A couple of enterprising bloggers have compiled lists of all 2011 front page headlines from two of the Desmond group’s papers, the Express and Star. They are grouped by subject, and make for interesting reading, showing the particular preoccupations of these papers.
If you’ve been looking for an article that combines two of the big media stories of last week, the News of the World and Harry Potter, then this is the one:
Tues, Sept 11, three hours after the collapse of the Twin Towers: Begley is told to turn up at tomorrow’s news conference, dressed as Harry Potter.
Wed, Sept 12: Still feeling stunned, he phones his newsdesk editor Neville Thurlbeck for confirmation.
CB: Hi, Neville. I just wanted to check, given the enormity of events in America – will the editor still need me dressed up as Harry Potter for conference?
NT: Well, she knew exactly what was going on yesterday afternoon and she still wanted you to dress up then. I think you should just assume she wants you to do it now.
via Pottergate: we publish the secret tapes – Telegraph.
Ryan Giggs: How the UK press reported the saga | Media | guardian.co.uk.
Yet more on the media debates and wider issues surrounding privacy and social networking, flagged up by the Ryan Giggs super-injunction case.
With today’s headline being ‘Britain’s 40% surge in ethnic numbers, the Daily Express is repeating one of its favourite ideas: that ethnicity means non-white. This New Statesman article considers exactly what they mean.
This kind of thing goes back to an “us and them” distinction that has been apparent in the Daily Express and Daily Star for a while, usually in relation to Muslims and British people, as if the two could not possibly be the same. In this instance, the “us and them” narrative is that this country’s population is composed of two types of people: white and non-white. The assumption is that “we” are white and “they” are non-white, and there isn’t anything in between.
via New Statesman – What a frightening world it must be if you only read the Daily Express.
Uncharacteristically sober piece from Charlie Brooker looking at the representation of Muslims in the Daily Star. There are blogs pretty much entirely devoted to this topic and The Star’s ongoing flirtation with the EDL. Depressing stuff that makes the other tabloids look like the New York Times by comparison.
This week saw the news that Richard Desmond‘s Northern & Shell publishing organisation are no longer under the jurisdiction of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC).
The PCC is funded by contributions from the publications they regulate, and N&S have decided not to continue to pay. This means that there is no one to complain to if you disagree with a story in The Daily Star or any other N&S titles.
The story is well covered by Tabloid Watch: Tabloid Watch: Richard Desmond and the PCC.
Following the move, the PCC have dropped all outstanding complaints against N&S.
A long list of complaints upheld against The Express and Star since March 2008 are listed here, along with payouts.
Follow on from my recent post about the shocking revelation that Mohammed is the most popular boy’s name in Britain.
This feature looks at the range of responses in different tabloids.
Tabloid Watch: What’s in a name?.
Earlier in the year I posted about the Daily Star’s baffling GTA Rothbury article, where they apparently invented a story about the next Grand Theft Auto game being based on the Raoul Moat case.
They apologised shortly afterwards and have just paid undisclosed damages to Take 2 Inc, the publishers of the GTA series.
When it became abundantly clear that the story was nonsense, however, the piece was quickly removed from the Star’s website, and replaced with a grovelling apology, which included the following confession: “We made no attempt to check the accuracy of the story before publication and did not contact Rockstar Games prior to publishing the story. We also did not question why a best selling and critically acclaimed fictional games series would choose to base one of their most popular games on this horrifying real crime event.”
This raises interesting questions about how the games industry is represented in the media.
In part, what the story typifies is a doggedly persistent belief that the games business is some sort of shadowy black market operation, rather than a major entertainment industry that contributes many millions to the UK economy. It is tempting to believe that, thanks to the rise of the family-friendly Wii console and the gigantic explosion in social titles like FarmVille, games are no longer demonised as essentially evil and corrupting in nature. But this fear and loathing appears to exist to this day, at least in the agendas of media purveyors who are happy to exploit the perceived technophobia of their audience if it means an easy scare story.
Of course, it would be cynical of me to suggest that some of the scaremongering and criticism of the games industry is because money spent on games is not being spent on magazines, papers, films, music or other forms of media.
Rockstar vs Daily Star: a landmark moment in games coverage? | Technology | guardian.co.uk.
You may have spotted the Express front page headline ‘Muslim Plot to Kill Pope’ this Saturday. It turns out that all men arrested were released without charge, but the Express have not made quite such an effort to let their readers know that their previous headline was erroneous:
Tabloid Watch: Blink and you’ll miss it.
The Daily Mail is well known for running many articles stating that particular things cause or prevent cancer. In some cases, such as alcohol, they apparently do both.
Someone has kindly produced a database so we can be clear on just what does and doesn’t cause cancer according to that newspaper.