Tabloid Century: The Popular Press in Britain, 1896 to the Present, by Adrian Bingham and Martin Conboy

Abstract

The term ‘tabloid’ seems first to have been transferred from pharmaceuticals to newspapers in 1901. It denotes a distinctive combination of appearance and content that lent a newspaper convenience, time-saving and impact. A Mirror editor described his paper’s objective in 1949: ‘the vivid and dramatic presentation of events so as to give them a forceful impact … big headlines, vigorous writing, simplification into familiar everyday language and the wide use of illustration by cartoon and photograph’. The Mirror’s editor, grumbling to Northcliffe in 1911 about employees from Eton and Oxford whose education apparently ended with events in 42 BC, said that ‘highly educated men, I find as a rule, have no sense of news’. Perhaps this mandarin trait persists, and explains why the press’s historians have preferred to study what one newspaperman wrote to another rather than what they published in the popular press. Not so with the authors of the present book, Adrian Bingham and Martin Conboy: after soaking themselves in the content of Mirror, Express, Herald and Sun, they now surface to tell the tale. They do not pinch their noses, but fair-mindedly aim to understand and to contextualise: ‘we need to take the tabloids seriously’, they rightly say. Covering much the same ground as A.C.H. Smith’s somewhat disappointing Paper Voices: The Popular Press and Social Change 1935–1965 (1975), but with a longer time-span, they offer six thematic chapters: on war, politics, monarchy/celebrity, gender/sexuality, social class, and race/nation, outlining a century of change within each area.