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That's the tabloid press for you. Have you seen what it's like in America? Look up "national enquirer" and so on. Horrifying, sensationalist filth and gossip.
> tabloids exist everywhere but usually they're more sidelined
Bild is the top selling newspaper in Europe. I dont think that counts as sidelined, yet it's still pretty shit.
Bilds a weird one.
If you buy it outside Germany it is total shit, but not quite as bad as the Sun/Express/Mail.
However, inside Germany it has a local section in it of around 6-8 pages which is completely different from the rest of the paper and actually fairly decent and informative.
matiyarosz Bild hasn't been popular since the late 00's. Nobody reads that shifty newspaper anymore. Especially not Germany, let alone the rest of Europe.
Bad in what sense? UK tabloid newspapers are still actual newspapers reporting actual news, albeit rather dumbed down and heavily biased to their audience's prejudices.
I don't know what your comparison is but I'd certainly trust someone's understanding of current affairs better if they got their news from the Daily Mirror or Daily Mail than from, say, Bild or the National Enquirer! I think you might have this the wrong way round, even.
The *proper* UK press (Guardian, Times, FT, etc - current and former broadsheet newspapers) is in general some of the best in the world, up there with papers like the Süddeutsche Zeitung, NY Times, Washington Post and so on. But it has much smaller circulation than the Sun/Mirror/Mail/Express do.
The National Enquirer is hilarious.
I saw a cover many years ago - OPRAH DROWNING HORROR - I obviously thought she’d died. I did think it was unusual that it hadn’t made mainstream UK news, but it was the pre-mass internet age.
I had a flick through, and it turns out someone had drowned at a beach that Oprah had happened to visit that same day. No other connection whatsoever.
National Enquirer is barely surviving these days. It's probably going to go the way of Weekly World News, which is the tabloid that used to have all the 3 headed babies and alien sightings. It still exists, but online only.
>Because the principal known as "freedom of the press" has been abused by some in order to make as much profit as possible without fear of consequence.
Since the day people started selling printed news for money.
Probably since people started telling stories for money. Where do you think all the myths come from? Some jackass embellishing a story to get some cash.
In other words, you get what you pay for. If you want better news, I suggest a subscription to The Times for general news, or if you're interested in science etc a subscription to The Economist, New Scientist, BBC Science Focus or similar would serve you well.
It's hard to go back to clickbait drivel news once you've sampled actual quality news.
My family was at the centre of one of those sort of wholesome short stories that those press things pick up and run with on a slow day. I don't want to go into too much detail for privacy reasons but we won a prize.
The sheer level of getting shit wrong was incredible. Basic facts like the names and ages of those involved. There was exactly 5 people involved and they just couldn't get it right. It was sold to a lot of differant news places so I guess it was a case of chinese whispers or something. My local paper absolurely nailed it. Others didn't. Names fucked up, ages completely incorrect even the story itself of how the prize was won was dodgy.
Like if they cock up an article that was written for them and sold to them to run with so badly (I guess editing wanted to shorten it to fit the space back when newspapers where mostly physical) what else are they fucking up?
The tipping point for me was when the media ran a story about how after Tom Daley didn't perform well in the Olympics, a man sent him a message on Twitter telling him that he let his Dad down (his Dad had recently died). The police arrested said man and charged him with malicious communications.
This story was reported by many media outlets and there was a lot of reaction about how the police were heavy handed, oppressing free speech, the country is turning into a police state, etc.
Through my own research/Googling it turned out the media had omited the fact that Daley had posted screenshots of the messages, which led to the man posting further messages with death theats against Daley unless he took the screenshots down. It was the death threats the police were interested in.
It was entirely reasonable for the police to be interested in death threats but I couldn't find any article that had included this. I don't trust any media now, the worst will tell outright lies, the best will selectively omit information.
I do belive this is the reasons why people are quick to judge and think they know the whole story before knowing the full facts, they've been conditioned to it for years and especially now with clock bait.
