Tabloids are a symptom of society's ills.
Tabloids = the Death of Culture.
Tabloids are black-mouthed parasites on public life, massive with blood —
Or so runs the complaint.
We don't accept it. Why denigrate publications with so broad a readership? Why begrudge the tabloids their giant audience, their stuffed barrels of cash? All you do is insult those who see fit to pay 35p every day for a happily unsubtle march through the last 24 hours' news & chat. If you think their influence disproportionate, you patronise their readers' ability to sift truth from opinion's silt, to distinguish between fact and demagoguery (there have always been demagogues; they have always, eventually, failed), & thus belie what faith in the principle of democracy you profess.
PITCH has no beef with The Sun.
We love it for its brazen enshrining of the hacks' modus Simplify Then Exaggerate. Makes for a cartoonish, almost playschool take on current events, relayed in punchy short paragraphs structured like jokes. It is colourful! It is so obsessed with the insignificant its treatment of the significant makes significance itself look insig- nificant. It is also charmingly at home with the concept of 'woman as object'. Just as every day its Page 3 exhibits nationally an unerotic specimen of soft porn, so the journalism filling the rest of the paper might be described as 'news-' or 'sportporn'. And just as page 3 serves as wank-fodder for ten thousand lorry drivers, so the actual articles serve as opinion-fodder for a thousand lonely cabbies, prejudice and ill-informed argument their ejaculate.
(We realise this may contradict what you'll recall we wrote above.)
All hail the tabloid style! We want to take it as exemplar, but fear we could not honour it.
Tabloids = the Death of Culture.
Tabloids are black-mouthed parasites on public life, massive with blood —
Or so runs the complaint.
We don't accept it. Why denigrate publications with so broad a readership? Why begrudge the tabloids their giant audience, their stuffed barrels of cash? All you do is insult those who see fit to pay 35p every day for a happily unsubtle march through the last 24 hours' news & chat. If you think their influence disproportionate, you patronise their readers' ability to sift truth from opinion's silt, to distinguish between fact and demagoguery (there have always been demagogues; they have always, eventually, failed), & thus belie what faith in the principle of democracy you profess.
PITCH has no beef with The Sun.
We love it for its brazen enshrining of the hacks' modus Simplify Then Exaggerate. Makes for a cartoonish, almost playschool take on current events, relayed in punchy short paragraphs structured like jokes. It is colourful! It is so obsessed with the insignificant its treatment of the significant makes significance itself look insig- nificant. It is also charmingly at home with the concept of 'woman as object'. Just as every day its Page 3 exhibits nationally an unerotic specimen of soft porn, so the journalism filling the rest of the paper might be described as 'news-' or 'sportporn'. And just as page 3 serves as wank-fodder for ten thousand lorry drivers, so the actual articles serve as opinion-fodder for a thousand lonely cabbies, prejudice and ill-informed argument their ejaculate.
(We realise this may contradict what you'll recall we wrote above.)
All hail the tabloid style! We want to take it as exemplar, but fear we could not honour it.
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