In my post 'The News of the World as soap opera' I argued that the popular press' focus on feeding our baser selves with a daily diet of reality, action, sex,
violence and the trivial has led, in time, to the creation of an ongoing reality celebrity soap opera
which forms the substance of the redtops, celebrity mags, reality TV, and online
chats/tweets encompassing as it does the 'who has been seen where', 'who is with
who', 'who has broken up with who', 'who has attacked who', and 'who has cracked
up and/or rehabilitated' of the real (and, sometimes, manufactured for money)
lives of celebrities, entertainers, politicians, sportstars and victims of
serious crime. For this reason I suggested that Hackgate, rather than diminishing in any way this celebrity reality soap opera, will only feed it as its participants become part of the story.
In today's Guardian, John Kampfner also argues that Hackgate won't drain the trivia out of everyday life:
"As the old saying goes, you get the journalists, the MPs and the coppers you deserve. How many people were complaining about greed when bankers, BBC executives and many others in private and public life were lining their pockets? How many people were indulging in celebrity pap, enjoying the gossip being fed to them at the expense of serious news? Far more than a healthy society would admit.
Why did newspapers plunge towards the lowest common denominator? Because their product sold in a difficult market, and still does. How would the tabloids fare if they put the latest massacre in Syria on their front pages? The redtops are not exclusively to blame. Rarely does a so-called serious paper miss the opportunity to follow up on a celebrity story, sprinkling their reports with irony to help their more knowing readers digest more comfortably. I read them as assiduously as the next person ...
Over the past two decades some people did complain about iniquities in society; some journalists investigated wrongdoing. But far from finding out too much, unearthing corruption and assorted wrongdoing, our media is far too pliant. And the readers, it seems, were not that fussed either, at least while the going was good, while consumerism anaesthetised the brain ...
... the financial crisis, MPs' expenses or phone-hacking and the Murdochs? Each of these scandals attests to the corrosion of the public realm. None of these scandals can satisfactorily be addressed by themselves. They grew out of the same root.
Seriousness needs to be pursued and protected. It cannot be magicked into life by august committees, as each crisis unfolds in our public life. It ultimately comes down to our own individual choices and priorities."
If we feed ourselves a diet that is shallow, superficial and self-centred, we should not be surprised when society becomes ...
Hello! We are the shallow people,
reflections of our fitness ratings,
shining the surface of our existence,
selling our lives to seek significance.
OK! we are on heat, on fire,
hyper cool, yet full of desire.
Bad and wicked are terms of approval.
Bums and tums are there for removal.
Ultra-slim celebs shed baby weight,
the best bikini bodies we celebrate;
airbrushing or anorexic,
eating disorders are so photographic.
Narcissus is our role model;
made in Chelsea , such a fit young man,
lightly tanned and with a wicked four pack,
we know that he is Essex!
We are pissed off, falling over,
stumbling in the dark.
Drunk on celebrity chardonnay,
technology sated, intoxicated.
We think we are such foxy ladies
sexy, sultry sods.
We are hung over, hearing voices,
kissing the porcelain god.
We are off our heads,
out of our skulls,
out of our minds,
we decline.
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The Kinks - Dedicated Follower Of Fashion.
Showing posts with label soap opera. Show all posts
Showing posts with label soap opera. Show all posts
Wednesday, 3 August 2011
Saturday, 9 July 2011
The News of the World as soap opera
Ian Jack, in today's Guardian, suggests that with the closure of the News of the World "the great age of Britain's popular press is drawing squalidly to its close."
What he calls the great age of the popular press, he characterises in two vignettes. First, the owning by the News of the World of "what the Victorians knew as our baser selves" through the paper's specialisation in "salacious accounts of sex and violence." Second, the "enterprising devotion" of the popular press to the frivolous as characterised by Lord Northcliffe, who "spread the word to his staff like a preacher: roughly, to subvert the words of Philip Larkin, readers were forever surprising a hunger in themselves to be more trivial."
"Crime exclusives," Northcliffe noted: "are noticed by the public more than any other sort of news. They attract attention, which is the secret of newspaper success. They are the sorts of dramatic news the public always affects to criticise but is always in the greatest hurry to read ... Watch the sales during a big murder mystery, especially if there is a woman in it. It is a revelation of how much the public is interested in realities, action and mystery. It is only human."
This "only human" principle of feeding our baser selves with a daily diet of reality, action, sex, violence, and the trivial has led, in time, to the ongoing reality soap opera which forms the substance of the redtops, celebrity mags, reality TV, and online chats/tweets encompassing as it does the 'who has been seen where', 'who is with who', 'who has broken up with who', 'who has attacked who', and 'who has cracked up and/or rehabilitated' of the real (and, sometimes, manufactured for money) lives of celebrities, entertainers, politicians, sportstars and victims of serious crime.