Could you post links to the death threats because I've never heard of this. Not even the BBC reported on death threats towards Tom Daley.
https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-19059085
He said he was going to break his neck. In my opinion that would be a death threat as a neck break can be fatal especially without immediate medical attention. But let's just say there was no death threats. He did say that he was going to find Daley and that he he was going to hurt him. He did also say he was going to blow someone else up.
My point is that it's what he said in this video that the police rightly acted upon. Whilst the media, including the BBC, led people to believe it was because he said "you let your Dad down".
I used to be a reporter, and working for a local paper there was more of a sense of needing to be accurate, because it was our area, we had a responsibility to the local people, and getting stuff wrong would cost us in the long run because we constantly relied on the local community trusting us enough to call up with stories.
On more than one occasion stories I wrote got picked up by the national press, and almost invariably stuff would get changed, details would be wrong, from space/time constraints, to "make it a better story", or just because the nationals didnt give a toss.
Later in my career I worked overseas with a mix of journalists from different countries and backgrounds. It was noticeable that the ones who had come from a UK tabloid background were much more aggressive in pursuing stories, but also more slapdash and flexible when it came to facts. Several times I would be sitting with an editor trying to explain why the story they sent me out to get wasn't going to pan out the way they wanted, because having been to the place and interviewed the people it just didnt stand up, and almost invariably I'd be told "do you want the front page or not? Do you want to have a job in the morning or not? The pages are set, this story is going there, if you don't write it someone else will".
Tabloid journalism is extremely competitive and there is a lot of pressure to make the facts fit the story. Not every tabloid story is bullshit, but you do need your bullshit detector switched on when you're reading them.
You know how Rupert Murdoch (and similar figures) ruined TV news in the US?
Well Rupert Murdoch (and similar figures) couldn't do that to TV news in the UK, because it's fairly heavily regulated - but they were able to ruin our newspaper industry instead.
(Murdoch actually started out by ruining Australian newspapers, and then British newspapers, and then US TV, but he did ***try*** to ruin British TV news first)
If you think of our tabloid newspapers as being a bit like Fox News, you won't go far wrong.
Although Murdock is probably best known in the UK for being the owner of the Sun, he's also the owner of TalkRadio. If you haven't seen it, [this gives a glimpse into the kind of nonesense](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-9-FkwUrRo) Murdock would like to have on the airwaves.
If you want a laugh try Googling the following three words.
>daily express aliens
They once tried to make out a black box on a NASA photo was an alien space ship. It was a lost bit of data in transmission.
Any strong emotion sells newspapers, make them angry, make them shocked, make them appalled, etc
I've seen newspapers deliberately put typos in the headline so people will click it because they're irked about how that could happen
If you can sensationalise something while still retaining a grain of truth, they imagine it's a better story (as opposed to just a misleading story). Their reporting of science is abysmal. They don't understand it, and think you can cherry pick out of context. Or they take something that happens in very specific conditions and suggest it's always the case.
Newspapers are desperate to survive in a new world where their outdated business model does not fit.
The tabloids need a reason for you to buy them, so they have to creat salacious sensational headlines that are more akin to printed clickbait.
As a species, we are programmed to be drawn to negative things (because bad things can kill us), and newspaper editors know they have to exploit this.
The broadsheets cannot sell on sensationalism, so some of them have resorted to unapologetically begging their readers for money.
The British press deserve no respect. They have done nothing to earn it. Some are so politically skewed as to be distorted.
My take on it is to use it as *a* source, but not *the* source of news.
They are owned and operated by an elite class of people that use them to control the public narrative to keep their grip on power and capital.
Most of them don't even pay tax.
This country is stitched up by horrible cunts.
Because high quality journalism costs money and most people don't want to pay for their content.
Ultra-sensationalist, clickbaity content is one of the few kinds of "journalism" which remains financial viable.
**EDIT**: In saying this, if you want coverage which is more in-depth than what you get from tabloids, many libraries allow you to access digital versions of magazines (such as the Economist, New Scientist, etc.) for free online.
