television’, it is imperative that we know the history of tabloid newspapers, which emerged to meet up the demands of growing and literate urban population in the late 19th century and which we have constantly challenged the definition of what journalism is, and the standards to be expected in its practice.
Strictly speaking, a tabloid is a newspaper page exactly half the size of a broadsheet: a mathematical relationship, which stems from the fact that the publishers need to be able to print tabloid and broadsheet newspapers on the same printing presses. It is in all ways a misleading handle as the British tabloids which have given the term its contemporary meaning, the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the News of the World, all began their stint as broadsheets and turned tabloid, respectively in 1969, 1971, 1977 and 1984. It is also important to note that in many countries the most respectable newspapers are tabloids, Le Monde and El Paris among them. So it’s hard to complain against ‘tabloid journalism’ in Paris and Madrid.
Modern tabloid journalism, although it has spread across Europe in titles like Germany’s Bild Zeitung, is largely a product of transatlantic cross-pollination between Britain and USA.
It is worth sketching the history of British and American tabloid journalism, for it reveals the extent to which the values of entertainment and fact have often been indistinguishable.
In 1888, T.P.O’Connor returned from United States to Britain to set up an evening newspaper, The Star, giving us, in the words of Matthew Engel, historian of British tabloid press, ‘the frankest of all manifestos for the journalism that was to come’? ‘We believe’, O’connor wrote:
That the reader of the daily journal longs for more than mere politics; and we shall present him with plenty of entirely apolitical literature – sometimes humorous, sometimes pathetic; anecdotal, statistical, the craze for fashions and arts of housekeeping and, now and then, a short, dramatic and picturesque tale. In our reporting columns we shall do away with the hackneyed way of obsolete journalism; and the men and women that figure in the forum or the pulpit or the law court shall be presented as they are – living, breathing, in blushes or in tears – and not merely by the dead words that they utter.
After O’Connor successive waves of proprietors and editors would extend the dramatic license of their writing, but they would often combine this with serious attempts at political influence. Northcliffe’s Daily Mail, in the best tradition of popular journalism, beat a patriotic drum during the First World War, but also attacked Lord Kitchener, commander in chief of the British forces, for his incompetence in directing trench warfare.
The Canadian Max Aitken, later Lord Beaverbrook, was famous for his circulation-building stunts, but he also promoted maverick political causes, prompting Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to complain that the newspaper publishers possess ‘power without responsibility – the prerogative of harlot through out the ages’. The quality of Beaverbrook’s own political judgement was evident in his complacent reaction to the rise of fascism in Germany. On October 1 1938, the Express’s front page declared: YOU MAY SLEEP QUIETLY – IT IS PEACE FOR OUR TIME. Two days later, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia.
The Express’s political misjudgements along with its failure to keep up with the changing aspirations and tastes of the working class, created space for the Daily Mirror, which had begun life in 1903 as a paper aimed at women, before pioneering in 1920s the use of pictures. The mirror read the situation in Germany more accurately. After the war ended it became the biggest selling paper in the country.
Silvester Bolam, the Daily Mirror’s editor from 1948 to 1953, felt no need to apologize for a louder, brasher style of journalism, announcing on his front page: ‘The Mirror is a sensational newspaper. We make no apology for that. We believe in the sensational presentation of the news and views, especially the ones coming from eminent people, as a necessary and valuable service in these days of mass readership and democratic responsibility’.
Sensationalism, Bolam said on a later occasion ‘does not mean distorting the truth. It means the vivid and dramatic presentation of events so as to give them a forceful impact on the mind of the reader. It means big headlines, vigorous writing, simplification into familiar, everyday language, and wide use of illustration by cartoons and photographs’.
Murdoch’s Contribution
By the late 1960s, the Mirror had a competitor snapping at its heels. The Sun first appeared in 1964, as a renamed Daily Herald, a paper supported by and loyal to Britain’s trade unions, but it was in deep trouble when Rupert Murdoch bought it. He had already bought News of the World, the naughtiest and the best-selling paper of Britain’s Sunday newspapers.
Murdoch told the staff that he wanted the Sun to focus on ‘sex, sports and contests’, a mission translated in the satirical paper Private Eye as ‘a tear away appear with a lot of tit’. Private Eye labeled Murdoch ‘the Dirty Digger’, well before the paper’s launch in 1970 of a regular feature, which continues to this day: a photograph of a naked woman on page three. As recently as October 2002, the Sun was congratulating itself on the emergence of a Sun-look alike in Moscow (dubbed inevitably, the Sun-ski) complete with page three ‘lovelies’. The Sun’s page three girl has also made a successful move to the paper’s website.
By the time the Sun soared past the Mirror in 1977, Murdoch was buying newspapers in the United States including the New York Post in1976. In Britain aced with the newly launched Daily Star, Murdoch hired a new editor, Kelvin Mackenzie who combined an ability to stretch the limits of taste and professional behaviour, with a passionate advocacy of the newly elected Margaret Thatcher, whose backing was required to fulfill Murdoch’s television ambitions in UK. With Murdoch looking to expand his interests across the Atlantic and the Pacific, cross-fertilisation between Australian, British and American tabloid journalism intensified.
By the time of Thatcher’s war against Argentina in 1982, which generated Mackenzie’s famous headline GOTCHA, when the Argentinean warship General Belgrano was torpedoed by a brutish submarine, Mackenzie was into his stride. The paper sometimes brilliantly caught the mood of the frustrated, but aspirational working-class who supported Thatcher, but it also thumbed its nose at standards. During the Falklands War, the Sun published an ‘interview’ with the widow of a dead service man with whom the paper had never spoken. Seven years later, under a front-page headline, THE TRUTH, the paper accused Liverpool football fans of urinating upon rescue workers as they tried to save people in a stadium disaster in which 96 fans were crushed to death. Mackenzie was also careless when it came to libel laws, costing his boss a fortune in payments to stars like Elton John.
Sometimes, Mackenzie’s front pages would disappear entirely into a world of make-believe. There is no other explanation for headlines like the famous FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER, on March 13 1986, referring to an obscure incident two years earlier, when Starr, a comedian, had pretended to eat a hamster in a sandwich as a joke. On many days, it became impossible to ell the difference between the Sun’s reports of death or adultery in the street of a popular television soap opera and similar dramas in real life. The paper had turned fact into fiction and fiction into fact, which amused readers but not the real-life individuals who found themselves caught up in the Sun soap opera. In the 1990s the star columnist, Richard Littlejohn, would habitually conclude one of its ranting columns with exasperated catchphrase: you couldn’t make it up.’ But you could and the Sun sometimes has.
Mackenzie’s Sun, however, has to be understood in the context of the tabloid story in the United States. America’s first daily tabloid, the New York Daily News, had appeared n 1919 and prompted one of the great newspaper wars of the century, when William Randolph Hearst launched the New York Mirror against it. But it was a Hearst broadsheet, the New York Enquirer, which was to change the course of tabloid history when Generoso Pope Jr in 1952 picked it up, with a circulation of 17,000.
Pope Of American Tabloids
Pope, who knew and admired the News of the World, renamed the paper the National Enquirer, turned it tabloid and told his small team of journalists to concentrate upon lurid crime stories. Fifteen years later, having acquired a slew of competitors, the Enquirer was selling a million copies a week. In 1978, an edition of the Enquirer featuring a photograph of the body of Elvis Presley sold seven million copies, a peak not yet achieved.
Pope initiated a garish style of journalism that like Mackenzie’s had moments of high political impact. It was the Enquirer’s photograph in 1988 of the presidential candidate Gary Hart on board a yacht called Monkey Business, with a young woman called Donna Rice on his lap that ended his political career. Although there is a debate to be had about the press’s appetite for the private lives of public figures, this story could not be challenged as Hart was indeed concealing an illicit relationship.
But countless stories in the tabloids were simply made up. The inspiration of these publications was closer to that of satirical comics like National Lampoon or the Onion, which are manifest self-parodies of journalism and its techniques, though it is not certain that al of their readers viewed them in these terms. Presumably, only the most de hard conspiracy theorists would have believed a headline like HITLER SEEN ALIVE IN US or JFK ALIVE ON SKORPIOS (complete with a picture) and it is difficult to think that anyone took seriously: SEVEN HOUR ENEMA TURNS BLACK GIRL WHITE! Or GIRL, 16, BECOMES A GRAND MOTHER or I WAS RAPED EIGHT DAYS BY THREE MEN AND A LESBIAN.
Bill Sloan, who worked on the Enquirer and other tabloids, has explained how experienced writers and editors like him ‘were routinely able to shift gears between out and out trash and serious reportage. One day they were inventing bogus stories for the News Extra or even grinding out soft porn for the National Bulletin…. The next day, they were interviewing real people, writing legitimate articles, and striving mightily for documentation and credibility. Sloan’s justification for this behaviour, apart from the excellent salaries, which attracted numerous journalists to ‘tabloid valley’ in Florida, was that these people had rediscovered a basic truth about their profession. They recognized early on what Hearst had figured out some eighty years ago and what practically every TV news executive and major daily editor realizes today – what qualifies as hot news has only the sketchiest relationship to pure information. For all their lofty pretences, today’s mainstream media are essentially just another branch of show biz.
Faking The Truth
The decline of the tabloids circulation in the late 1980s and early 1990s resulted as the broadsheets were out tabloiding the tabloids. For instance British newspapers in the recent years have run numerous fictional columns, mostly with satirical purpose, but occasionally misjudging the ability of the readers to recognize what is a joke. A satirist Chris Morris used his TV show to lure celebrities into invented schemes and situations designed to show them in bad light. Apologists for this genre of TV sometimes call it ‘investigative comedy’.
Shortly afterwards, it emerged that even the venerable BBC was using actors to pose as real people with real problems, on a daily talk show hosted by Vanessa Feltz. Another newspaper columnist pretended to be suffering from cancer in order to make her column more appealing to the readers.
WHO ARE THE STARS?
The chances of becoming famous might be called the great… jackpot. To be a celebrity, to appear on television, to be applauded…that is the warm and not-so-secret dreams of countless Americans in a society that is becoming more an audience directed by mass communication. And…it may be hard to avoid the impression that almost any kind of person can be a celebrity.
KLAPP
It is quite strange as to how certain people become so important that the entire media feeds on them. It is interesting studying the various elements, which help us in identifying and determining celebrities.
In his account of the social and historical conditions which give rise to the ‘phenomena of stars’ Francesco Alberoni observed that in every society are to be found persons who, in the eyes of the other members of the society are especially remarkable and who attract universal attention. Typically, this applies to those who hold power (political, economic, religious) but one also finds others, whose doings and way of life arouses considerable and at times even a maximum degree of interest.
The latter group constitutes what Alberoni describes as ‘powerless elite’, which includes not just the stars of the cinema but ‘idols’, ‘champions’ and ‘divas’. If this formulation is used as a starting point for mapping the contours of this story-type it is clear that a significant number of ‘other news’ stories in broadcast sample weeks had a very big impact on the on the ‘doings and way of life’ of people who could qualify as ‘especially remarkable’.
It is important to be noted that news does not merely take note of the especially remarkable; it actively participates in their construction: it makes them in ‘remarkable’ and especially so. Once elites enter the journalistic discourse for the subject for stories, it becomes relevant to ask – how are they represented; which remarks, attributes, actions and possessions are the focus of interest; how are elite persons signified and given meaning as especially remarkable? A study of ‘William Hickey’ gossip column as it appeared in the English newspaper the Daily Express during the 1950s and 1960s offers some concrete suggestions in terms of ways to proceed. According to Smith this gossip column is best understood in the way it provided its readership with a glimpse of the ‘higher world’, serving to build a contrast between the dull routines assumed to govern everyday life and a charmed spectacle which was regularly paraded like a kind of a theatrical show. Interestingly, despite the apparent gap in years and the different media, a number of rhetorical and stylistic devices which Smith’s study of the gossip column uncovered is still very much in evidence in the coverage of elites and their ‘doings and way of life’ in media’s other news.
Celebrity Game
A celebrity is a widely-recognized or famous person who commands a high degree of public and media attention. The word stems from the Latin adjective celeber meaning famous or celebrated. While fame is generally considered a necessary precondition for celebrity status, it is not always sufficient. There has to be a level of public interest in the person, which may or may not be connected to the reason they are famous. Many celebrities are only so for a certain amount of time, perhaps after appearing on a television program or doing something to cast them into the public eye, such as rowing the Atlantic ocean or being the first to do something. There are also specialist celebrities, who are only celebrities to those who enjoy a particular subject and so consider them a celebrity.
A public figure such as a politician or CEO may be famous, but they may not become a celebrity unless public and mass media interest is piqued. For example Virgin Director Richard Branson was famous as a CEO, but he did not become a celebrity until he attempted to circumnavigate the globe in a hot air balloon. On the other hand, mass entertainment personalities such as soap opera actors or country music stars are likely to become celebrities even if the person deliberately avoids media attention.
Celebrity structure
A small number of celebrities can be considered 'global', in that their fame has spread across the English-speaking world and even into non-English-speaking cultures. These celebrities are often prominent political figures, Hollywood actors, globally successful pop musicians and sports stars. A few examples of internationally-known celebrities include South African politician Nelson Mandela, Hollywood actor Tom Cruise, pop singers Cher and Madonna, and golf star Tiger Woods.
The rise of international celebrities in acting and popular music is due in large part to the massive scope and scale of the US media industries, which has enabled US media firms to dominate the English-speaking film, television, and popular music markets. The reach of US entertainment products is further extended by large-scale illegal copying of Hollywood movies and US popular music, which makes inexpensive pirated versions of US DVDs and CDs available throughout South America and Asia.
Regional or cultural celebrities
Each country has its own independent celebrity system, with a hierarchy of popular film, television, and sports stars. Celebrities who are very popular in one country, such as India, might be unknown abroad, except with culturally-related groups, such as the Indian diaspora. In some cases, a country-level celebrity might command some attention outside their native country, but not to the degree that they can be considered a global celebrity.
Subnational entities or regions, or cultural communities (linguistic, ethnic, religious) also have their own 'celebrity systems', especially in linguistically or culturally-distinct regions such as Quebec (a French-speaking province in Canada) and Puerto Rico (a Spanish-speaking US territory). Regional newscasters, politicians or community leaders can be considered as local or regional celebrities. For example, while journalist Lin Sue Cooney is a well known television reporter in Arizona, she is little known outside the Southwestern US.
In a smaller country, linguistic or cultural community, a figure will be less likely to gain a broader celebrity. Shakira and Daddy Yankee were known largely in the Spanish-speaking world before becoming popular in English-speaking communities, by performing English language songs. Similarly, Spanish actors Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas, who were country-level celebrities in their native Spain, were able to become global celebrities only after they became Hollywood actors in English-speaking films.
Media commentators and journalists will refer to celebrities as A-List, B-List, C-List, D-List or Z-List. These informal rankings indicate a placing within the hierarchy. However, due to differing levels of celebrity in different regions, it is difficult to place people within one bracket. A Czech actor might be a B-list action film actor in the US, but be an A-list star in the Czech Republic. A method of dividing celebrities into categories from A-List to H-List based on their number of Google hits has been proposed.
Professions that offer celebrity
Some professional activities, by the nature of being high-paid, highly exposed, and difficult to get into, are likely to confer celebrity status. For example, movie stars and television actors with lead roles on prime-time shows are likely to become celebrities, as are popular rock stars. High-ranking politicians, national television reporters, daytime television show hosts, supermodels, astronauts, successful major-league athletes and chart-topping pop musicians are also likely to become celebrities. A few humanitarian leaders such as Mother Teresa have even achieved fame because of their charitable work.
While some film and theatre directors, producers, artists, authors, trial lawyers and journalists are celebrities, the vast majority are not, or they garner much less celebrity than their professional importance in the business might seem to warrant. Some people in these professions strive to avoid celebrity, while others seek it, by appearing on talk shows and high-profile events, such as film openings.
Individuals with their own television show (or sections of television shows) often become a celebrity: this includes doctors, chefs, gardeners, and interior decorators on shows like Trading Spaces and While You Were Out. However fame based on one program may often prove short-lived after a program is discontinued.
Celebrity families
An individual can achieve celebrity on the basis of their profession, accomplishments, or notoriety, without necessarily having any family or social connections to aid them. However, there are families where the entire family is considered to have celebrity status. In Europe, all members of royal families are celebrities, especially when they are associated with a real or perceived scandal. As well, in Europe and in the US, there are artistic 'dynasties', where several members of a family are associated with a profession-typically music or acting.
Examples include the Durski, Barrymore, Hieftje, Cassidy (David and Shaun Cassidy), the Osmonds, the Winans, Osbournes, Quintanilla, Redgrave, Sheen/Estevez, Stiller,Voight, Mistry, Jackson and Baldwin families. For politicians, there are the Bushes, Clintons, and most notably, the Kennedys. Other dynasties include the Montanas, the Russell family, Luke Ellis's family, the Sweet family and some "sports families," where multiple members are involved in professional sports.
Celebrity as a mass media phenomenon
In the 1970s, academics began analyzing the phenomenon of celebrity and stardom. According to Sofia Johansson the "canonical texts on stardom" include articles by Boorstin (1971), Alberoni (1972) and Dyer (1979) that examined the "representations of stars and on aspects of the Hollywood star system." Johansson notes that "more recent analyses within media and cultural studies have instead dealt with the idea of a pervasive, contemporary, ‘celebrity culture’." In the analysis of the 'celebrity culture,' "fame and its constituencies are conceived of as a broader social process, connected to widespread economic, political, technological and cultural developments."
In Bob Greene’s article “The new stardom that doesn't require paying any dues,” he argues that for “most of man's history...people of talent would work to create something--something written, something painted, something sculpted, something acted out--and it would be passed on to audiences.” With the rise of reality TV shows, Greene points out that audiences have been turned into the creators. He argues that the “alleged stars of the reality shows "Survivor" and "Big Brother,"have become famous not for doing, but merely for being.”
Greene says that “You simply have to be present, in the right place at the right time.” Whereas “...publicly famous] people were once defined as such based upon the fact that their remarkable skills had brought them to the attention of the public,” Greene states that with reality TV, “one can become a public person just by being a person, in public.”
Celebrities often have fame comparable to that of royalty. As a result, there is a strong public curiosity about their private affairs. Celebrities may be resented for their accolades, and the public may have a love/hate relationship with celebrities, asking "do celebrities deserve their fame?" Due to the high visibility of celebrities' private lives, their successes and shortcomings are often made very public. Celebrities are alternately portrayed as glowing examples of perfection, when they garner Grammy awards and Oscars, or as decadent or immoral if they become associated with a Hugh Grant-like sex scandal.
Tabloid magazines and talk TV shows bestow a great deal of attention on celebrities. To stay in the public eye and obtain new revenue streams, celebrities are increasingly participating in business ventures such as celebrity-branded items, such as books, clothing lines, perfume, and household items.
The notion of celebrity is self-reinforcing and ultimately vacuous. Some celebrities are not famous for their accomplishments, but merely famous for their fame and presumed fortune. For example, Paris Hilton would not be a public figure without her wealth, but her family's prominence has created and reinforces her fame. Hilton is in some senses a special case; she is famous at least in part for being an example of the perceived negative or shallow aspects of celebrity life, and some believe she is going out of her way to fill that role and gather further attention.
Probably the most famous definition of celebrity comes from the cultural theorist Daniel Boorstin. In his book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, he cynically describes celebrities as people well known for their “well-knowness”.
Sales Potential Of A Celebrity
In the same period that the journalism has learnt to make light of the boundary between fact and fiction, it has also become increasingly absorbed by the entertainment and sales potential of celebrity, with significant consequences for the way the journalism is practiced.
One damaging consequence is that, in order to get pictures and stories about celebrities, journalists have to deal with the industry of agents, publicists and middle people which surrounds them and who make their own living from promoting the celebrity’s brand values through obtaining the ‘right media coverage’. This is strictly a two-way commercial play, because the news media know the right celebrity cover on a magazine, or a star interview on a talk show, can boost ratings in a way nothing else does for the same price. Celebrity is thus big money not only for the celebrities, but also for the news media. It is inevitably that, in these circumstances, stories and pictures will be obtained not, chiefly, by the industry and enterprise of the reporters, but by those news media willing to pay the largest fees.
Generoso Pope discovered the power of celebrity when, in 1969, the National
Enquirer published a family photograph of the late President Kennedy, surrounded by a story headlined: JACKIE BLASTED BY NURSE WHO BROUGHT UP JFK’S CHILDREN. Sales got tripled, prompting Pope to instruct the staff, “I want her on the cover page at least every couple of weeks.”
Much the same phenomenon attended the tragic figure of Diana, Princess of Wales, who entered global media consciousness in September 1980 when she was identified as the likely wife of Prince Charles, heir to the British throne. During the fairy tale phase of the royal romance the princess appeared on page one of the Sun sixteen times in one month. When she chose to go on the BBC Television current affairs programme Panorama, in 1995, to discuss the breakdown of her marriage, the show had the biggest audience in its history. No wonder press was willing to pay huge sums for any snatched, or even doctored picture of Diana, and that so many were on her tail as she sped, driven by a drunk, in to a Parisian underpass in August 1997.
At her funeral, the princess’ brother famously accused the media of having his ‘sister’s blood on their hands’ for the manner in which they had hounded her. On the other side of the Atlantic, the National Enquirer was quickly trying to recall and pulp its latest edition which led with the startling headline: DI GOES SEX MAD: ‘I CAN’T GET ENOUGH’.
Disgusted by the behaviour of the media, other celebrities including Madonna, George Clooney, Elizabeth Taylor and Sylvester Stallone called for stronger counter attacks on the media. Legal action was also thought of as a measure.
News Hole and Warhol
It is to be noted that ‘Paparazzi’ as a word has its origin in fiction and not in fact, Signore Paparazzo was the pushy photographer in Federero Fellini’s 1960 film La Dolce Vita, foreshadowing the fact that in the closing decades of the twentieth century, fact and fiction bleed into each other o every front. Andy Warhol the iconic pop artist took routine news agency snaps of car crashes, including some considered by certain publications too gory for publishing, and retouched them into art. And among his most admired works are the images of celebrities, often repeated, frame after irresistible frame.
For now, celebrity publishing is a freestanding industry. Hello Magazine began its life in Spain as Hola! Identifying a niche for soft, mainly photographic profiles based upon handsome payments and access to star’s private world, including marriages, funerals, new babies and homes.
One of Hello’s imitators UK based magazine OK s owned by Richard Desmond, whose other properties include pornographic magazines and TV channels besides the Daily Express. When Desmond bought the newspaper group, he immediately set out to exploit OK’s celebrity contracts, including the magazine’s relationship with Victoria and David Beckham, at the time Britain’s most pursued celebrity couple, across its new titles. At the same time, the Beckhams were busily extending their own brand by promoting potato chips, sunglasses and other stuff.
The fact that celebrities would take part in flattering tabloid features one week, and then denounce the journalists the next for intrusion into their personal lives, has undermined their arguments in the courts for greater privacy, as Naomi Campbell found when she lost a legal action in 2002 against the Daily Mirror, which had revealed her recourse to treatment for drug addiction. The newspapers could ask: why should stars be allowed t manipulates their relationships with the fans whose cash makes them rich?
For a routine journalist, the celebrity boom raises another problem that the celebrities can dictate terms in the way they do business with the news media. Results being that when journalists are granted interviews with the celebrities, they agree to notify questions in advance and even submit their copies for a glance prior to publication, not to mention often being obliged to pay cash for the access in the first place. Interviewees also sometimes demand inclusion of references to commercial sponsors.
There is a pleasant parody of the routine five-minute celebrity interview in the film Notting Hill, in which Hugh Grant poses as a journalist from Horse and Hound magazine to interview Julia Roberts. It is a situation that makes manipulations of the Westminster political lobby or the White House press corps looks positively low-key. As Caroline Monnot of Le Monde protested during the French Presidential campaign in 2002, even the ultra-left candidate of Lutte Ouvriere was a seen ‘borrowing the tactics from movie stars’ agent. Accreditations have to be applied for; there are waiting lists and you only get three timed questions with the star. It is as if you are interviewing Julia Roberts.
Are Journalists Celebs?
In the present scenario, it is not surprising that the journalists, especially the television reporters are themselves turning into celebrities.
Barbara Walters has gone down in the history as the first million-dollar news presenter. This was in the era when van Gordon Sauter, head of CBS News, propounded an influential theory that, since journalism was a ‘kind of a theatre’, what he wanted to see from his correspondents and producers were ‘moments’ rather than facts. Such moments, he said, offered ‘a portrait of an emotional reality’. Since then, the salaries of news presenters have multiplied ten fold and, like sports stars, actors and models, some appear to be heavily concerned with making the most of their brand, whether on the lecture circuit, opening super markets, hosting executive conferences or even associating themselves with product sponsorships.
Media companies know that a handful of celebrities may look expensive, but they are no where as expensive as extensive reporting networks. A question also arises that why keep a well informed but unglamorous foreign reporter in London, New York or Rome when if there is a big story, the audience ‘wants to see’ the star roving correspondent or anchor, live from the news scene?
However, there are ill effects. First of all, fly-in, fly-away presenters are no substitute for true reporters who know the terrain and can adjust accordingly. Stars are seldom in a place long enough to know anything. News stars can also have the effect of overshadowing the events they are reporting. Many journalists would add to this list the danger that, in a world where the presentation values replace the value of the substance, TV news would always be inclined to hire people who look glamorous, rather than those who can assess the news situation with greatest authority. But there is a reason why the Washington Post’s guidelines on the reporter’s role read: Although it has become increasingly difficult for this newspaper and for the press generally to do so since Watergate, reporters should make every effort to remain in the audience, to be stagehand rather than star, to report the news, not to make the news.
There are also it should be said, many exceptions to the characterization of the television presenter as lead airhead in a theatre of pretence. John Simpson, the BBC’s veteran world affairs editor spends most of his life on the road and is a formidable expert on international affairs. The fact that even got caught up in the ludicrous characterization as the ‘liberator of Kabul’ in 2001, demonstrated that even the most experienced hands occasionally lose grip and forget that great television journalism is all about teamwork. The Afghan war in fact proved to be a great breeding ground for a new generation of star reporters.
Richard Sambrook, director of BBC News, says the corporate pressures are intensifying to focus upon celebrity reporters and presenters and downgrade the emphasis upon news gathering. On-screen talent, not content is becoming the basis of difference between rival American news broadcasters and we are starting to see the same in Britain, said Sambrook in a lecture in Cardiff.
None of this however suggests that it is easy to unravel the claims of entertainment from the claims of good journalism. The most effective journalism achieves both. But it is clear that money distorts the picture in many ways.
THE CASE OF TABLOID JOURNALISM
What is then the case for the defence for the tabloid journalism? Interestingly, this question comes more from outside than from within the news media. The starting point is that much criticism of tabloid journalism is, as understood by Silvester Bolam: a little more than snobbery, the mocking view of the man and woman in the best seats at the opera for the couple who prefer watching soap opera on television. ‘The Sun stands for opportunities for people and for change in the society. It is a real catalyst for change, it is a very radical paper’, Rupert Murdoch once said 15 and there have been periods when this claim has been justified, whatever you think about Page Three Girls or Kelvin Mackenzie’s way with facts. There is no escaping the fact that the old establishments, which live or die by public support, not only need the support of the tabloid readers, they need to be able to speak in a language to which those readers will respond, if democracy is to thrive.
An example of this point emerged in 1990s during the exhaustive coverage of the trial of O.J.Simpson, the footballer accused of murdering his wife and a male friend, and which has been linked with the growing reluctance of black Americans to serve on juries or, when they do, to behave in a manner expected by the court. After the trial, Dan Lungren, California’s attorney general, complained about the ‘oprahisation’ of the American juries – a reference to the heated debates, leading to instant judgement, which takes place on television talk shows like the one hosted by Oprah Winfrey. ‘Talk show watchers are widely considered by prosecutors to be more likely than others to distrust official accounts of “the truth”, Lungren said.
Regrettable though this tendency, if true, may be from the point of view of an attorney general, it must be balanced against the possibility that black people might indeed legitimately doubt trustwortyness of ‘official accounts of truth’. In the words of Kevin Glynn, an academic commentator, tabloid media multiplies and amplifies the heterogeneous voices and viewpoints in circulation in a contemporary culture, giving rein to many that are typically excluded from the dominant regime of truth through the dynamics of race, class, gender, age and sexuality. The shrill and repulsive response to tabloid media from ‘respectable’ journalism indicates the extent to which their popularity threatens officialdom’s power to regulate the discursive procedures through which we make sense of the society. ‘Serious’ journalism is far more concerned with controlling, organizing and ordering the hierarchy of voices it admits into its discursive repertoire than is tabloid news, whose contents are driven by ratings and circulation.
This is exactly what Murdoch said in plainer language.
Catherine Lumby, an Australian journalist has gone further, arguing that TV shows like Winfrey’s exemplify a new form of public speech, one which privileges experience over knowledge, emotion over reason, and popular opinion over expert advice. 18 ‘Western public spheres have become a forum for voices and interests which were largely excluded from public debate even thirty years ago’. She could have added that among the consequences of Winfrey’s style, and her celebrity, was the development of the most successful book club in American literary history, as the television star’s book club show in the late 1990s became for a period the key driver o country’s best seller lists.19.
Ethics Of Journalism
Journalism is a domain of moral choices, sometimes involving a melodramatic interplay between good and evil, which probably explains why the news media have proved such a fertile source of story-lines for Hollywood.
Fictional news heroes and their challenges come in many shapes and sizes, reflecting the dominating concerns of their day. In 1930s, Torchy Blane a female reporter tested gender stereotypes in the urban jungle, demanding entry to a crime scene with the words: ‘Holdups and Murders are my meat. I’m Torchy Blane of the star’. Orson Welle’s creation, Citizen Kane, based upon the career of William Randolph Hearst, delved into the news industry’s hazy ability to discern the difference between fact and fiction. ‘He was disappointed in the world, so he built one of his own’, says one of Kane’s aides. The same decade yielded the first of four screen adaptations of a successful Broadway play.
The Front Page (1931), featuring Hildy Johnson’s irrefutable description of a general new reporter’s life: ‘It’s peeking through key holes. It’s running after fire engines and waking up people in the middle of the night. It’s stealing pictures off the old ladies after their daughters get attacked.’
In 1970s, the Hollywood’s mirror briefly reflected a more positive image of the newsroom. All the President’s Men (1976) starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, delivered a gripping account of the story of the decade: ‘the Washington Post’s exposure of the Watergate scandal. Soon Jane Fonda was exposing nuclear skullduggery in The China Syndrome (1979), however this wasn’t an everlasting phenomenon. Films like Broadcast News (1987) have shown journalistic integrity taking second place to glamour and entertainment. The Insider (1998) portrayed television journalism corrupted by corporate self interest and in To Die For (2000) Nicole Kidman plays a young woman willing to corrupt school children and murder her husband in order to get a break in television news documentaries.
Killing Journalism
If the Hollywood’s journalists are ethically challenged, so they are in real life as well. On October 15, 1978, Murdoch’s News of the World published a story about a math teacher, Arnold Lewis, who organized sex parties for consenting adults in his caravan in Welsh hills. In between time when the undercover reporters phoned him of his impending notoriety and press time, Lewis gassed himself in his car. At the inquest, the coroner asked the female reporter whose byline appeared on the story whether the contents of Lewis’s suicide note upset her. ‘No, not really’, she replied. Many years later, her editor confessed that the editor still kept him awake at night3.
The Sins Of Journalism
Over the past decades there have been several debates by the journalists about news value and the merit of the stories that have helped define the new tabloid era in the evolution of the media.
Beyond the fact that two people were dead, writes David Krajicek in his book ‘Scooped’, ‘the O.J.Simpson case was important only because it addressed the country’s confused racial dynamics and the secretive subject of spousal abuse. The Dick Morris prostitute scandal was news because it unveiled political hypocrisy—a presidential consultant who espoused family values and sucked a hooker’s toes when he wasn’t playing bridge with his wife’.
The Jim Baker-Jessica Hahn case was about sexual power and financial deceit in the religion racket. Heidi Fleiss was about power, somehow, in Hollywood, Rob Lowe was about the abuse of a star’s power. William Kennedy Smith was a case of alleged sexual abuse by a man born into a family with political power. The Bobbits? The empowerment of a woman against an abusive spouse. Amy Fisher?
Is it surprising or a mere coincident that most of these stories involve sex? Doesn’t seem to be convincing enough to be true. For centuries the scribes of the world have been served by lust and six other sins: pride, envy, sloth, intemperance, avarice and ire. These basic ingredients have formed the stock of the news stew since well before parchment replaced cave walls as the medium of choice. During the Middle Ages traveling news balladeers and storytellers earned their daily bread by dishing out details about executions, wars, natural disasters, adultery and lawlessness. When Johann Gutenberg perfected the movable type in Mainz, Germany in the fifteenth century, the technique was employed to print an edition of the book of Psalms. But it surely was not long before enterprising writers expanded upon the religious motif. Perhaps a true life tell-all account of a love triangle involving a local minister and his mistress from the chant coir in Antwerp.
Crime, death and immortality have been part of the standard repertoire of what is now thought to be journalism since its birth. That is not surprising because those same themes from the spine of both classic literature and folk legends—the more respectable cousins of modern journalism—in most cultures. In particular, human beings have proved to possess an enduring and robust appetite for tales about coitus and death—how life begins and how it ends. A question arises as to why stories about murder and sex make our pulse race? Is the interest purely prurient and morbid? Is it triggered by a primordial survival instinct of some sort, like animals that obsessively sniff at the carcass of a family member of their family unit, as though looking for clues to how to avoid the same fate? Or, as a reporter in Cleveland once suggested to David Krajicek, are sexy crime stories so popular “because people like to read them”?
Whether the appeal is shallow or deep, the popularity of this type of news has created a convenient codependency between the seller and the buyer—convenient in that each can blame the other for its propagation. Today, as always, an irreconcilable combination of lust and disgust greets bloodstained and sexy news. Readers and TV viewers consistently say that they want to be spared most o the gore and gossip, but news directors and editors point out, correctly, that circulation figures and ratings beg to differ. Clearly some one is stealing peeks at the stuff.
The tabloid pedigree of the U.S. journalism traces to the founding fathers, or at least a founding uncle. James Franklin, the older brother of Benjamin Franklin was a printer in Boston who is believed to have acquired a brash entrepreneurial spirit while working as an apprentice in England in the same journalistic era described by the London Daily Post. In 1721 he established the New England Courant, which set itself apart from the other Boston periodicals by combining stories of sex and crime with strident political polemics. A writer of the competing Boston News-Letter called the Courant “full-freighted with Nonsense, Unmannerliness, Raillery, Prophaneness, Immortality, Arrogancy, Calumnies, Lies, Contradictions, and what not, all tending to Quarrels and Divisions, and to Debauch and Corrupt the Minds and Manners of New England.
A Joke Of Ethics
A question arises however that do the reporters take the ethics seriously? Many examples from all over the world make you think that they don’t. One of the most widely used textbooks in the training of the British journalists introduces the subject of ethics with the following words:
To the outsider journalism and ethics are about as incongruous a mixture as you can get. Even to put the two words in the same sentence is to risk reducing the listener to helpless laughter. To the insider on a mass-market tabloid, ethics are largely an irrelevance. Editors, pressed by intense competition for readers, demand that staff cut ethical corners; and competition among the staff encourages some to respond. Lecturing these journalists about ethics is as pointless as advocating celibacy to sailors arriving in port after six months at sea.
Or, as Kelvin Mackenzie, the famous editor of the Sun during the 1980s once put it: ‘Ethics is a place o the east of London where the men wear white socks.’
No wonder that Private Eye, the satirical magazine that specializes in poking fun at the media, locates the newspaper industry in ‘the Street of Shame’, where its spineless hacks, like Lunchtime O’Booze, do the bidding of an absurd proprietor, Lord Gnome, who functions with the lawyers (Sue, Grabbit and Runne) at one elbow and his curvaceous assistant, Ms Rita Chevrolet, at the other.
Journalists And Their Belief
Talking about the ethic involved in journalism, it is important to understand the mind of a Journalist. But the question largely remains unexplored. The researchers have found that most journalists believe that they are in the business of getting the information quickly to the people, but there are different school of thoughts about the limit to which the journalists should see themselves as ‘watchdogs’ on government or other centers of power. This is a highly rated objective among the journalists in Australia, Britain, India and Finland, but much less so in the countries, which lack a long history of democratic government and a tradition of free press. Algeria, Taiwan and Chile provide examples among the countries surveyed.
Nor could journalists really agree on the importance their role as analysts, or whether they have an obligation to report accurately. Only 30 per cent of the British sample agreed that journalists must be accurate and objective while performing their duty. In Germany more than 80 per cent agree on this obligation. German journalists who are regarded by their British counterparts as dull and cautious creatures, say they are much less happy about harassing sources, using documents without permission and paying for information
What About Conscience?
It is perhaps not surprising, in the light of such surveys that there is confusion about standards of behaviour in journalism. There simply is no lingua franca of journalistic ethics. Journalism is an occupation, especially in newspapers and magazines, which prides it upon the absence of regulation and which, by its very nature, is simultaneously trying both to tune into and challenge the moral and political reflexes of the societies in which it functions. It remains to be seen whether convergence of print and audio-visual media via the internet and other digital platforms will result in regulation of the press becoming more like broadcasting and vice versa. What is certain, however, is that we will no achieve high moral standards in journalism by accident. Healthy democracies need transparent data about communications and communicators, so that thy can debate the business of journalism with authority, intelligence, grit and insight.
TABLOID CONVERSION OF THE MAINSTREAM PRESS IN INDIA
Talking of Page 3 journalism in India, it seems to be multidimensional, with two of the leading national dailies, The Times of India and Hindustan Times going neck to neck with their celebrity frenzy style of coverage, in fact the page 3 for them has spread its wings and today comes out in form of complete supplements. HT City and Delhi Times probably are among the most read publications in Delhi today. If the loyalty of the readers is set aside there is very little that separates the two daily supplements, with each carrying a full celebrity meal on each of their issue.
To some degree, the mainstream media have left behind the journalistic ethics that have guided them since the 1950s. Whether television or the print forum, news organizations seem to have redefined what constitutes appropriate coverage. They now spend a considerable amount of time in covering tabloid-type stories, not all of which involve crime and trials (for instance, extensive attention is paid to celebrities and their activities). A question arises as to why these celebrity trials and investigations receive such attention? The answer may lie in the fact that these events, unlike most other news stories guarantee the press of an opportunity to provide detailed, prolonged and a rather inexpensive coverage. On the one-hand stories about hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, fires and other natural disasters (historically media favorites), for instance can be sustained only for a few days. There might be a series of short reports on pre-disaster anxiety and preparations, several pictures and descriptions of the actual event itself and a culmination with post-disaster victim reaction ad clean up efforts. Stories about celebrities and their trials and investigations, on the other hand can be sustained for weeks, months or even years. In fact, the length of the trial and the criminal proceedings actually allows for suspense and interest to grow over time. Further, the relatively slow moving nature of the criminal justice system allows these cases to become national melodramas embedded in the social fabric of our country and its culture.
Clearly, the length of trials and investigations is part of what makes them such ideal stories for news organizations. It is to be noted that at times the public expresses little direct interest in such stories. Rather, people regularly indicate that they consider these cases to be boring sagas and believe that media spends way too much time on them.
It is difficult to understand if the coverage of such stories is merely the media’s response to public demand for this demand is, in effect, denied by the citizenry in polls. Alternatively, there may exist a set of internal media imperatives driving the coverage of these cases, such as the need to promote ratings or maintain a competitive edge over the other media outlets.
CELEBRITY JOURNALISM FROM THE EYE OF A REPORTER
Bollywood is the biggest source for the news emanating on the Page 3. Today, Shahrukh Khan is bigger than any other personality in India. Priyanka Srivastava, Senior Correspondent, Delhi Times shared her views on Page 3 journalism and its future in the country. Speaking about the impact, which the film stars generate, on the news media she said, Films in India and all over the world are an important form of entertainment. And the craze for film stars per se is high across the globe. So, any newspaper, magazine or channel cannot do without the lifestyle or entertainment section, which consists largely of the news related to the film stars. And so far as the hype is concerned, it is only because film stars are the one's who are heard the most so the hype is natural. Since people want to know more about them, much is written or shown about them in the media. When we talk about Page 3 celebs, it consists of film-stars, top business tycoons, socialites, television stars, singers etc. Though pg 3 consists of news about known people from the entertainment section, but, film stars are noticed the most thus the news related to them attract the attention, immediately
Replying to a question on the stature of page 3 and its potential Srivastava said, “The news related to the rich and famous and the high and mighty have always been carried by the news papers. However, in the recent time, it has gained popularity as Page 3, which is nothing but compilation of interesting news, gossips taking place at various events and parties. Page 3 news has been important all over the world, but, in India, it has gained importance in last 10 years. Though, the page 3 journalism is not given due importance, but, it is the most sought after section as it is largely read.
About the future of Page 3 journalism she states, “Page 3 is growing in leaps and bounds. Its importance has grown even more after the news channels have started covering the parties and interesting events. Besides, there are several niche lifestyle and entertainment magazines coming up which cover parties and events. So, the future is bright.
According to Sarika Malhotra, Correspondent, The Times Of India the film stars are not the only page 3 stars in India but they definitely are big names. She says, “In a society where we do not have real heroes they are looked up to as Gods.
As for page 3 journalism she says we ape the western societies for most of our products and page 3 is no different. Also the fact that people have tired out reading serious stuff and page 3 comes across as a nice relief package to them, so the page 3 in the newspaper has got extra importance. Film stars, Politicians, Socialites, Artists are the primary regulars and other then them there is a whole brigade of models, business honchos and their dumb wives on the Page 3.
Free speech and free press gives us a nearly "unbounded" right to cover the banal, the bizarre, and the shamelessly self-promoting. The choice of whether to do so is one that journalists make, and I want to explore whether there are elements of responsible decision-making, or responsibility for the choices we make that affect the decisions of journalists?
Second, celebrity coverage sells — the whole range of it. As a general rule, journalists will attract more, not fewer readers, viewers, or listeners if they include some element of celebrity coverage in the buffet they offer to the public. This is a fact that flows, I fear, from the same primal instinct that makes drivers slow down to watch an accident in the opposite side of a highway — and the more cars, ambulances, and stretchers the slower they will go. In that sense, I guess journalists could argue that celebrity coverage is smart business. Further, I will stipulate that, by extension, competitive pressures provide a plausible justification for celebrity coverage — if I don't do it my competitor will and that will be to my disadvantage.
Inarguably, much of the public is interested in coverage of celebrities — what they're doing and with whom; their rise, their fall, and even their time in the gutter. But are the news media acting in the public interest by giving the public a steady diet of its baser desires?
The news media, imperfect as they are, constitute the central nervous system of our society and communications infrastructure for the culture. We are the essential plumbing — we carry useful information, including information on changing values, priorities, and shared challenges. But we also carry (or maybe spread is the better word here) that which weakens, that which corrodes, that which debases.
Journalists make the decision on what we carry finally. The assertion that "the people made me do it" won't pass muster, although I would allow that "my boss made me do it" does not seem out of the question. In any event, my questions today include why journalists make the choices they do, whether they consider the consequences of their choices. Are they responsible gatekeepers or passive stewards of the people's plumbing? Or are journalists like any other group of workers, cogs in a business out to make as much as it can however it can?
By the way, I do have a bonus question for extra credit: What are celebrities? Are they public figures like elected officials? Are they persons in or near the press's spotlight, whether by choice or by chance? And how should they be treated and why? Are there limits?
Excerpts From Sonia Gandhi’s Article In Outlook.
All too often, we see needless sensationalism; we see the creeping ingress of what, for want of a better description, is known as tabloid journalism. I understand that there is competition and that without commercial viability; no newspaper, no magazine or indeed no television channel can sustain its way for long. But should not the search for readers, listeners and viewers always be tempered with professionalism and restraint? Should enthusiasm and exuberance be allowed to dilute objectivity? Why, for instance, should rumour be presented as news and gossip as fact? Truth in media should not end up as a contradiction in terms.
INTERVIEW WITH SABINA SEHGAL SAIKIA
Page 3 journalism is more aspirational, than a forceful genre followed by the news media. It strengthens the basic essence of journalism that at the heart of every type of journalism is the society. It is important to be noted that with the advent of modernization, people have become more and more interested in what eminent people are doing in their lives. Today, entertainment has earned itself an image of repute as it comes across as a vent to public’s troubles and frustrations.
Experts argue that people have a tendency to live vicariously and voyeuristically through other’s lives. So, the celebrities gain a position of eminence and as the line goes: Journalism is all about covering what matters. So if people want to know about the celebrities, they get it.
According to Sabina Saikia, former Editor, Delhi Times politics has become too boring with all its scams and controversies, also both print and electronic media provide an extensive coverage on the politics, sometimes getting to a stage of overdose with its analysis and the expert comments. Therefore the ‘Page 3’ comes across as a relief factor in such circumstances.
The function of the Page 3 therefore becomes to cover the parties, weddings and other social functions and keep the readers/viewers updated with the latest developments in the lives of the people who matter.
As for the Page 3 journalism in India, Saikia claims, “I was the first one to start this genre of Journalism in India during mid 1990s”, or rather give it its present shape. The Page 3 was evident, though just a little bit in the Saturday edition of The Times of India; however, with the coming of Delhi Times as a special supplement, Page 3 announced its arrival in fine style. From the first day of its publication, Delhi Times is known to cover the celebrities like no other media has done. She says that people who were at the centre of it all, were convinced that the time had come to introduce the Indian readers to Page 3 journalism, the belief which became a reality when all the leading dailies and the news channels had a section of their own, devoted entirely to parties and people.
A point to be noted here is that long before Delhi Times and the others started the full-fledged Page 3 journalism, there were a few tabloids in the country like the Mid-Day and the Blitz, but they were hardy based on the lines of their counterparts from the west. According to Sabina Sehgal Saikia, these tabloids based there soul in politics and other stories, so they never indulged into the so called ‘celebrity journalism’.
The Youth Factor
Saikia attributes the popularity of Page 3 to the youth of India. Quoting an essential demographic figure, that about 70 per cent of India’s total population is under 35 years of age, she says that the audience today is not the old intellectual people who are moved more or less by the developments in the political and the economic spheres, but the youth who seem to have had their share of politics and economics and are now looking to enjoy themselves. They are concerned with the people in the lime light and in a way live their dreams through the celebrity’s life.
Another fact is that gone are those days when people considered academic intellect to be the greatest virtue one can possess, when people were interested in glamour and lime-light but were generally hypocrites on the face of it, things are different now, people believe in what they do and are proud of it. They read the editorials and the celebrity news with the same interest. There is no hypocrisy in what they do.
How Sun-ny Is The Indian Page 3
Saikia says, “In India, the genre of Page3 Journalism is still in its nascent stage, people still have to understand the aspirations behind it. The Indian Page3 is about pro-activeness and not character assassination; it is about aesthetic and provocative beauty and not titillation.
On the question of Paparazzi, she says that it is early for the advent of such a degree of sensation in the Indian media. The Indian social set up is one which doesn’t essentially go with the concept of hunting the celebrities; however journalists rarely miss a moment with a celebrity that makes a good story.
As for the celebrities, Saikia says that celebrities ‘just love’ to be on Page3. She continues, “As an editor many celebrities used to call and check if they were going to be covered in the next day’s edition.”
How Big Is Page 3?
Considering all the aspects I stand with a question in my mind that how big the page 3 has grown. Don’t think too many experts can help me on the issue?
We’ll to me the page 3 today has grown beyond expectation taking everyone with it; don’t mind the few who have been left behind. Exceptions are always there. More and less page 3 has and is performing the functions of more than just a page in the papers and way more than a half hour show on news television. It has become a culture, a habit, a routine and moreover a way of life. Good or bad, it is up to the experts to decide.
It is known that celebrity gossip has ruled the media ever since the late '20s when Walter Winchell invented the genre in his syndicated newspaper column. Winchell served a hearty blend of hard news, loose facts, innuendo, and vitriol about stars, politicians, and the rich. Compared to today's celebrity rags, Winchell covered an entire universe of people. But thanks mostly to Fuller's influence, the constellations of people worth gossiping about are the blond and fertile—and a few legacy stars like Liza. It's as if Fuller and her competitors milled the whole grain of Winchell's formula to a pale dust. Has the page 3 journalism now reduced to mere reporting what the celebrities wear and do before each time they go to sleep, if not, then the rush for getting the first click or the exclusive interview doesn’t seem in tune.
PAPARAZZI
Paparazzi is a plural term (paparazzo being the singular form [1] [2]) for photographers who take candid photographs of celebrities, usually by relentlessly shadowing them in their public and private activities. Celebrities claiming to have been hounded by such photographers often use "paparazzi" as a pejorative term while news agencies commonly use the word in a broader sense to describe all photographers who take pictures of people of note.
Origin
The word paparazzi was popularized after the Federico Fellini 1960 film ""La Dolce Vita." One of the characters in the film is a news photographer named Signore Paparazzo (played by Walter Santesso). In his book Word and Phrase Origins, author Robert Hendrickson writes that Fellini took the name paparazzi from an Italian dialect word for a particularly noisy, buzzing mosquito. In his school days, Fellini remembered a boy who was nicknamed "Paparazzo" (Mosquito), because of his fast talking and constant movements, a name Fellini later applied to the fictional character in "La Dolce Vita."
Techniques
Technological developments in cameras (such as higher quality telephoto lenses and high speed films) enable paparazzi to shoot their subjects from afar, and often unseen. Miniaturization allows tiny palm-sized cameras that can effectively engage in secret photography. Further, digital cameras and transmission methods allow for rapid distribution of the pictures.
Restrictions
Due to the reputation of paparazzi as an annoyance, some states and countries (particularly within Europe) restrict their activities by passing laws and curfews, and by staging events in which paparazzi are specifically allowed to take photographs. In Germany photographers need the permission of the people in their photographs.
The presence of paparazzi is not always seen as annoying; the arranger of an event may, in order to make the guests feel important, hire a number of actors who pretend they are paparazzi (so-called "faux-paparazzi"). This was, for instance, seen at extravaganza events during the dot-com boom.
Paparazzi sell their work to dozens of magazines and newspapers that publish such photos for their readers and subscribers, and many paparazzi feel that they are helping celebrities and public figures in general by increasing their visibility. Not only can photographers earn large sums of money for a valuable picture, but celebrities may also benefit from the publicity,
Paparazzi in the news
In 1999, the Oriental Daily News of Hong Kong was found guilty of "scandalizing the court", an extremely rare criminal charge that the newspaper's conduct would undermine confidence in the administration of justice. The charge was brought after the newspaper had published abusive articles challenging the judiciary's integrity and accusing it of bias in a lawsuit the paper had instigated over a photo of a pregnant Faye Wong. The paper had also arranged for a "puppy team" to track a judge for 72 hours, to provide the judge with first-hand experience with what paparazzi do
Some observers blamed paparazzi for the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Al-Fayed, who were killed in 1997 in a high-speed automobile accident in Paris, France, while being pursued by paparazzi. Although several paparazzi were briefly taken into custody, no one was ever convicted, and the official French investigation of the crash concluded that they had not caused the accident, and in fact the cause of the accident was a drugged and drunken driver named Paul Henri.
According to an article in Time Magazine, Time Style and Design, Fall 2005, Mel Bouzad, one of the top paparazzi in Los Angeles, is a twenty-six year old man who makes it his business to know where celebrities will be at any given time. Bouzad's job is to take marketable pictures of celebrities. The article continues to say that Bouzad, like many other photographers, moved to Los Angeles with only his camera and a change of clothes, only to become a very successful businessman, running his own company, MB Pictures. Bouzad told Time how much money is involved in the business by claiming to have made $150,000 for a picture of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez in Georgia after their breakup. He also claimed, "If I get [a picture of] Britney and her baby, I'll be able to buy a house in those hills," referring to the luxurious homes in the hills above Sunset Boulevard. Bouzad went bankrupt in 2006.
Also according to Time, Peter Howe, the author of Paparazzi, says, "Celebrities need a higher level of exposure than the rest of us ... so it is a two-way street. The celebrities manipulate."
Some have argued that it is the paparazzi who "make" people celebrities, but very often, the celebrities attempt to act as if they hate and fear the paparazzi. Some paparazzi have responded that if a celebrity, who sought out fame in becoming a celebrity, wants privacy, they shouldn’t leave their home.
The E! Network program Celebrities Uncensored used often-confrontational footage of celebrities made by paparazzi.
Waparazzi
A new term for amateur photographers at major events was coined in February 2006 by Orange (UK). Wrote MediaGuardian, "Fans armed with mobile phones were given their very own press pen outside the Odeon Leicester Square. And the name for this new breed of amateur snappers? Why, the waparazzi, of course."
Passers-by or witnesses to news events who take images later used for broadcast have been dubbed snaparazzi.
PAGE 3 AND CINEMA
An important ingredient of the page 3 in India to be specific is the news emanating from within the film industry, especially bollywood. The film industry has been a real big thing in the country, with the film-stars given the status of super heroes and the movies considered nothing but epics. From Dev Anand to Shahrukh Khan and from Hema Malini to Rani Mukherjee every actor has been a subject of media attention. A photograph depicting Bollywood film stars Shahid and Kareena allegedly kissing each other was recently published in a Mumbai tabloid. While the celebrity couple went around town crying foul play, news channels across the country went into an overdrive, running video clips of the alleged lip lock. While a kiss between a celebrity couple may not be such a big deal, the fuss over public display of affection by those in the limelight calls for a debate. Private lives of the rich and the famous have always piqued public interest. This by no means denies them the right to privacy. But constant scrutiny is the price of fame and celebrities are held to higher standards of personal behaviour than the rest of the society. The incident has reignited the debate on just how far the paparazzi should go. There is no denying the fact that public figures and media feed off each other. Many celebrities often seek media exposure, revealing many aspects of their personal lives. In this case it is by all standards hypocritical to complain of press intrusion, when the media decides to foray into those aspects that the stars would prefer to hide. But at the same time continual probing into the private lives of those in the limelight is illustrative of a press, which thrives on sensationalism. It may be wishful to expect the media to turn a blind eye to incidents that whet public curiosity. But there is an urgent need to put moral guidelines in place for those who create a veritable circus around the private lives of known figures. The pictures and video clips might make life entertaining for some, while for others they may classify as no more than a cheap publicity stunt.
As I discuss a chapter on Page 3 and Cinema, this article by Jerry Pinto, which appeared in the magazine Outlook, is too tempting to be left out. With the twists and turns the film industry is taking, the essence of the article does not seem to be a distant reality.
Coup De Kank
'HELLO AND WELCOME, I AM KARAN JOHAR AND THIS IS THE NEWS AT 9'
JERRY PINTO
Right now, it doesn't matter if you don't have an opinion on Israel's bombardment of Lebanon or whether you believe in Dr Manmohan Singh as prime minister. You have to know where you stand on Karan Johar's cotton-candy take on infidelity, Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna. The subject isn't new even in Hindi cinema: off the top of my head, I can name Guide, Silsila, Masoom, Yeh Nazdeekiyan, Arth, Griha Pravesh, Aastha, Ek Hi Bhool, even Paheli....
And yet, the media began to behave as if the film had actually investigated marriage as a serious text instead of a way of showing pretty people doing petty things against a backdrop of extreme privilege. TV channels are tying up with films. Soon, editorial control will be offered up for access to stars.
For that is what Karan Johar's cinema is about but you'd think he was actually making something important and meaningful. So meaningful that NDTV literally couldn't stop talking about it.
But then, this is the way it is going to be from now on.
Watch Barkha Dutt talking about remakes on We the People, when the remade Don (Shahrukh-Priyanka-Kareena) comes out. For you see, NDTV has managed to tie up with Farhan Akhtar for that one and he might just give them a little spot in which some extra holds up a mike saying NDTV. Industry sources say that CNN-IBN has tied up with Jaan-e-mann (Salman-Akshay-Preity), so we will have Rajdeep Sardesai on love triangles, perhaps? No one knows which way J.P. Dutta will jump when his version of Umrao Jaan (at Kargil, perhaps?) is released but someone will snap up this one since it has Aishwarya, Abhishek and Sunil Shetty and then we'll have indepth interviews with the designer of the costume and the zari workers who slogged for hours....
They tie up. Nothing wrong with that, is there?
Well, not really, not unless we're worried about the nature of journalism, even film journalism, which Khalid Mohammed once described to me as being tantamount to having "third class citizenship in the nation of the media". It is not unusual for a television channel to commit to a thousand spots, some of which are promos, but some of which are also editorial. So while everyone goes around saying that the Times of India pioneered the sellout of journalism to the interests of the bottomline, watch while the television channels offer up their editorial control for access to the stars.
"You see," says a straight-talking critic from one channel, "the industry is savvy now. They take along another crew to shoot the crew so that they have material for those 'Making ofs'. Those are huge. A channel can play them and look like they were there and if you think viewers are going to feel a bit of deja vu, they add a little of their own masala, a few interviews with the editor or the cameraman to make it look different. Or they give you access to the set and let you shoot some stuff with them. That kind of thing."
But KANK was the textbook case. It generated hype on its own because it was a Karan Johar film and there is something so unbearably glossy that all the little girls will go and spend the commute home asking each other who would stray if she were married to Shahrukh/Abhishek (depending on whether the little girl in question likes her men camp or clumsy). But the media was on the same bus. You couldn't turn around without a journalist of stature having a magisterial say about the problem of marital infidelity, the unbearable lightness of cotton-candy cinema and other such earth-shattering topics.