This ongoing soap opera which blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction has become 'the news' for many, if not most of us. In what Ian Jack calls "the great age of Britain's popular press," it was the redtops which provided this daily diet to millions of us but, with the advent of rolling news and the internet, the ability of the redtops to deliver, sufficiently quickly, the public face of this celebrity reality soap opera has diminished pushing the News of the World into its alleged illegal focus on the secret face of the celebrity reality soap opera.
This soap opera now provides our sense of the sacred. Gordon Lynch, writing in the same edition of the Guardian, explains that: "Coverage of the death of Baby P or processions at Wootton Bassett honouring soldiers killed in action momentarily bind their audiences together in strong, moral sentiment, either through their recognition of a particular sacred form or horror at its pollution ... The moral credibility of news media lies partly in their ability to work with the grain of sacred meanings shared with their audience ... The degree to which the News of the World profaned what many people take as sacred is unprecedented in post-war media history ... The tipping point came when the actions of people associated with the News of the World became profanations, an evil polluting the cherished sacred significance embodied in the stories of Milly Dowler, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, and the 7/7 bombings."
The death of the News of the World, however, does not diminish in any way the celebrity reality soap opera. Instead, it feeds it. Rupert Murdoch, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson have all become part of the story in ways that they never intended - indeed they are 'the story' for the moment - but, because we are fed by this ongoing soap opera and therefore need those who become stories in it, I predict that - as in the career of Piers Morgan - the story will rehabilitate them at some point in the future and by means of some other role in the soap opera, as long as they come to accept that they have, by foul means, become characters within the ongoing celebrity reality soap opera that they themselves have helped to perpetuate.
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Echo and The Bunnymen - The Puppet.
What he calls the great age of the popular press, he characterises in two vignettes. First, the owning by the News of the World of "what the Victorians knew as our baser selves" through the paper's specialisation in "salacious accounts of sex and violence." Second, the "enterprising devotion" of the popular press to the frivolous as characterised by Lord Northcliffe, who "spread the word to his staff like a preacher: roughly, to subvert the words of Philip Larkin, readers were forever surprising a hunger in themselves to be more trivial."
"Crime exclusives," Northcliffe noted: "are noticed by the public more than any other sort of news. They attract attention, which is the secret of newspaper success. They are the sorts of dramatic news the public always affects to criticise but is always in the greatest hurry to read ... Watch the sales during a big murder mystery, especially if there is a woman in it. It is a revelation of how much the public is interested in realities, action and mystery. It is only human."
This "only human" principle of feeding our baser selves with a daily diet of reality, action, sex, violence, and the trivial has led, in time, to the ongoing reality soap opera which forms the substance of the redtops, celebrity mags, reality TV, and online chats/tweets encompassing as it does the 'who has been seen where', 'who is with who', 'who has broken up with who', 'who has attacked who', and 'who has cracked up and/or rehabilitated' of the real (and, sometimes, manufactured for money) lives of celebrities, entertainers, politicians, sportstars and victims of serious crime.
This ongoing soap opera which blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction has become 'the news' for many, if not most of us. In what Ian Jack calls "the great age of Britain's popular press," it was the redtops which provided this daily diet to millions of us but, with the advent of rolling news and the internet, the ability of the redtops to deliver, sufficiently quickly, the public face of this celebrity reality soap opera has diminished pushing the News of the World into its alleged illegal focus on the secret face of the celebrity reality soap opera.
This soap opera now provides our sense of the sacred. Gordon Lynch, writing in the same edition of the Guardian, explains that: "Coverage of the death of Baby P or processions at Wootton Bassett honouring soldiers killed in action momentarily bind their audiences together in strong, moral sentiment, either through their recognition of a particular sacred form or horror at its pollution ... The moral credibility of news media lies partly in their ability to work with the grain of sacred meanings shared with their audience ... The degree to which the News of the World profaned what many people take as sacred is unprecedented in post-war media history ... The tipping point came when the actions of people associated with the News of the World became profanations, an evil polluting the cherished sacred significance embodied in the stories of Milly Dowler, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, and the 7/7 bombings."
The death of the News of the World, however, does not diminish in any way the celebrity reality soap opera. Instead, it feeds it. Rupert Murdoch, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson have all become part of the story in ways that they never intended - indeed they are 'the story' for the moment - but, because we are fed by this ongoing soap opera and therefore need those who become stories in it, I predict that - as in the career of Piers Morgan - the story will rehabilitate them at some point in the future and by means of some other role in the soap opera, as long as they come to accept that they have, by foul means, become characters within the ongoing celebrity reality soap opera that they themselves have helped to perpetuate.
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Echo and The Bunnymen - The Puppet.
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