Open up any tabloid today, and inside you will find lechery, debauched rhetoric and asinine comment pieces: Playing to the strength of an under-educated staff, with Austen-esque sensibilities. Modern-day mainstream journalism is the prostitution of a wide-ranging prolix (as demonstrated within my introduction, hopefully), and a want to better. It's puerile hedonism: Sensory descriptions based on rumour, tasteless critique devoid of substance, tantalising for the taste buds, debilitating for a moral compass.
Take any front page at random (of the lesser tabloids, for this is where my ire lies), for instance, let's flick to The Sun today. Runs roughshod over the funereal goings on of the Gately family, juxtaposes to a shot of Katie Price's ample cleavage superimposed over a picture of Noel-Fielding lookalike cage fighter, with the tag "Jordan Brags About Sex With Alex" (beautifully crafted). I'm not sure of the cognition that's gone into this layout, it truly could be inspired: As one is buried, another may have been inseminated (hey I can do terrible half-rhymes too) - if it were this, a subtle interplay of the frailties of life and the birth of the new. Sublime in its most Wordsworthian sense. That's not the line, though, is it; the line is that people need to be cheered after reading something even remotely harrowing - they need the apposition; like I said: Sensory hedonism. We flutter delightfully from the sad, terrible premature death of Gately to the sordid Jordan affair; seriously when will this saga end? Talk about milking a story for all it's worth. We get it now: She's unconventional and mildly eccentric. Leave her alone, it's infinitely tedious.
Fear not, however, we soon descend into the ninth-circle of hell; we are truly adrift on Styx, all sense of realism and moral turpitude has long been abandoned at the shoreline - let's take leave of our sense, Anton Du Beke. Yes, it's that rubbish about him saying his dancer-partner "looked like a paki" after a spray-tan. Wow, it's surprising to see the Sun taking an admonishing stance here - the entire episode stinks of a delicious irony; bigotry whored out as admonition. So we've reached hypocrisy now, too. Newspapers for some reason feel the need to engage in the binary of hilarity each and every week: Every week there is a frankly alarming level of zealotry within the tabloids in telling us 'Not to blindly follow the government', but yet and at the same time they try to preach us there own repugnant agenda. How does tandem hatred and profiteering work? It's an incompatible formula: Disdain and acquiesce.
So how have we arrived at this junction? Where do we turn from here? If we go left, surely we're destined to end as predicted? An imploding media, devoured by its own megalomania and hypocrisy. Each year we see a downturn in sales of newspapers, widespread redundancies, and more and more ruthless editors asking for more and more ruthless subordinates. We've reach an apex and we've got these choices in front of us. To the left, as I say, is further immorality and masturbatory pandering to a mouth-foamingly banal end. To the right, perhaps, a sense of freedom or of escapement. Shelley once said: "Though art not, as imposters say,/ A shadow soon to pass away,/ A superstition, and a name/ Echoing from the cave of fame"; a poignant demonstration perhaps.
So I faded from my original train there, let us now analyse the front of The Daily Mail - and yes, impressive that I managed to coin it by its 'real name'. Let us take a sojourn through a weird and lurid landscape beyond description: Words truly do fail me, it's a Dickensian portraiture of an Orwellian country. What it is, is naked profit-gouging under the guise of morality. What we have here is a critique of modern-day Britain, slowly melting under its own angst. 'Evil mother', 'Cunning mother' - here is a truly fantastic difference of word choice. What we have here is precisely the type of technique which shows you the brain power of your typical Mail reader: The headline rests with "Evil mother", whereas the tag at the bottom is "Cunning mother"; and that's simply because not everyone will understand "cunning". Great, eh? We slalom through the funeral (almost literally) of Stephen Gately, to the size of Jonathan Ross' wife; taking a quite respite to sympathise with Cheryl Cole (fights in pubs, not a bigot) about how nervous she is to perform on the x-factor even though she's an established pop-figure and they're all relative amateurs. It's oxymoron; sensory overload. How are you to know how to feel? You aren't. That's precisely the point. You can only digest this much latent hatred if you cannot understand the true rationale and message. If you were to analyse this page for page you would come to a startling confusion that life was both pointless and wasteful. You'd probably kill yourself: It's 1984 incarnate; cadaverous humanity, and monstrous society.
But is life really that bleak? Where did sensationalism come from? Well, the Victorians, now that you ask:
"Most of the pleasures we imagine to be our own, the Victorians enjoyed first. They invented the theme park, the shopping mall, the movies, the amusement arcade, the roller-coaster, the crime novel and the sensational newspaper story... Blame them, or thank them, for the suburban housing estate. For the fax machine. For... political spin-doctoring,... investigative journalism,... sex contact ads."
So, yeah, thanks Victoriana: They revolutionised the system, and we adopted it, neigh, we adapted it to suit our own ends. So the driving force behind a sensationalist publication is surely a sensationalist populace? Surely at at time of revolution; of revolt and political upheaval, an over-excited urbane population is to be expected? Are we thus in the same turmoil as Victorian Britain? Do the suffragettes push through bills unseen? Am I unaware of the landed gentry outside my door? Is the funniest joke an uncovered piano leg?
Seriously: Sensationalism is the driving force behind modern-day journalism, but it need not be. Sensationalism is a masque for triteness, hyperbole a carapace for idol wastrels. What we need is a track-back, a return to the kind of investigative journalism you just don't see covering the front pages anymore: The MP's expenses scandal barely involved much investigation, it was handed to us on a silver platter, the story begged to be told, it was made to overshadow all else. What else has there been?
So how do we dig ourselves out of this? I know I'm being an unrealistic dickwad, an idealist, perhaps, but I truly do think that the profession is salvageable by a few simple codifications. Courtesy and thought need to become obligatory requirements for fresh recruits: Why are we to be enamoured to new columnists whose only endearing feature is the fact they can write a dazzling intro? There needs to be soul, and compassion: Two things entirely devoid in the two papers I have covered above. People also need to learn how to write, and punctuate. The amount of times I see truly laughable mistakes splashed on a front page is beyond a joke: Who is subbing these things? Do we just abandon proof-reading and quality, for the sake of quantity, now? I am appreciating how many feature columnists seem to have a decent vocabulary, that is to be praised, but it is not to be a defining trait of why they deserve a readership. Take a binary: Brooker and Moir. The former has a giant lexicon and also makes superb points; the latter has the former but not the latter. How interesting.
How are we to change the fate of a dying industry? Is it by further obsequious behaviour? Are we to entrench a morally repugnant hollowness? Can we not apply real journalism, real zealous reporting, and real hard-hitting stories? Can we not supply features that colour stories; profiles which inspire and give insight? Must we continue down this road sealing our own fates as a dead industry? Can we not work with the internet, not against it? Can there be no compromise?
So where is our cosmic balance? Where is Karma for our industry? Well, it's self-evident nowadays. Like I've been saying, the industry is killing itself, we're weighed down by this plague of empty writers who have nothing but hackneyed cliché to bring to the table. There needs to be a rapid injection of originality into the world of journalism: Our best writers are overlooked and overshadowed by those who conform to mainstream banality. Moir is published, Thatcher too, Clarkson is lauded; I have friends who have a more pleasing style than any of the previous three - at least Clarkson is funny, I suppose. Good at conceit, too.
We're afflicted with this curse of celebrity. It's everywhere. It has infected everything and everyone to the point where you actually can't go a day without being bashed in the head repeatedly by news of Peter Andre. More so than that: Who the fuck is Peter Andre? I mean, seriously. What do you actually know about him? Nothing. Here's my fucking point. People are covered 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for eternity and you come out the other side still utterly devoid of intelligence of who and what they are. Oh, sure, you know what they do, but why is that necessary for your life? Why are you publishing this empty rubbish? Fuck yourselves. Fuck you you giant pile of fucking wastrels. Disgusting.
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