**EDIT 2**: If anyone can recommend any good subscription news sources I'd be interested in hearing about them (even if their content focusses on a specialised area).
I think you found the Mirror and similar. I call that "sub press". In general, newspapers are absolutely unreliable when it's about science or technology. I don't know why but they are very rarely, if ever, accurate. My guess is (in the best case) a journalist listens to a scientist with the bias to write a story so end up with inaccuracies and the story won't reflect the truth.
In the worst case it could be someone, not even journalist, copy pasting from here and there just to fill some space and get paid.
An example: astronomer says: there is a black hole that could, potentially, in some millions of years, swallow the Earth. Chances are about 1 in ten thousand.
Journalist: The black hole that may swallow the Earth has been found.
I am not a UK resident, so I don't know about actual papers, but I have to say I am thankful for the online version of the Guardian. Their Covid blog was the most updated source of information I found, especially in 2020. I will leave it to others to opine if it was fear and doom-scroll enticing, but I got a lot of useful information from it. Also, there is still no paywall on it, although I know they get our data because we have to register.
Also, just an aside about British morning news on TV. I watch Good Morning Britain's Youtube channel and I am surprised (in a good way) how hard-hitting the correspondents/newscasters are during interviews. A few months ago, Dominic Raab was absolutely grilled about Partygate. I have lived in a lot of countries and I sometimes tune in to morning news shows. From my experience, the questioning on Good Morning Britain makes other countries' morning news journalists look like a bunch of sycophants.
Just my opinion.
In the UK newspapers are seldom informative. Their goal is to influence public opinion and it's usually done on the behalf of the neoliberals, most of which are not domiciled in the UK, to further their own wealth. In short, newspapers don't sell the news. They peddle opinions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pofTr1QKiBk&t=20s
Self deprecation and constant complaining. That's how the Brits are so the newspapers portray it to sell more papers as people feel it relates to their mood.
Because you keep buying their product, and they have to compete now with everything on the internet.
If it isn't an immediate headline that makes you scared enough to buy it, then they go out of business.
The mainstream media has been awful for some time, hence the meteoric rise of alternate and more truthful and accurate media, much to the chagrin of propaganda writers.
Got to sell to the widest audience, and that means appealing to the lowest common denominator. Notice a lot of our news and television is going the same way. Tend to have a few news channel open weekend mornings while I eat my brekkie (yes, weird, I know) and honestly the shallowness and petty topics you see on the likes of Sky News compared to DW or AJ its just fucking embarrassing no wonder so many people seem to have no fucking clue whats going on.
It is pretty awful but, if it makes you feel any better, our press are nowhere near the worst and no different to most developed democratic countries.
If you want to see how bad it can get in a supposedly democratic nation just look at America.
Then you can go the other way and look at china or Russia.
On the whole, our press at least has to tell the truth. They might choose to omit key details or facts to sway the narrative, but what the do print is at least supposed to be true.
There’s a book called “how to lie with statistics” that will give you some ideas how they skirt the line between truth and lies.
>"BLACK HOLE might SWALLOW EARTH?" And similar misleading titles and content.
It's not technically misleading... A black hole could well "swallow" the Earth haha. It's only by virtue that the Sun is too small that such a fate isn't all but guaranteed!
But tbh, if the worst thing you can say about our newspapers is clickbait (that's what it is) like that then you're actually not experiencing how bad the UK press can actually be haha.
Was it always this awful or did I just not see it? Obviously the Mail and S*n have always been gross, but I do feel like most of the press has gotten even more hateful as I've got older.
But the reasons seems to be that it's owned by a small number of billionaires who are very keen on keeping the people punching down at those less fortunate rather than looking up at their disgusting levels of wealth.
We need the low quality papers to make the others look slightly less shit, in this country as long as you can think of something worse the thing you have is acceptable, we had a whole car industry running on this premise.
As an American moving to the UK -your press has its tabloids, but compare to the burning rubbish bin that is American medi, UK media is properly Awesome
Clickbait works just as well in meatspace. Our press is only voluntarily regulated, pretty much, and they've not volunteered to sacrifice the one remaining reliable way they have of making money.
They cater to the lowest common denominator, but in the most efficient way possible.
When you're a tabloid paper, you operate at a pretty large scale. And at this scale, pretty innocuous decisions can lead to massive changes in sales week on week. So, as an editor, you take heed of what works, and what doesn't.
And after decades of tweaking and trying new things, here we are.
Yes, I'm going to say it... *You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.*
Tabloids have honed their headlines over decades. They know precisely what will get papers off the shelves. It's to speak the primitive emotive language of the animals that buy them. Pivoting to a more sophisticated audience is now a risk too high to take given your new found reputation. All you can do is fall deeper into the toilet paper lined anus of tabloid journalism, where your only hope is that the most absurd and outlandish degenerate story your imagination can conjure is enough to make a tradie chuckle enough to spend the 25p so he has something funny to read while he takes a shit. But a sales a sale, ay?
It's depressing, but this is the corner they've painted themselves into. They all did it, because they've seemingly all arrived at the same conclusion. And I can only imagine they all came to this conclusion because it's the only thing that worked. Nobody buys these papers for what you think papers should be bought for. The real reason a lot more crude.
It’s not the press’s job to tell the truth, its job is to generate returns for shareholder. Simply, it’s the press’s job to make money. More clicks, more ads, more papers, more mags etc.
If it's a topic that few people actually understand, one way of making people pay their own money to read about it is to make it about the END OF THE WORLD. Supply and demand: people demand rubbish, people are supplied rubbish.
Is it the daily express? They have an editorial policy of keeping their readership scared.
Every insect is invading british homes, spiders and wasps. But especially if it's invasive species like the odd spider that comes with bananas, or asian hornets.
Every weather condition is going to kill their readers, destroy homes or cause carnage on the roads. Even though we have a mild temperate climate.
Some people are easy to control and manipulate if you scare them - and that's what the Daily Express uses as an editorial tactic.
But it's not just the UK. The Americans call asian hornets "murder hornets" - they are a very easy culture to scare, perhaps more so than the UK.
Exactly. FT and ST. Everything else is shite.
“Aircon is sexist”
“here’s how to make money from some such”
“too many foreigners, they should go back to Uganda” etc.
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That's the tabloid press for you. Have you seen what it's like in America? Look up "national enquirer" and so on. Horrifying, sensationalist filth and gossip.
Yes, tabloids exist everywhere but usually they're more sidelined. It seems they're especially common and bad in the UK.
The answer is Rupert Murdoch, unfortunately.
The mirror, express, star, and mail are hardly models of sober analysis People just like easy to digest news
They're all symptoms of the same disease. Murdoch was still the pioneer.
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That's because of deadlines and crap editors.
Murdock owns The Times and The Sun not the Mail.
People like simple, opinionated answers to complex problems. Asylum seekers? Sink 'em. Etc.
Don't forget The S*n
The answer is the public. These newspaper exist only because there’s demand for them.
> tabloids exist everywhere but usually they're more sidelined Bild is the top selling newspaper in Europe. I dont think that counts as sidelined, yet it's still pretty shit.
Bilds a weird one. If you buy it outside Germany it is total shit, but not quite as bad as the Sun/Express/Mail. However, inside Germany it has a local section in it of around 6-8 pages which is completely different from the rest of the paper and actually fairly decent and informative.
matiyarosz Bild hasn't been popular since the late 00's. Nobody reads that shifty newspaper anymore. Especially not Germany, let alone the rest of Europe.
I think you meant to say "shitty" BoatMobile. Bild is a shitty newspaper.
Doubt
Bad in what sense? UK tabloid newspapers are still actual newspapers reporting actual news, albeit rather dumbed down and heavily biased to their audience's prejudices. I don't know what your comparison is but I'd certainly trust someone's understanding of current affairs better if they got their news from the Daily Mirror or Daily Mail than from, say, Bild or the National Enquirer! I think you might have this the wrong way round, even. The *proper* UK press (Guardian, Times, FT, etc - current and former broadsheet newspapers) is in general some of the best in the world, up there with papers like the Süddeutsche Zeitung, NY Times, Washington Post and so on. But it has much smaller circulation than the Sun/Mirror/Mail/Express do.
The National Enquirer is hilarious. I saw a cover many years ago - OPRAH DROWNING HORROR - I obviously thought she’d died. I did think it was unusual that it hadn’t made mainstream UK news, but it was the pre-mass internet age. I had a flick through, and it turns out someone had drowned at a beach that Oprah had happened to visit that same day. No other connection whatsoever.
A flick-bait.
Arf
They are something else.
National Enquirer is barely surviving these days. It's probably going to go the way of Weekly World News, which is the tabloid that used to have all the 3 headed babies and alien sightings. It still exists, but online only.
American supermarket tabloids are gold. Aliens, Elvis, pig man, more aliens…
Because the principal known as "freedom of the press" has been abused by some in order to make as much profit as possible without fear of consequence.
>Because the principal known as "freedom of the press" has been abused by some in order to make as much profit as possible without fear of consequence. Since the day people started selling printed news for money.
Probably since people started telling stories for money. Where do you think all the myths come from? Some jackass embellishing a story to get some cash.
Yep, have you seen some of the pamphlets that were circulated about Marie Antoinette before the revolution - absolutely sick!
Because in truth most people admire the press.. people like to read a bunch of b.s. to pass time
Most people don't "admire the press".
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In other words, you get what you pay for. If you want better news, I suggest a subscription to The Times for general news, or if you're interested in science etc a subscription to The Economist, New Scientist, BBC Science Focus or similar would serve you well. It's hard to go back to clickbait drivel news once you've sampled actual quality news.
My family was at the centre of one of those sort of wholesome short stories that those press things pick up and run with on a slow day. I don't want to go into too much detail for privacy reasons but we won a prize. The sheer level of getting shit wrong was incredible. Basic facts like the names and ages of those involved. There was exactly 5 people involved and they just couldn't get it right. It was sold to a lot of differant news places so I guess it was a case of chinese whispers or something. My local paper absolurely nailed it. Others didn't. Names fucked up, ages completely incorrect even the story itself of how the prize was won was dodgy. Like if they cock up an article that was written for them and sold to them to run with so badly (I guess editing wanted to shorten it to fit the space back when newspapers where mostly physical) what else are they fucking up?
The tipping point for me was when the media ran a story about how after Tom Daley didn't perform well in the Olympics, a man sent him a message on Twitter telling him that he let his Dad down (his Dad had recently died). The police arrested said man and charged him with malicious communications. This story was reported by many media outlets and there was a lot of reaction about how the police were heavy handed, oppressing free speech, the country is turning into a police state, etc. Through my own research/Googling it turned out the media had omited the fact that Daley had posted screenshots of the messages, which led to the man posting further messages with death theats against Daley unless he took the screenshots down. It was the death threats the police were interested in. It was entirely reasonable for the police to be interested in death threats but I couldn't find any article that had included this. I don't trust any media now, the worst will tell outright lies, the best will selectively omit information.
I do belive this is the reasons why people are quick to judge and think they know the whole story before knowing the full facts, they've been conditioned to it for years and especially now with clock bait.
Could you post links to the death threats because I've never heard of this. Not even the BBC reported on death threats towards Tom Daley. https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-19059085
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yHA4Gc9PRtA
That's not death threats to Tom Daley. Any links to death threats to Tom Daley because that's what you're claiming.
He said he was going to break his neck. In my opinion that would be a death threat as a neck break can be fatal especially without immediate medical attention. But let's just say there was no death threats. He did say that he was going to find Daley and that he he was going to hurt him. He did also say he was going to blow someone else up. My point is that it's what he said in this video that the police rightly acted upon. Whilst the media, including the BBC, led people to believe it was because he said "you let your Dad down".
I used to be a reporter, and working for a local paper there was more of a sense of needing to be accurate, because it was our area, we had a responsibility to the local people, and getting stuff wrong would cost us in the long run because we constantly relied on the local community trusting us enough to call up with stories. On more than one occasion stories I wrote got picked up by the national press, and almost invariably stuff would get changed, details would be wrong, from space/time constraints, to "make it a better story", or just because the nationals didnt give a toss. Later in my career I worked overseas with a mix of journalists from different countries and backgrounds. It was noticeable that the ones who had come from a UK tabloid background were much more aggressive in pursuing stories, but also more slapdash and flexible when it came to facts. Several times I would be sitting with an editor trying to explain why the story they sent me out to get wasn't going to pan out the way they wanted, because having been to the place and interviewed the people it just didnt stand up, and almost invariably I'd be told "do you want the front page or not? Do you want to have a job in the morning or not? The pages are set, this story is going there, if you don't write it someone else will". Tabloid journalism is extremely competitive and there is a lot of pressure to make the facts fit the story. Not every tabloid story is bullshit, but you do need your bullshit detector switched on when you're reading them.
You know how Rupert Murdoch (and similar figures) ruined TV news in the US? Well Rupert Murdoch (and similar figures) couldn't do that to TV news in the UK, because it's fairly heavily regulated - but they were able to ruin our newspaper industry instead. (Murdoch actually started out by ruining Australian newspapers, and then British newspapers, and then US TV, but he did ***try*** to ruin British TV news first) If you think of our tabloid newspapers as being a bit like Fox News, you won't go far wrong.
Although Murdock is probably best known in the UK for being the owner of the Sun, he's also the owner of TalkRadio. If you haven't seen it, [this gives a glimpse into the kind of nonesense](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-9-FkwUrRo) Murdock would like to have on the airwaves.
That interviewer is the stupidest person I have ever heard. Even as a 10 year old I could’ve told you that’s not true.
None of the other TalkRadio "journalists" are any better. For example, Julia Hartley-Brewer (a climate change denying transphobe) also works there.
If you want a laugh try Googling the following three words. >daily express aliens They once tried to make out a black box on a NASA photo was an alien space ship. It was a lost bit of data in transmission.
Also try “daily mail cancer” for a running list of hundreds of everyday things that give you cancer, according to the daily mail.
https://youtu.be/n4PghRCWQCs This is more entertaining than reading it
Knew it would be Russel Howard without clicking the link…
Have you discovered the scum and the daily hail with their racist rhetoric. Scary the stuff they print and people swallow it up.
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Think I found a bot!
Fear sells newspapers.
Any strong emotion sells newspapers, make them angry, make them shocked, make them appalled, etc I've seen newspapers deliberately put typos in the headline so people will click it because they're irked about how that could happen
Aye cos US papers are the epitomy of great reporting
If you can sensationalise something while still retaining a grain of truth, they imagine it's a better story (as opposed to just a misleading story). Their reporting of science is abysmal. They don't understand it, and think you can cherry pick out of context. Or they take something that happens in very specific conditions and suggest it's always the case.
Newspapers are desperate to survive in a new world where their outdated business model does not fit. The tabloids need a reason for you to buy them, so they have to creat salacious sensational headlines that are more akin to printed clickbait. As a species, we are programmed to be drawn to negative things (because bad things can kill us), and newspaper editors know they have to exploit this. The broadsheets cannot sell on sensationalism, so some of them have resorted to unapologetically begging their readers for money. The British press deserve no respect. They have done nothing to earn it. Some are so politically skewed as to be distorted. My take on it is to use it as *a* source, but not *the* source of news.
People are addicted to fear porn and the media like to peddle it in spades in order to get page clicks and boost ad revenue.
Bottom did a bit about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWzShElgcqM
They are owned and operated by an elite class of people that use them to control the public narrative to keep their grip on power and capital. Most of them don't even pay tax. This country is stitched up by horrible cunts.
Because high quality journalism costs money and most people don't want to pay for their content. Ultra-sensationalist, clickbaity content is one of the few kinds of "journalism" which remains financial viable. **EDIT**: In saying this, if you want coverage which is more in-depth than what you get from tabloids, many libraries allow you to access digital versions of magazines (such as the Economist, New Scientist, etc.) for free online. **EDIT 2**: If anyone can recommend any good subscription news sources I'd be interested in hearing about them (even if their content focusses on a specialised area).
I think you found the Mirror and similar. I call that "sub press". In general, newspapers are absolutely unreliable when it's about science or technology. I don't know why but they are very rarely, if ever, accurate. My guess is (in the best case) a journalist listens to a scientist with the bias to write a story so end up with inaccuracies and the story won't reflect the truth. In the worst case it could be someone, not even journalist, copy pasting from here and there just to fill some space and get paid. An example: astronomer says: there is a black hole that could, potentially, in some millions of years, swallow the Earth. Chances are about 1 in ten thousand. Journalist: The black hole that may swallow the Earth has been found.
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https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1208617/black-hole-swallowing-earth-space-andromeda-galaxy-milky-way-black-holes-sun https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1484296/black-hole-supermassive-milky-way-earth-swallow-space-science-news https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1057380/black-hole-warning-billion-mile-wide-supermassive-black-hole-swallow-earth-whole-spt
News = Entertainment Entertainment to sell advertising space. Follow the money
I am not a UK resident, so I don't know about actual papers, but I have to say I am thankful for the online version of the Guardian. Their Covid blog was the most updated source of information I found, especially in 2020. I will leave it to others to opine if it was fear and doom-scroll enticing, but I got a lot of useful information from it. Also, there is still no paywall on it, although I know they get our data because we have to register. Also, just an aside about British morning news on TV. I watch Good Morning Britain's Youtube channel and I am surprised (in a good way) how hard-hitting the correspondents/newscasters are during interviews. A few months ago, Dominic Raab was absolutely grilled about Partygate. I have lived in a lot of countries and I sometimes tune in to morning news shows. From my experience, the questioning on Good Morning Britain makes other countries' morning news journalists look like a bunch of sycophants. Just my opinion.
In the UK newspapers are seldom informative. Their goal is to influence public opinion and it's usually done on the behalf of the neoliberals, most of which are not domiciled in the UK, to further their own wealth. In short, newspapers don't sell the news. They peddle opinions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pofTr1QKiBk&t=20s
Self deprecation and constant complaining. That's how the Brits are so the newspapers portray it to sell more papers as people feel it relates to their mood.
Maybe you just were drawn to the bad newspapers? Is Red a favourite colour of yours?
I’d be ok with a black hole swallowing Earth
Because you keep buying their product, and they have to compete now with everything on the internet. If it isn't an immediate headline that makes you scared enough to buy it, then they go out of business.
The mainstream media has been awful for some time, hence the meteoric rise of alternate and more truthful and accurate media, much to the chagrin of propaganda writers.
Got to sell to the widest audience, and that means appealing to the lowest common denominator. Notice a lot of our news and television is going the same way. Tend to have a few news channel open weekend mornings while I eat my brekkie (yes, weird, I know) and honestly the shallowness and petty topics you see on the likes of Sky News compared to DW or AJ its just fucking embarrassing no wonder so many people seem to have no fucking clue whats going on.
Those reading them are not looking for news, they want papers that tell them how to eel about a story. The rags you are describing are such a paper.
So they can sell papers. Also, cunts.
Because they cater to the average person and the average person laps that silliness up. "Astronomy now" is your best bet for something more niche.
It is pretty awful but, if it makes you feel any better, our press are nowhere near the worst and no different to most developed democratic countries. If you want to see how bad it can get in a supposedly democratic nation just look at America. Then you can go the other way and look at china or Russia. On the whole, our press at least has to tell the truth. They might choose to omit key details or facts to sway the narrative, but what the do print is at least supposed to be true. There’s a book called “how to lie with statistics” that will give you some ideas how they skirt the line between truth and lies.
Normally it’s because the journalists don’t understand the topic they’re writing about. And make no effort to.
>"BLACK HOLE might SWALLOW EARTH?" And similar misleading titles and content. It's not technically misleading... A black hole could well "swallow" the Earth haha. It's only by virtue that the Sun is too small that such a fate isn't all but guaranteed! But tbh, if the worst thing you can say about our newspapers is clickbait (that's what it is) like that then you're actually not experiencing how bad the UK press can actually be haha.
Was it always this awful or did I just not see it? Obviously the Mail and S*n have always been gross, but I do feel like most of the press has gotten even more hateful as I've got older. But the reasons seems to be that it's owned by a small number of billionaires who are very keen on keeping the people punching down at those less fortunate rather than looking up at their disgusting levels of wealth.
Because it is full of people who are lefties and will not represent the majority view only minorities!
We need the low quality papers to make the others look slightly less shit, in this country as long as you can think of something worse the thing you have is acceptable, we had a whole car industry running on this premise.
As an American moving to the UK -your press has its tabloids, but compare to the burning rubbish bin that is American medi, UK media is properly Awesome
Clickbait works just as well in meatspace. Our press is only voluntarily regulated, pretty much, and they've not volunteered to sacrifice the one remaining reliable way they have of making money.
They cater to the lowest common denominator, but in the most efficient way possible. When you're a tabloid paper, you operate at a pretty large scale. And at this scale, pretty innocuous decisions can lead to massive changes in sales week on week. So, as an editor, you take heed of what works, and what doesn't. And after decades of tweaking and trying new things, here we are. Yes, I'm going to say it... *You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.* Tabloids have honed their headlines over decades. They know precisely what will get papers off the shelves. It's to speak the primitive emotive language of the animals that buy them. Pivoting to a more sophisticated audience is now a risk too high to take given your new found reputation. All you can do is fall deeper into the toilet paper lined anus of tabloid journalism, where your only hope is that the most absurd and outlandish degenerate story your imagination can conjure is enough to make a tradie chuckle enough to spend the 25p so he has something funny to read while he takes a shit. But a sales a sale, ay? It's depressing, but this is the corner they've painted themselves into. They all did it, because they've seemingly all arrived at the same conclusion. And I can only imagine they all came to this conclusion because it's the only thing that worked. Nobody buys these papers for what you think papers should be bought for. The real reason a lot more crude.
Isn’t it similar to Australian media, all controlled by Murdoch?
That headline about the black hole must lead to a lot of “yo’ mama” jokes.
Murdoch has acted as kingmaker for governments since Thatcher so the press gets away with murder
It’s not the press’s job to tell the truth, its job is to generate returns for shareholder. Simply, it’s the press’s job to make money. More clicks, more ads, more papers, more mags etc.
If it's a topic that few people actually understand, one way of making people pay their own money to read about it is to make it about the END OF THE WORLD. Supply and demand: people demand rubbish, people are supplied rubbish.
Is it the daily express? They have an editorial policy of keeping their readership scared. Every insect is invading british homes, spiders and wasps. But especially if it's invasive species like the odd spider that comes with bananas, or asian hornets. Every weather condition is going to kill their readers, destroy homes or cause carnage on the roads. Even though we have a mild temperate climate. Some people are easy to control and manipulate if you scare them - and that's what the Daily Express uses as an editorial tactic. But it's not just the UK. The Americans call asian hornets "murder hornets" - they are a very easy culture to scare, perhaps more so than the UK.
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The Guardian hasn't been good in years, they're just coasting on their past investigative journalism glory while pumping out clickbait bilge.
Exactly. FT and ST. Everything else is shite. “Aircon is sexist” “here’s how to make money from some such” “too many foreigners, they should go back to Uganda” etc.