“What happened to tabloids’ content was that they became more and more sensational to stay ahead of the curve, sometimes chasing aspects of people’s private lives.”Ĭross compares modern British tabloid culture to the US’s culture of yellow journalism in the 19th century: a lot of muckraking and exaggerating. “Newspapers were desperately seeking to maximize their readership as much as possible,” he tells Vox. At the height of the tabloids’ success, they collectively had an audience of about 85 percent of the entire population. These “powerful forces” were shaped by the competitive British newspaper market of the 1980s, says Simon Cross, a senior lecturer at Nottingham Trent University. “There comes a point when the only thing to do is to stand up to this behaviour, because it destroys people and destroys lives,” Prince Harry continued, referencing how he’d seen his mother, Princess Diana, and his wife “falling victim to the same powerful forces” of the press. (Associated Newspapers told news outlets that it stands by the story and will be defending the case.) The legal process against Associated Newspapers has been “many months in the making,” and some specific claims regard the contents of a private letter Markle sent to her estranged father, which were “published unlawfully in an intentionally destructive manner,” the Duke of Sussex wrote in a statement. This legal action comes days after the Duke of Sussex and Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, sued Associated Newspapers, the publisher of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, over alleged misuse of private information, infringement of copyright, and breach of the Data Protection Act of 2018. The source within the publishing groups told the Guardian they were aware of the claims, but that they have yet to be served with legal notices. According to the Guardian, a royal source indicated that the claims involved alleged illegal interception of voicemail messages. On Friday, the Guardian reported that Prince Harry has filed claims against the owners of the Sun and Daily Mirror - two of the biggest UK publishers - over alleged phone hacking. But for all their eye-catching headlines of scandal and controversy, tabloids aren’t immune to legal action. Six of the 10 most circulated UK newspapers are tabloids, and tabloid publications like the Sun and Daily Mail outnumber traditional papers’ daily circulation. The tabloids are a uniquely British beast, one that “both hounds the famous and the powerful and tramples on the ordinary citizen,” wrote Charlie Beckett, a media professor at the London School of Economics, in the Guardian. The industry’s ethically questionable practices have come under fire before, but the “red top” press - the nickname derived from the tabloids’ bold red headers - remains culturally relevant and widely read. The British tabloids spare no one - not even the royal family - from scrutiny into their private lives.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |