The headline ‘Man Bites Dog’ is a classic journalistic aphorism that expresses the difference between an everyday event and one that is newsworthy. Frank O’Brien, in his history of the New York Sun (1833 – 1918) , first promulgated the verity said by editor John Bogart that dogs bite men often and we needn’t get excited about it – but that when a man bites a dog – that is news.

Tabloid Journalism is a type of journalism which is often discounted by those who prefer “true journalism.” Tabloid journalism tend to focus on more sensational or extreme topics such as celebrity gossip, outrageous crime, seemingly impossible events (such as the possibility of extra-terrestrials) or other sensational stories. Tabloid papers take the mantra of ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ extremely seriously. Today, tabloid journalism is particularly strong in anglophone cultures such as the UK and the US. These papers are easily recognisable by the vivid red mastheads – in fact, in the UK tabloid papers such as the Sun, the Mirror and the (now discontinued) News of the World are also known as red-tops. Usually placed at shop checkout counters, many give these papers very little credibility. However, there is a huge market for ‘infotainment’ and advertisers have taken advantage of the circulation, making this business highly lucrative – and making the tabloid press more influential than you might like to believe.

You have seen how the selection of stories can be influenced by the institutions of production and newsworthiness criteria. Now it is time to examine how conventional uses of journalistic language affects the presentation of news stories. The most important concepts in this section are emotive language, euphemism and vague language and you will also learn about the distinctions between broadsheet and tabloid journalism. Read the following pieces to clarify what these terms all mean, learn how to both recognise them and to consider their effects:

• The Media and Journalism (IB Textbook)
• Media Sensationalism (article by Glenn Halbrooks)
• To Fix Fake News, Look to Yellow Journalism (Jstor Daily article)
• Is Sensationalism in the News Bad? (Thoughtco article by Tony Rogers)

Reading Challenge

This is a longer and more challenging text, but spending time on this piece, and discussing it with your teacher, will help you master this topic:

• How to Watch TV News (extract by Neil Postman and Steve Powers)

Class Activity: sleaze and sensationalism

In the world of print journalism, the two most widely seen formats for newspapers are broadsheet and tabloid. Broadsheet newspapers appeared in Britain in the 18th century when the government taxed newspapers based on their number of pages. By increasing the size of the pages, newspapers could reduce the number of sheets in each edition – an ingenious way to lessen the amount of tax they had to pay!  

One of the first tabloids in the U.S. was The New York Sun, started in 1833. It cost only a penny and was easy to carry – the idea of making a newspaper smaller and more convenient appealed to the working class who had to carry the newspaper to work. Early tabloids were more irreverent in their writing style than their broadsheet brethren, and crime reporting combined with lurid illustrations were a hit with readers. This trend continues today: a broadsheet will refer to a police officer, while a tabloid might use the term cop. And while a broadsheet might use up precious column inches on serious news, a tabloid likes to target sensational stories or celebrity gossip, with a penchant for sleaze, sordid sex, and tales of immorality, perversion and crime.

Learning the differences between broadsheets and tabloids is the basis of this sequence of lessons, which will help you understand how newspaper writers and editors can use language in particular ways to achieve different effects – and even alter the meaning of an identical story or event printed in the news.

Discussion Points

After you’ve got your head around the material in this section, pair up, pick a question, spend five minutes thinking and noting down your thoughts – then discuss your ideas with a friend and report back to the class:

1. Tony Rogers writes about sensationalism from an interesting viewpoint: he doesn’t think it’s all bad. What do you think about this idea? What’s good about sensational news reporting?
2. Does the news reflect an accurate image of society? If you were an alien who could only study human societies using news broadcasts that had leaked across the cosmos, what conclusions would you draw about life on Earth?
3. No journalist likes to be accused of bias as reporting the truth is one of journalisms axiomatic principles – but is truly impartial news reporting possible? Discuss the reasons why total objectivity might be difficult to achieve.

Learner Portfolio

Write a tabloid news article that reports (in a biased and sensational way) on an event from one of your literary texts. Include:

• A headline (bonus points for slammers, alliterating or punning headlines);
• An image that presents your subject in either a favourable or unfavourable light, depending on the angle of your story;
• Embedded interviews and comments from various sources;
• Sensational and dramatic language, employing the techniques you have learned in this section of the course.

Here are a couple of tabloid articles written by students in response to this prompt: one about breaking news in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and the other responding to gossip from the High Plateau in Broken April.

Paper 1 Text Type Focus: tabloid and broadsheet newspaper reports

Body of Work: The ‘Difficult Duchess’

In 2016, Prince Harry, a member of the British Royal family, was introduced to Meghan Markle, an American actress, and a modern day romantic fairy tale began. Months after that initial London meeting, the country’s press – including the infamous tabloid redtops – managed to get news of their blossoming romance. The Sunday Express was the first paper to reveal the 36-year-old was Prince Harry’s new girlfriend with the news featuring on the front page.

In September, the couple made their first public appearance at the Invictus Games, an international sporting event set up by Harry for injured soldiers. Crowds gathered to catch a glimpse of the couple strolling hand-in-hand and the global press rushed to capture the moment. In the weeks and months after the story broke, the Royal Romance gripped the nation – and readers in other countries too, who could follow the news story online. Press intrusion began to become more and more significant. Meghan was followed shopping in London and stories began to break about her family relationships, mixed race heritage, pictures posted online, and her previous marriage to Trevor Engleson which ended in divorce in 2013.

In November 2016, the prince officially confirmed he was dating the US actress. In a statement from Kensington Palace, he also took the opportunity to condemn Meghan’s treatment by the press. He referred to a “smear” on the front page of a national newspaper, racial undertones in comment pieces and “outright sexism and racism” from online trolls. Eventually, the two quit the UK and moved to America, where they gave a forthright interview with Opera Winfrey. Many have continued to speculate that the media’s general bias against her comes from resistance to accepting a mixed-race American into what upper-class white British people feel is an exclusive cultural institution like the British royals.

Here you can find a selection of news stories about Meghan Markle and her relationship with Prince Harry to study as a Body of Work. Because a non-literary Body of Work must consist of texts by the same author, all the stories have come from The Sun newspaper, a notorious British tabloid redtop. You can study these articles to discover the way supposedly factual news reporting can be biased towards or against an individual. You might like to trace how the stories became more and more negative over time, keep track of the various names and labels used to describe Meagan, analyse the headlines, notice the institutional voices who are recruited to lead your opinion about Meagan and compare the way the press treats her to the way it treats, for example, Harry in the same stories. Should you wish to find more evidence, you can find over 300 pages (!) of articles, photographs and videos by directly visiting the Sun Online and searching for ‘Meghan Markle‘.

Towards Assessment: Individual Oral

Supported by an extract from one non-literary text and one from a literary work, students will offer a prepared response of 10 minutes, followed by 5 minutes of questions by the teacher, to the following prompt: Examine the ways in which the global issue of your choice is presented through the content and form of two of the texts that you have studied. (40 marks)

An extract from this Body of Work would make an ideal text to discuss in your Individual Oral activity. Here are suggestions as to how you might use this Body of Work to create a Global Issue. You can use one of these ideas, or develop your own. You should always be mindful of your own ideas and class discussions and follow the direction of your own thoughts, discussions and programme of study when devising your assessment tasks:

possible liteary pairings

• George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion – this could be a natural pairing for the ‘Difficult Duchess’ body of work, as Liza is a prototypical Meghan, being asked to fit into an exclusive cultural upper-class family, and being constantly upbraided for her appearance, speech, habits and viewpoints. Until, that is, she finds it in her to fight back.
• Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice – another ideal companion text for this activity might be this play. Long thought of as a ‘problem play’ because of its bias and stereotypical presentation of Jewish people, you might like to present your ideas as to whether the depiction of Shylock leads your opinion in the same way the Sun does with Meghan Markle.
• Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife – this feels like an ideal pairing. Duffy’s intention is to give voices to silenced or marginalised women and – while it would be hard to argue Meghan Markle has been marginalised – although plenty of people are invited to speak about her in this Body of Work, one voice is conspicuously missing: her own.
• Ismail Kadare’s Broken April – like Meghan, Diana is defined by others who see her in a certain way. Whether it’s Mark Ukacierra, who despises her on sight, the local people on the rrafsh who are unused to seeing a woman so free, or even Bessian, her own husband, who doesn’t seem able to recognise Diana’s true thoughts and feelings.
• Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber – in the same way that the media try to define Meghan Markle’s identity to suit their own agenda, so too does the Marquis attempt to remake his young wife in his own image.
• Han Kang’s The Vegetarian – when Yeong-hye decides to give up eating meat, she very quickly realises that to go against Korean social convention makes her an enemy to her family, husband and friends. Is it her diet that offends them – or the fact that she is trying to assert her autonomy in a patriarchal society? Importantly, her story is recounted through the perspectives of others, and only rarely do we hear her own voice.
• Shen Congwen’s Border Town – as Cuicui grows older, her grandfather decides it’s time for her to be married. But how much say does she have in her own future? This could be an interesting choice of literary work to combine with the ‘Difficult Duchess’ news reports.
• Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie – investigating Luo’s attitude towards his new girlfriend reveals some surprising insights. He never really seems to be satisfied by her, can be a bit condescending, and even resents her taking matters into her own hands at the end of the novel.

Wider Reading and Research

• Tabloid Journalism – go to this ‘howstuffworks’ article to find out all about tabloid journalism.
• Journalism 101: how to write a lead – in this informative video lecture, Journalism Professor Mark Grabowski explains how news writers write good leads for newspaper stories.
• The Writer’s Art – in this extract from News Reporting and Writing by Melvin Mencher, you’ll find out the skills most essential for writing the news.
• The Language of News Media (extract from Media and Language by Allan Bell)
• The Fourth Estate – documentary series released in 2018 about The New York Times in the Trump era that explores critical issues facing the ‘newspaper of record’ and journalism today. Embedded here is the first of four episodes: First 100 Days.
• Jon Talks About the Media – podcast episode, Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan talks with Jon Stewart about media sensationalism.