At this year's Osian Cinefan, the French were preening themselves on how they treated cinema as a cultural event and how a new film would sometimes be given three pages in Le Monde. Then Hubert Niogret, also French, pointed out that while the paper would give a film three pages, they would give it this kind of saturation coverage even if their critic thought it a bad film.
That's what we've done here. We've taken our star worship to its natural conclusion. In our desperate desire to know anything about them, everything about them, we've allowed our media to turn into panders for the producers. The next time we watch a saccharine Simi or a cozy Karan, we should know what we've done. We've thrown out the baby and now we've got into the bubble bath. Bring on the froth....
Celeb Starved Society
If television is believed to be the most credible source of information today, then this is something from television that too from a person who is more than just a known figure in the television today.
The prologue to the main event goes something like this:
After months of media speculation Bollywood's most-talked about couple, Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan got engaged in a closely-guarded ceremony.
The engagement took place soon after the couple returned from the premiere of their latest film Guru in New York and the news has literally kept the nation engaged ever since.
In a talk show on the news channel CNN IBN, Editor In Chief Rajdeep Sardesai put forward a question to actor and television anchor, Mandira Bedi; Ad guru, Alyque Padamsee; and senior journalist Madhu Trehan. The question was, Is India is a celebrity-starved society?
There was a sense of frenzy over the engagement of probably the most celebrated couple in the film industry as hundreds of fans and media personnel had gathered outside the Bachchan bungalow, Jalsa, in Mumbai, to catch a glimpse of the Bachchan family.
When asked if Indians were obsessed with stars in general and Aishwarya and Abhishek in particular, ad guru Alyque Padamsee said, "I think it's really the media which is obsessed with stars. All we see in newspapers today is Bollywood, Bollywood and more Bollywood with a little bit of cricket thrown in. It's a complete frenzy. What is going on?"
However, when told that the media had simply taken over from where the ad-men left, Padamsee said, "Yes, I agree. It's also the problem of advertisers who have gone mad about having celebrity brand ambassadors. But that can be understood for they are trying to make sales. However, I thought the news media was supposed to be giving us news not entertainment. It's a feeding frenzy."
Is the media responsible for this frenzy or is it simply reflecting the fact that it's Bollywood's Jodi No. 1 which is getting married and that makes for a great story?
To this Madhu Trehan said, "It's not the media that has gone crazy and neither is it that the audience are celebrity starved. It is basically a reflection of what India has become. It's a money making proposition."
She said that the film industry is an advertiser in all media with their films, their cinema and theatres and media houses would not turn down these great advertisements. "So it’s really the advertisers who decide the stars and these people are made stars by the business houses of the media," she said.
Do celebrities and media feed on each other?
So, is the relationship between stars and the media incestuous or do they simply feed on each other?
To this Mandira Bedi said, "Absolutely. They do feed on each other. I would like to know what the definition of 'breaking news' is nowadays. The fact that Aishwarya and Abhishek got engaged was breaking news on every channel on Sunday night and all through Monday morning. So, I am wondering whether the really important things in life are that important any more”.
However, she added that she agreed that it was a great story and since this is what the society wants, this is what the media will give them.
But stars in general are also marketing themselves. It's a part of the game that one needs to market themselves to be relevant – even Aishwarya and Abhishek almost needed to event manage their engagement.
Mandira Bedi disagreed with this saying that they don't need to event manage their engagement as the news channels and newspapers did the needful for them.
So do news channels have a defence in this regard, especially with ad-men and celebrities themselves attacking the media?
"It's a mutually exploitative relationship between stars and the media and in any exploitative relationship, it is very difficult because one always crosses the line. So a star will get up and say 'enough, this is my private life' or a journalist is compromised and is told 'I will give you an interview if you don't ask me about my affairs'," said Madhu Trehan.
To this Rajdeep Sardesai said that his own view as an Editor was that the 24-hour beast needed to cover both Nithari - a gruesome and terrible story - and the Ash-Abhisek engagement, a happy story.
The Reality TV Celebrity
Shilpa Shetty is the same actress who made her debut along side Kajol in the 1993 flick BAAZIGAR, but Kajol left her far behind in the race for popularity. Apart from good performances in movies like Dhadkan and Phir Milenge, Shilpa was known more because of Geoffrey Boycott rather than any achievement in her film career. But as they say it is never too late to start. So a bright decision, to go abroad to participate in the reality television show, Big Brother, some controversy with Jade Goody, intervention by Indian and British Governments and the media was all about Shilpa Shetty. Racialism or no racialism, the entire episode ensured such coverage for Shilpa that is doing wonder for her career which as going down hill. It was recorded that within two days of the controversial comments made by Jade Goody the TRP of the show Big Brother were quadrupled. The newspapers and the news channels also made hay as the hullabaloo loomed large, another incident that proves the fact that the media is hungry for any kind of news related to the celebrities.
DEMARCTION OF PAGE 3 CULT
In Indian newspapers, Page 3 makes a clear demarcation of froth from hard news. Yet, the thin supplements that chronicle cocktail parties and gossip from the world of glitterati manage to attract a lot of attention (not to mention cash returns) from the popularity circuit. Observers are of the opinion that India’s emerging Page 3 culture reflects two distinct dimensions of an aspirational society. One is the genuine need for tittle-tattle, and the other is the growing desire to be seen as famous. The tabloid culture has imbibed from television channels, radio stations and cyber entities, and is set to emerge lot stronger in the coming days.
Responding to the increasing popularity of the section, brands also seem to be keen on being featured amidst the extraordinary mix of news and fiction. Says Prasanth Kumar, Associate Media Director, Maxus, “The Page 3 arena has grown in volume and content over time, and people like Nafisa Joseph, Preity Jain and the kind have started occupying the centrestage. What started out as an interest area for the minority has emerged into a big pre-occupation with the majority. Brands are a lot more enthusiastic about a Bombay Times, or an HT City in the current day, as these promise them a high level of noticeability. So, whether its lifestyle, cosmetics, food products, sports shoes, drinks or anything else, they are keen to get aboard the Page 3 bandwagon. Youth-related brands are on a high as far as these segments are concerned.”
Hiren Pandit, GM, Mindshare, asserts, “The growing fascination with the Page 3 cult reflects an aspirational Indian society, where the party scene and social relationships are paramount. While lifestyle and youth-centric brands are on an overdrive as far as Page 3 segments are concerned, there are still brands like financial institutions, for instance, that maintain their staid reputation, and prefer to stick to the main sheets. On the whole, I would say that the base of Page 3 advertisers still consists of youth centric brands. Non-traditional advertisers are perhaps not so open-minded about the same.”
Shariq Patel, Station Head, Go 92.5 FM, says that the appetite for light-hearted content is steadily increasing both among brands and listeners. Which is why the station has come up with its own little segment dedicated to the social lot, interestingly, called Page 3’.
Patel explains, “We launched this particular segment in April 2004, in partnership with Bacardi Blast. The segment goes on air from 8.45 pm to 9 pm (Monday to Saturday) within Malini’s show Horn Okay Please’. It gives listeners the daily dope pertaining to the celebrity circuit. And I am happy to say that the initiative is definitely bringing in desired response.”
This explains why snazzy stories are no longer adorning supplements alone, but are also making their way towards the main pages.
On a recent occasion, Rahul Kansal (Director, TOI Brand), mentioned, “The newspaper is no longer a patriarchal figure as in yesteryears. Structure and formality are no longer the pure fundamentals. We have come to realise that there is a range of content beyond politics and the spotlight has moved from news that’s important, to news that you can use, and finally to news that you can enjoy. Times, as a newspaper, is now acknowledging the new aspirations of the people and opting for a youthful look. The move is proving to be extremely successful in the market.”
News is evidently moving out of its political mould, and embracing subjects that appeal to the aspirational side. The theory, perhaps, remains stuck to the good-old saying, there’s no biz like the showbiz.
FACTUALITY AND CELEBRITY JOURNALISMAudiences may not expect or want absolute factuality
One of the most contentious professional issues with regards to celebrity journalism is its relationship with factuality. Can stories about celebrities be believed or not? The question is, however, whether audiences are actually looking for absolute factuality in celebrity news?
It should be noted that stories about celebrities often appear very factual as they – unlike the royal family - can sanction media publishing inaccurate information by withdrawing their cooperation or lodging a complaint with the Press Council.
But when it comes to the royal families and particularly those stories which relate to the love life of the crown prince or the possibility that princess Alexandra might be pregnant again, celebrity journalists may employ a different version of factuality to that of traditional facts based journalism. This technique could be labeled the gossiping technique.
The gossiping techniques
In traditional facts based journalism facts are used to create as complete a picture of a story as possible. A story about the crown prince’s frequent trips to Australia would be deemed irrelevant unless somebody competent would comment and explain what he was doing there.
Celebrity journalism, however, may take its starting point in the factual observation that the crown prince has been going to Australia quite often recently and use that as a frame for the picture of the story. The area in the middle of the picture would then be opened up for discussion with the reader when the journalist offers up an interpretation based on other types of information than direct and attributable quotes of why he goes there so often – for instance because of a new love interest.
It is a technique which gives the reader an opportunity to engage in the story through active gossiping which essentially is to evaluate and interpret the behaviour of others.
But it is important that the journalist present an interpretation which is believable and desirable – to suggest that the crown prince is undergoing treatment for alcohol problems out of the public eye would probably not be accepted by the audience unless there was firmer evidence for it.
Gossiping And Truth
Does the gossiping technique threaten credibility of individual stories as well as that of the journalistic profession in general?
The answer to a certain degree depends on the sophistication of the audience. For the audience, the danger of the gossiping technique obviously is that in order to make the story work, the journalist implicitly asks readers to question and disagree with certain story lines. Those who appreciate the technique may enjoy the individual story without loosing faith in the general credibility of journalism.
But for those who do not understand or accept the method such a story may lead to doubts not only about a particular story itself but about all other stories in the same media as well as the production process behind it.
It should also be borne in mind that there are clear differences in the skill and morality with which individual journalists and media apply the gossiping technique. Sometimes the gossip storylines go beyond journalism and lead the reader directly into the territory of fiction.
Engaging With The Audience
The gossiping technique is part of the special dynamics which govern celebrity journalism and distinguish it from other types of journalism. Central to these dynamics is a very active relationship between journalism and consumers. Contrary to communal wisdom celebrity journalism demands a fair amount of activity on the part of its consumers in order to succeed.
First, consumers need to build up relationships with people in the public eye to such an extent that they are willing to invest in celebrity news products in order to learn more about them.
Building relationships of that kind is a dynamic process which requires consumers to consume cultural products such as news, tv-programmes, movies and music.
That a personal relationship is necessary is amply illustrated by considering the lack of interest Danish consumers have in Swedish or German celebrity magazines which are full of similar stories but about people Danish consumers do not know.
Second, as the Australian media researcher John Langer has pointed out in his study of tabloid news, celebrity journalism rely on the consumer being willing to use herself and her own life as something to measure lives of celebrities against.
Celebrity must be recognised as something extraordinary in order to create the necessary tension to consider the rather ordinary events in celebrity lives (shopping, falling in love, having a baby) interesting and perhaps more interesting than the same event in the consumer’s own life.
And third, some of the presentation techniques such as the gossiping technique and the sharply angled front-page headlines also require active participation and accept from consumers to work.
Editors of weekly celebrity magazines in Denmark say that gaining accept from consumers is an ongoing process where the main negotiation takes place at newspaper stands as consumers make decisions whether to reward good headlines by buying the publication or punish it for last week’s edition by leaving it on the shelf.
Changes Ahead?
With few and notable exceptions, celebrity journalism is cozy and inoffensive. And editors of weekly celebrity magazines believe that this state of affairs is unlikely to change for the foreseeable future because a definite section of the audience will not accept scandal mongering or sensationalism in their magazines.
The huge demand for any story about the Danish royal family has for instance led celebrity magazine Billed-Bladet to abandon a long held policy on allowing members of the royal family to personally decide whether they would accept being photographed when they appear in public places on personal business.
Now photographs are taken before consent is asked for another picture. If the answer is no, the magazine reserves the right to publish the first picture which was taken before personal interaction.
Billed-Bladet not only markets itself as the Danish royal magazine but also prides itself on particularly high ethical standards compared to the other celebrity magazines. Still, perceptions of market demands have changed principles for newsgathering at the magazine, and the question is how far audiences can push journalistic principles before they are met with resistance from the newsroom?
Constructing Celebrity
Pressures against the independence of celebrity journalism also come from the process of constructing celebrity.
So far celebrity journalism has been based on a fairly free exchange between celebrities and journalists of information for attention. But exchange rates are rising. There are examples of payment to celebrities for exclusive pictures from weddings although the extent is nowhere near the situation in Britain where some celebrities generate major incomes for themselves by selling life events to celebrity magazines.
Editors complain that celebrities make demands on how they want to appear in the news although the situation is nowhere near that in Hollywood where journalists must negotiate with PR agents for access to interviews with film stars.
But celebrity journalism more or less is heavily involved in the construction of celebrity and with the appearance of reality TV the process has become intensified to the point where journalistic independence is in jeopardy.
This year, the Danish popular newspaper Ekstra Bladet made an arrangement with a Danish television station that they would publish news from the first Danish series of the reality-TV programme, Big Brother, every day in exchange for exclusive access to good stories and the showing of the newspaper’s logo in connection with the broadcasts.The paper’s editor, Hans Engell, called it a win-win situation: Daily coverage of a popular television programme with many viewers would also attract many readers. But journalists at the paper worried that by entering into such an agreement, the paper was in danger of relinquishing editorial freedom and independence to producers of celebrity.
Will It Continue To Be Journalism?
These observations go straight back to the question whether celebrity journalism can be called real journalism?
For the time being, parochialism seems to preserve celebrity journalism as a largely journalistic practice.
However, with the rise of celebrity as news value in a market which leading futurologist Rolf Jensen expects will be based on providing consumers with emotional experiences, it was worrying to note that editors of Danish celebrity magazines in general do not have any visions of a journalistic mission beyond serving the market.
It is a form of naivety which can be damaging if the same editors want to be able to stay within the parameters of a journalism paradigm rather than becoming dependent cogwheels in the larger production of celebrity through constructed authenticity.
This statement is a bit problematic. The Indian news media was covering the Shilpa Shetty racist slur story well BEFORE the Parliament or other leaders chimed in to condemn it. The main reason it even was raised in Parliament was because the sheer number of viewers in the UK and worldwide wrote in to express their disgust to the network for airing the racist slurs and statements.
Once the racist slur did become the subject of official government speeches both here and in the UK, it’s understandable that the press here would cover those reactions. But spending 15 to 20 out of 30 minutes of a news broadcast on this? Save that for the entertainment news shows.
The other point worth making here is that we are discussing REALITY television–most of which has now become scripted by producers to generate maximum ratings. In other words, most of these actors are being TOLD what to say, which to me basically transforms the genre into a sort of quasi-fictional serial of sorts. Of course, this doesn’t justify telling actors to throw around racial slurs or even tolerating such atrocious behavior. But it is reality television. And there are far worse acts of racism going on in the world–why doesn’t the Indian news media focus on the scores of cases in which British police have attacked or abused Indians in the U.K? Probably because it doesn’t make for good ratings.
Aside from this, there is a civil war going on in Iraq where countless thousands are being killed. There is genocide in the Sudan where millions have been killed. There is similar chaos in Uganda presently. There are countless instances globally where thousands to millions of people are being ravaged by war, genocide, disease, hunger, and losing their basic human rights and civil liberties if they survive all of this. I don’t see the mainstream media in India covering any of this on the front page.
But they did go on ad nauseum about the Shilpa Shetty row and the Aishwarya Rai-Abishek Bacchan engagement. A sad statement about news reporting today.
Calling coverage sensationalistic doesn’t mean that the media shouldn’t cover a given story. What it does mean is that the media shouldn’t obsessively focus on a story to the detriment or exclusion of other important stories. For example, there is a very little well-reasoned coverage in the mainstream Indian news media of issues relating to systemic poverty, corruption, family and child abuse, violation of women’s rights, child slavery, or sheer governmental lawlessness. The only time such stories receive major coverage is if there is some major singular tragedy such as the recent Noida atrocities, or if some huge corruption scandal is uncovered. But generally speaking, coverage of such issues is either very limited or truly superficial and not thought provoking–there isn’t enough coverage that truly heightens general awareness of the scope and severity of problems in many areas that pressures the government or civil society groups to redress these problems.
The whole Rahul Mahajan incident this past summer is another example of this, which highlighted the pervasive problem of drug and substance abuse in India. But again, the reason this got front-page billing day after day was because it involved a celebrity or well-known person, and NOT the actual significance or severity of the underlying issue in quesiton.
I’ll cite one other example. The “Aishwarya Rai-Abishek Bacchan engagement” story was front-page news in multiple leading daily newspapers in India. Should the media cover this story? Perhaps. Should it be the main front page story? No–it should be relegated to the “Gossip” or “Entertainment” section.
The bottom line is that the media in any country must have some responsiblity to provide good, unbiased, and well-researched coverage of significant news stories that affect people, including what their government is or isn’t doing, the state of environmental policy, the state of policies designed to help the poor and oppressed, etc.
The NEWS media however must also responsibly resist the temptation to cater to the lowest common denominator of our salacious desire to know every detail about the personal lives of celebrities. Covering the Shetty racism story is important given that it highlights the persistence of racism towards Indian-Americans globally. But elevating the Big Brother show as a top story to the detriment of other equally important and long-persisting social problems in India highlights the fundamental problem with media coverage both in India
Sensationalism And The Media In India
The tabloid press in India sells far fewer papers as compared with the broadsheet newspapers and is largely confined to the metros. On the other hand it is no secret that tabloids in England sell more than newspapers and earn more advertising revenue.
At the same time over the past few years in India, there has been what can only be called a ‘tabloidisation’ of the national newspapers with major newspapers like the Hindustan Times and The Times of India printing a separate section on the city. This section of the paper is generally flush with photographs of glamorous personalities and is accompanied by a write up that is a mish mash of juicy tidbits and gossip from the filmi, fashion and corporate worlds. It does however remain within a certain code of decency.
It can be said therefore that over the last decade or so the national press has become less serious sensing an interest in its younger readership for more lighthearted fare. By introducing lighter fare that accompanies the more serious pages the newspapers have increased their readership and simultaneously kept the tabloids at bay, for the tabloids do not then have anything special to offer.
Can we envisage a time in India in the not to distant future when tabloids will overtake the broadsheets in terms of sales? This could happen only with the emergence of a yet greater appetite within the reading public for even greater sensationalism and stories with sexual overtones. For it would not suit the broadsheets to carry overly salacious material even on its city pages. They are already walking a tight rope in this regard. They would lose stature and all sense of serious debate and opinion were they to do this and further alienate its conservative readership, which is already unhappy with the increased focus on fashion and gossip in the city pages.
Tabloids have the advantage of keeping a smaller number of staff on their payrolls and their overheads are also less. This is true even with the hot selling Sun or Mirror in the UK as compared with big newspapers such as The Times or The Guardian.
With the emergence of Cable (and now Satellite) television in India there has come about an increased awareness and with it notions of morality too are changing. While this can be seen to be positive in some respects, there are negative consequences as well. It can be seen therefore that with respect to television drama, adulterous affairs are thrown into serials to spice them up even where the story line does not demand them. This has tended to lower the general quality of serials.
With respect to the print media, the quality of the writing in a tabloid is generally inferior to that of a newspaper. The views are also less sophisticated and not nearly as well presented or argued. It can even be said that tabloid journalists are instructed by their editors to write in a simple fashion (if not more grossly).
'There is some truth in such an observation,' admits Gavin Evans, a practicing journalist of many years who now teaches journalism at the London School of Journalism (LSJ). 'The only thing that I can say is that you do need a certain kind of ability to come up with the puns the tabloids often come up with.'
Serious students of journalism however often evince reluctance to work for the tabloid press. 'I would never ever consider applying for a job with a tabloid,' says Myles Myall, a student at the LSJ, who previously studied Russian politics and is keen to report and make journalistic contributions on events happening in Russia. In India, as yet the tabloids offer few jobs to wannabe journalists but this could change in the future.
Yes, tabloids as opposed to the broadsheets survive on sensationalism. – "Twelve Year Old Brutally Raped and Butchered, Why Can't Britain Kich This Man off Out of the Country, This Man is Poison, Gay Man Sells Sperm to Lesbian Couple for One Pound ...." These are a small sample of the kind of headline that will scream at the reader in the United Kingdom. The journalists who write for them are careful to use shorter sentences and simpler English even while writing features as opposed to news reports. They are after all writing for an audience whose core readership is relatively less educated as compared to the readership of a national newspaper.
Is this then part of what Nobel Laureate VS Naipaul refers to as the ‘plebianisation’ of English culture? The unfortunate side effect of wide spread literacy. It is all very well to argue in favor of freedom of speech and say: ‘Let a thousand flowers bloom’. On the other hand it is not difficult to have sympathy with the somewhat elitist hope that even when censorship laws are loosened in India - as they inevitably will in time to come - the British kind of tabloid press will not emerge in the country in any major way.
Exclusive Celebrities
It is good to see that there are channels exclusively for the celebrities to be covered. Zee café, Vh1, AXN—all have their own exclusive shows dedicated to the celebrities. A majority of these shows focus on what the celebrities eat and what they wear while sleeping. Apart from that the bread and butter of the makers of such shows is dependent entirely on the dress-ups of the stars and their personal relations. Moreover, the celebrities who at times pretend to be sick and tired of such shows prove themselves wrong when they disclose the so-called inside information. It is often said that there is no smoke without fire, so if the page 3 journalists come up with, it doesn’t sum up to be a total fabrication. The presence of shows like ‘After Hours’, ‘Fabulous Lives’, ‘Celebs Uncovered’, ‘Pop-korn’, Current Bollywood’ and others are almost identical in the style of coverage, only difference being the language.
If there are television shows to cover the celebrities, the print counter-parts are not far behind. If one starts counting the number of publications involved in covering the cult, surely the fingers would go for a toss. But to name a few recent entries into the already existing list, we have a tabloid named Page 3 and other publications like ‘Metro Now’ in our own country.
DUMBING DOWN OF MEDIA
Debate about so-called ‘dumbing down’ extends beyond journalism to include education, the arts and society in general. Of direct relevance to journalism is the claim that news is being transformed into ‘newszak’; that is, ‘news as a product designed and “processed” for a particular market and delivered in increasingly homogenous “snippets” which make only modest demands on the audience’. Supporters of the dumbing down thesis bemoan the fact that news is being converted into entertainment. Chris Frost, an expert on human behaviour, writes that journalists are facing increasing pressure to become entertainers by finding stories that will delight the audience rather than inform, titillate rather than educate. For Pierre Bourdieu, a French scholar, this results in journalists being ‘so afraid of being boring’ that they increasingly favour:
Confrontation rather than debate.
Polemics or polarized views over rigorous argument.
Promotion of conflict.
Confrontation of individuals rather than their arguments.
Discussion of political tactics rather than the substance of policies.
Dehistoricised and fragmented versions of events.
There is nothing new about the perennial complaint that ‘journalism just recently got worse’, observes Samuel Winch, Assistant Professor of Journalism at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He argues that the boundary between news and entertainment is ‘socially constructed’ rather than based on essential elements.
The popular press of today can be seen as drawing on the 19th century ‘new journalism’ that was marked by a definite shift towards entertainment, a deliberate policy of appealing to the masses as part of a cultural and commercial proposition rather than as a more sedate organ of enlightenment and instruction.
Elitism
Critics of the Dumbing-Down thesis argue that it is an elitist concept, far too simplistic to do justice to the complexity of today’s journalism – or journalisms. Paul Manning, an American broadcast journalist thinks that there need to be some entertainment value in journalism because ‘news audiences are unlikely to warm to a format that has the feel of a sociology seminar’. For Brian McNair, the recent proliferation o outlets and styles, along with the blurring of boundaries between elite and popular culture, mean that journalism is less deferential towards the powerful than in the past (McNair 2000: 59-60). He explains: The distinction between ‘serious’ and ‘trivial’ information is no longer one which can be taken as the basis for evaluating the public sphere…An earlier form of detached, deferential , more or less verbatim political reportage has gone from the print media…to be replaced by styles and agendas which, if they are occasionally entertaining, are at the same time more penetrating, more critical, more revealing and demystifactory of power than the polite, status conscious journalisms of the past. And it is precisely the commercializing influence of the market, which has allowed this to happen.
Kees Brants argues that a mixture of ‘entertainment and consciousness rising’ could help to re-establish the popular in politics, taking in not only ‘the discursive and decision-making domain of politics but also the vast terrain of domestic life’. For Conboy, the debate about dumbing down and tabloidisation reflects anxiety about ‘a slippage of control’ on the part of those who have traditionally led public opinion. But, given the multiplicity of media outlets now available to audiences, it could be that ‘exposure to some kind of news is arguably better than no exposure at all’
The Twitch
Elites appear to be a natural topic for news. Their ‘very being as they are’ becomes a readily available source of occurrences that can be used to generate news stories. Yet simply to follow their doings and way of life lacks the efficacy assumed to be the basis of good journalism. Some impact is sought, some circumstances revealed, which can give the impression that it is indeed a news story. The gossip column in most of the news papers normally faces such a problem. To solve it one of the most mundane activities is to be used. One technique is generally to twitch our mild surprise at a discrepancy between what we expect of a character and what the news story actually tells us. An item about Bipasha Basu wearing certain jewellery may momentarily shake up the reader’s deposited sense of how the actress ought to behave and simultaneously reveal an unexpected ordinariness in the aspirations of a member of the higher world. The strategy of twitch stands in close proximity to a rhetorical maneuver commonly encountered in the fait-divers – bringing together terms logically belonging to distant ‘circuits of significance’ in a relation of coincidence for a surprising effect. The seemingly incongruous relation – in this instance between stardom and jewellery – can however work as at another level and provide the scaffolding for another discourse about the especially remarkable. They are simultaneously elite and ordinary, exalted and humanized. The reduction of distance between two seemingly distinct circuits of signification allows the higher world to become both more recognizable and more like our own. The privileged and those without it, the powerful and the powerless, the rulers and the ruled are shown to inhabit the same world of small and ordinary things.
Entertainment Versus Elitism?
Telling entertaining stories is a part of a journalist’s job, as is telling stories in an entertaining way. Lighter stories can be rewarding, as Yorkshire Television’s Lindsay Eastwood explains: I enjoy doing the ‘And finally … stories because you can be creative. I’ve done a giant mushroom story, and a dog that was allergic to grass so they made it these special red wellies. That was sweet. I did a lollipop man who’d won a ‘best lollipop man ‘ award and he did a rap, so we got him dancing with some kids. I did a baby boom in a Hull supermarket where everybody on the check out had a baby. We got them to do the Marge Simpson thing with the checkout going ‘ping’ when the baby was scanned in. And they’ve even taken a shot of my cleavage for National Cleavage Day. You can have a lot of fun on TV.
More serious news is also reported in ways designed to be entertaining. News is told in the form of stories hat usually focus on individual people rather than abstract concepts. News stories are written in a language, which is accessible, active and importantly colourful. And news stories may be presented visually and creatively to attract an audience.
Whenever journalists address ‘popular’ subjects, or report in ways intended to entertain, they run the risk of being accused of dumbing down – threatening civilization as we know it. Almost 70 years ago F J Mansfield recorded complaints about press sensationalism, distortion, invasion of privacy and the reporting the sex ‘beyond proper limits’ Ring any bells? David Goodhart, Editor of Prospect, a British current affairs magazine rejects the dumbing down argument as elitism and nostalgia: A combination of new media technology and social progress means, for good and ill, that common culture has gone forever. Welcome to what critic Jason Cowley calls ‘our crowded, fragmented, cultural market place.
As this is the cultural market place in which journalists must sell their wares, it means that part of the journalist’s job to entertain as well as inform. The trick - for both journalist and audience – is to recognize the difference between the two. And to remember that sometimes the facts of a story, simply told, can be the most entertaining of all. The changing role of the media to hype, sensationalise more so the new found obsession - the desire to do it first - all force us to believe that the media has somehow begun to become the show itself. The medium must remain the medium, it cannot become the message.
PAST AND FUTURE OF PAGE 3 JOURNALISM
Having a look at the yesteryears one finds that there are foundling beats—crime, sex and celebrities. This journalism is as bad as it has ever been, if not worse. An analysis of the journalism in the past decade might help demonstrate that these beats have been locked in the orphanage during an era of the media enlightenment.
On April 19, 1992, the producers of Fox Television’s A Current Affair distributed an electronic press release via the PR Newswire Association that hyped a segment scheduled to air on the program the next day. The headline read: ‘PRINCE EDWARD IS GAY’, ALLEGES INTERNATIONAL HIGH-SOCIETY COLUMNIST ON NATIONWIDE TELECAST OF ‘A CURRENT AFFAIR’, MONDAY APRIL 20. The text explained that the columnist, Taki Theodoracopoulos, offered the revelation about the British Prince “during an in-depth probe by ‘A Current Affair Senior Correspondent Steve Dunleavy into the scandals rocking the Queen of England and the royal family”. The press release offered Dunleavy’s office number for those seeking further details.
Based upon nothing more than Dunleavy’s press release, The Orlando Sentinel, Boston Globe, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Newsday and many other papers published stories that particular Monday about Prince Edward’s reputed sexuality. But these papers quoted Dunleavy as saying, “We don’t out anyone. We’re just reporting on allegations”.
This was a classic example of peeping-tom journalism, an essential element of the new tabloidisation of the mainstream media. Reporters and editors who would not vouch for the veracity of the material published in or aired by another legitimate news organization suddenly found themselves willing to peek through the window of a tabloid TV show and tell reader and viewers all about what they saw. Even though it was widely known that the progrmmes operated free of many of the traditional ethical constraints of journalism, newspapers willingly imperiled their reputations by tacitly vouching for A Current Affair, which used scripted questions and answers on some interviews, stage reenactment, and paid for information. The program’s version of truth had all the integrity of an infomercial and every journalist in the country knew that.
Newspapers were willing to risk their most valuable asset—the public’s trust and confidence—because the material the tabloid programme provided was so titillating that they could not resist. The cross-pollination served both parties. As in the Prince Edward story, A Current Affair distributed press releases, videotapes and photographs to the newspapers, wire services, and TV programmes before a story was to air, and the media touted the upcoming show. The payoff to a paper was a sexy picture or a sexy little story that might increase the readership or get a rise out of a bored editor. For the tabloid TV the payoff was increased viewer ship, ratings, and therefore advertising revenues. Everyone won—except the befuddled news consumer. Jerry Nachman, the broadcast journalist and the editor of the tabloid New York Post said the tabloids began to serve as the crash-test dummies of journalism on sleazy stories. “Slam into the wall, come out undead and everyone say, ‘Oh good, let’s pile on.”’
In relation to the famous or rather the infamous Amy Fisher story, someone outside the media industry might wonder as to why a rational editor at a good newspaper like Newsday would not step forward to question the publication of such a story. But by the time the piece was published in 1993, the legitimate press had run scores of stories copped from tabloid TV. The practice had become so prevalent that it was inconspicuous. Ad when came to Amy Fisher, what was the point holding back sexy stories? She was a crime celebrity, not because she was a dangerous criminal after all, but because she was nubile, a novitiate prostitute still wearing high school plaids. Sex was precisely the point, just as it had been in most of the sleazy stories that had dominated the news since the mid 1980s.
Realising how important and powerful the media, whether print or electronic, have become today, its responsibilities towards society have also increased manifold. The Preamble of the constitution proclaims the resolve of the people of India to secure:
Justice, social economic and political;
Liberty of thought, expression;
Belief, faith and worship; and
Equality of status and of opportunity;
And to promote among them all
Fraternity, assuring the dignity of the individual
And the unity and integrity of the Nation.
Media can play a significant role in achieving the aim, which the founders of the Constitution have set. The journalists are urged to recollect the glorious role media had played during the freedom struggle and set higher standards for themselves. It is high time and the Indian media should free itself from the corporate pressures and should try to slow down the race for celebrity news. A line of demarcation between news and entertainment definitely needs to be drawn.
Imitation of western media without appreciating the context of Indian Society is not going to help the nation, or the press fraternity. Delicate balancing of news and views should be the concern of the media with orientation for Bahujana Hitaya and Bahujana Sukhaya.
I would like to end by quoting Rabindra Nath Tagore:
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action----
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOOKS
1. The Sociology Of Journalism by Brian McNair
(Arnold Publications, 1998)
2. Journalism Truth Or Dare by Ian Hargreaves
(Oxford University Press, 2003)
Media Scandals by James Lull and Stephen Hinerman
(Oxford University Press, 1997)
Tabloid TV, Popular Journalism And Other News by John Langer
(Routledge Publications, 1998)
Ethics And Media Culture By Practice And Representations by David (Focal Press, 2000)
6. Tabloid Justice In The Age Of Media Frenzy by Richard.I.Fox and Robert.W.Van Sickel (Lynne Rienner Publications, 2001)
7. Media Monoliths by Mark Tungate
(UK Kogan Press, 2004)
8. India’s Newspaper Revolution by Jefrey Robin
(Oxford University Press, 1999)
9. Scooped! Media Miss Real Story on Crime While Chasing Sex, Sleaze, and Celebrities by David.J.Krajicek
(Columbia University Press, 2001)
10. Dirty Discourse: Sex and Indecency in Broadcasting by Robert Hilliard and Michael Keith
(Blackwell Publishes, 2007)
NEWSPAPERS
THE TIMES OF INDIA
HINDUSTAN TIMES
THE HINDU
THE ASIAN AGE
THE PIONEER
DELHI MIDDAY
METRO NOW
PAGE 3
PUNJAB KESARI
MAGAZINES
OUTLOOK
INDIA TODAY
THE WEEK
\MAXIM
DEBONAIR
FILMFARE
SOCIETY
SHOWBIZZ
STARDUST
TV CHANNELS
VH 1
ZEE CAFÉ
AXN
SONY MAX
CHANNEL V
MTV
CNN IBN
NDTV 24x7
STAR NEWS
ZEE NEWS
AAJ TAK
WEBSITES
www.outlook.com
www.vh1.com
www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk
www.washingtonpost.com
www.citypages.com
www.americanpressinstitute.org
www.prdomain.com
www.cnn.com
www.vh1.com
www.hoot.org
www.digg.com
www.poynter.com
INTERVIEWS
Sabina Sehgal Saikia (Former Editor, Delhi Times)
Sarika Malhotra (Correspondent, The Times of India)
Priyanka Srivastava (Senior Correspondent, The Times of India)
Zia Salam (Assistant Editor, The Hindu)
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
2 comments:
some ad student, somewhere in the world would be thanking you to have made his job easier....
www.sangambayard-c-m.com
Post a Comment