Objectivity and the Other Orwell: The tabloidism of the Daily Mirror and journalistic authenticity

Abstract

The emergence in the UK of ‘the new tabloid journalism’ in the form of the ‘re-born’ Daily Mirror between late 1934 and 1936 was challenging to the simultaneously nascent journalistic norm of objectivity. The Mirror was not the only national newspaper in the UK in the 1930s to articulate the commercial appeal of a burgeoning professionalism in journalism with the traditional open partisanship of the daily press—to demand of its reporters and correspondents what it expected of its leader writers. However, the Mirror’s ‘formula for tabloid journalism was uniquely simple—bread and circuses’. George Orwell was caught in this warp of facticity—‘a professional and public duty’ to ‘non-biased reporting’—and the weft of having ‘some political or social cause to argue for’.Not surprisingly, then, Orwell denigrated ‘cheap journalism’ which he characterized as ‘made-to-order stuff which I produced quickly, easily and without much pleasure to myself’. © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd