Britain’s trashy tabloids – scourge of minorities (Part 1)

The Daily Mail

This paper was founded in 1896 by two brothers, Alfred and Harold Harmsworth – Lord Northcliffe and hereditary Viscount Rothermere. It soon became an establishment paper that gloried in the Empire but it also put on a high moral tone and was ready to take on erring government officials, no matter how senior.

It was the Daily Mail that relentlessly pursued Keith Vaz while he was Minister for Europe in 2001. To the likes of the Mail, it was unthinkable that one from the former colonies should hold a senior position in Her Majesty’s government. Almost daily, readers were treated to headlines like Questions the pompous Mr Vaz must answer; Dump Vaz or pay the price, Tony; The Minister for Obstruction; Blair’s repeated support of Vaz is shameful; Vaz is not fit to be a Minister,… Vaz did resign soon and the Mail campaign had played its part. (We’ll return to the Mail in a later article.)

The Mirror

Launched in 1903 by Lord Northcliffe (owner of the Daily Mail), the Daily Mirror started life as a woman’s paper but as it didn’t do well, so it was re-launched two months later as a more general paper. In 1914, the circulation had crossed a million and Northcliffe sold the paper to his brother Lord Rothermere, a rightwinger who supported Hitler, Mussolini and British fascists. The circulation fell until in 1935 a new editorial team transformed the paper into the voice of ordinary people, entertaining as well as socially aware.

Throughout the 1950s and 60s, the focus was on major political and social issues. The Mirror opposed the American invasion of Vietnam and supported the anti-apartheid campaign in South Africa. BY the end of the 60s, the people was read by people of all classes and sold some 5 million copies a day.

Enter the Sun and sex

In 1964, an ailing socialist broadsheet Daily Herald was re-launched as The Sun and in 1968 the owners (Reed International) put it up for sale. Of the two bidders (Robert Maxwell a Labour MP and Rupert Murdoch who owned a string of Australian tabloids), Murdoch won with a bid for £800,000. In 1967 he had already purchased the News of the World. The new Sun, re-launched in 1969, became a spicier version of the Mirror. The very first issue (17 Nov) carried a photo of the Rolling Stones with a naked female. Sex was to be the main ingredient of the paper. Soft porn came to fill almost every page together with lurid sex stories. Within 100 days, circulation had jumped from 850, 000 to 1.5 million. Clearly sex is what the readers wanted.

When attacked for lowering standards, Murdoch hit back: “I am not ashamed of any of my papers at all and I’m rather sick of the snobs imposing their taste on everybody else…” Nevertheless, throughout the 1970s, the Mirror managed to retain over 4 million readers. Then in 1974, in a desperate attempt to mimic the Sun, it introduced sex content and topless models. That cost the Mirror many readers who preferred the Sun’s brand of sex. Eventually, in 1978, the Sun overtook the Mirror in sales. That drove the Express group (otherwise staunchly conservative) to launch its own sex-charged tabloid, Daily Star.

The Sun and politics

The young Sun had backed the Labour Party in the 1970 election but in the 70s decade it moved steadily to the right. It began to target the skilled and semi-skilled workers in the Midlands and South-East (social category C2). A stream of articles pandered to their interests and prejudices with pieces on ‘union bully boys’, ‘pompous do-gooders’ and ‘illegal immigrants’.

Margaret Thatcher became Tory leader in 1975 and sought the Sun’s support. The Sun obliged and in the 1979 elections, bannered ‘Vote for Maggie – to give you a better Britain’. The Tories won resoundingly and a grateful Thatcher rewarded editor Lamb with a knighthood. A year later the Tories also cleared the way for Murdoch to buy both the (London) Times and the Sunday Times.

Attacking the Left

Throughout the 1980s, the Sun took pleasure in attacking the ‘loony left’, left-leaning MPs, trade union leaders and ‘barmy’ labour-led councils. It picked on social security ‘scroungers’ and striking workers. Women were routinely degraded through page 3 photos of nudes or near nudes. Huge sums were paid to buy ‘kiss & tell’ stories involving celebrities.

In 1986, Murdoch switched to new printing technology and moved his papers to Wapping in East London. When the print unions went on strike, Murdoch simply dismissed some 5000 workers. Thatcher offered full support with a massive police force, including mounted police. Journalists too were given the ultimatum to move to Wapping or lose their jobs. Most moved. The Wapping works were designed to withstand any siege – complete with a 12-foot steel fence topped with razor wire, protected by security guards, searchlights and remote-control cameras.

Drumming up jingoism & vilifying minorities

The Sun with Thatcher’s backing proceeded to drum up a crude patriotism and anti-Europeanism. In 1984, readers were encouraged to wear free badges with the slogan ‘Hop off, you frogs’ (referring to the French) while an article (1987) poured scorn on German tourists with a headline ‘Vot makes Krauts holiday louts?’

But ridicule and contempt for minorities became a dedicated Sun sport. Its African cartoons propagated the archetypal colonial image of the African with spear, bone-through-nose and loincloth confronting cork-hatted Brit explorers. Readers were asked to spot the difference between two slightly different versions of such cartoons; the first ten correct entries would win video recorders. Owner Murdoch is (or was) a Jew and the Sun’s worst venom was directed against Arabs. A Libyan diplomat allowed re-entry into Britain was greeted with the banner headline ‘Arab pig sneaks back’. Similarly when the Syrian ambassador was expelled over an alleged anti-Israeli plot, the Sun headlined: ‘Get out you Syrian swine.’

Nor were Asians spared. When in Sept 1985, Hackney Council proposed re-naming a street after Indian nationalist Shahid Bhagat Singh, the Sun headlined: ‘Lefties start a singh and a dance in the street’. When head-teacher Ray Honeyford was forced to quit a Bradford school with many Muslim pupils, a Sun cartoon (17 Oct 85) showed Asian parents in turbans, dhotis and saris perched on the school roof with a steaming pot of curry to pour on an Honeyford approaching the school. The caption read: ’The Madras curry will finish him off.’

Within months of the move to Wapping, the Sun’s profits were up 40%. By 1987 the paper was making £1 million a week for Murdoch’s News International. The profits were used to subsidise Murdoch’s move into Sky TV. The gamble paid off.

Selling patriotism & prurience for profit

Sivanandan, Director of the Institute of Race Relations (London), has commented with insight on the British press today: “Newspapers in this country are now not so much in the business of presenting news as making opinion dressed up as news. We are not presented with the truth of a matter. Instead, we are treated to ‘comment’ and ‘analysis’. In the more degenerate papers, facts are pre-selected, distorted or concocted…

The Sun caters to the basest appetites and meanest prejudices in each of us and passes them off as virtues. Under the guise of patriotism, it teaches us to hate everything foreign or different…”

The Mirror (in the 1990s) and the Sun have much in common. Both see themselves as part of the entertainment industry. There is little hard news. They concentrate on the royals, celebrity gossip and get-rich-quick competitions. They excel in daft puns and lurid headlines. Sensational stories are designed to make (rather than to report) news because this raises sales. Next in priority come page after page on the lives of the supermodels, the royals, footballers and pop-stars. The sacred, the decent, the private must be sacrificed for profit.

References

1. Racism & the press in Thatcher’s Britain, Institute of Race Relations, London (1988)

2. John Pilger, Breaking the Mirror, Special Report, ITV, London (1997)