“BONKS and BLIGHTY? Oh, Tabloid Britain!”

Brook Miller
Department of English
University of Minnesota, Morris
cbmiller@umn.edu

A review of: Martin Conboy, Tabloid Britain: Constructing A Community Through Language. New York: Routledge, 2006.

I said Charles, don’t you ever crave
To appear on the front of
The Daily Mail
Dressed in your Mother’s bridal veil?
. . .
Oh, has the world changed or have I changed?

–The Smiths, “The Queen is Dead” (1986)

Opening with the WWI tune “Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty” juxtaposed to an aggressive punk drumbeat, “The Queen is Dead” playfully questions whether Britain’s tabloid culture represents a radical break from a sentimental, affectionate vision of a tradition-encrusted nation. In Tabloid Britain, Martin Conboy answers “no, but…” by tracking the paradoxical dual rhetoric of the contemporary British tabloids: on the one hand, indulging in prurient spectacle, while on the other, grounding a reactionary moralism in working-class rhetoric and nostalgic images of the British past.
 

According to Conboy, the British tabloids emerged in recognizable form in the late nineteenth century, heavily influenced by the American press. In the early twentieth century, British publishers pioneered new formatting and circulation conventions, and in the 1930s “fierce circulation wars . . . led to developments which aimed at a . . . more populist and more commercially successful format for a mass readership” (6). The Daily Mirror embodied these changes, with “larger, darker type, shorter stories, and less [sic] items on a page” (6). In the late 1960s and 1970s, The Sun attained a dominant market position by emphasizing sex, entertainment, and celebrity while still appealing to the “views and interests of the British working people” (7). This formula, and the tensions implied by it, largely has survived into the present, with periods of more or less salacious content.

 
Tabloid Britain might best be read in conjunction with Conboy’s two previous books, Journalism: A Critical History (London: Sage, 2004) and The Press and Popular Culture (London: Sage, 2002), that examine how changes in journalistic practices and in industrial relations manifested in newspaper content in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. These earlier books give the reader a stronger sense of the context that has fostered the rhetoric Conboy examines. In particular, Conboy describes Rupert Murdoch’s transfer of production facilities to Wapping in the 1980s as “a symbolic clustering of the technology, politics and ownership at the heart of much of tabloidization’s imperatives” (Journalism 193). These texts also dissect the impact of the tabloids upon journalism more generally.
 

Conboy’s newest book makes an important contribution to the critical discourse studies associated with Teun van Dijk by dissecting the complexities of popular discourse. Coverage of celebrity culture, for example, exposes a key nuance in the conjunction of spectacle and moralism: “Celebrity news . . . is not a one-way street of prurient gossip, sensation and revelation. It can also be used to drive an alternative and highly moralistic agenda” (190). David and Victoria Beckham provide a key contemporary case in point: while both Beckhams are national, indeed global, sex symbols, their relationship has at times embodied “traditional notions of the family,” especially the naturalness of wifely domesticity; at others, however, David Beckham’s tattoos have associated him with thuggish “yob” culture (190-1).

 
By limiting its purview, Tabloid Britain contributes a nuanced thesis about the operations of bias and ideology in a particularly vitriolic area of the modern media. It extends and complicates critical discourse studies of the media that posit a direct sociolinguistic affinity between the politics and background of a particular readership and the language of the newspapers they read, notably Roger Fowler’s seminal Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press (Routledge, 1991). Here Conboy convincingly demonstrates that the tabloids operate not simply as rhetorical and ideological mirrors of their readerships, but as significant “social educator[s]” through the “normalization of certain modes of social belonging” (9). This function is expressly nationalistic, and Conboy’s study focuses “on one strand of a complex flow of institutional, economic and journalistic processes, namely the language used to create and maintain a readership that is predicated on a sound grasp of a British national identity and a propensity to sense and exploit issues likely to stir nationalist feelings within the readership” (9). At the same time, Tabloid Britain “aims to show less the effects rather than the attempts to construct [a national] community of readers” and to engage with “the dynamics of discourse construction within the tabloids” (47).
 

The tabloids pursue this function by inflecting a “close textual display of intimacy with idealized individual readers” into “a version of the citizen-ideal of the public sphere, albeit one without the analysis of central social issues other than when they are refracted through sensation, celebrity, and a prism of everyday life” (10). This rhetoric is highly successful commercially, and it promotes an “ideological pact” with the readership in which “the newspaper appears to side with a populist chorus of condemnation of the ills of society [with] the implication that a return to some form of harsh regime of discipline is the solution . . . the tabloid agenda is one all too often predicated on an authoritarian populism” (26).

 
This agenda typically supports conservative values drawn from visions of individual initiative and character, charged by spurs such as threats to neo-Victorian ‘mums,’ and contextualized within a triumphant vision of Britain’s past salted with fears of an assault upon national values by progressive ideologies and non-white, non-British bodies. The weltanschauung of the tabloids is typically “non-rational . . . where humans are at the mercy of strange and incongruous events. The logic of this world has a corresponding politics, according to which improvements in life come from individual effort or the workings of fate” (33). Yet this textual politics also sometimes operates in the service of radical causes, as in a Daily Mirror exposé of the culture of racism at a detention center for asylum seekers and in its critique of the trade and monetary policies of the West as causes of African poverty (175, 176). These radical positions can be particularly pointed when directed towards supporting workers’ rights.
 

To enact this pact, the tabloids make frequent use of first-person plural pronouns and a tone of shared indignation (conveyed most overtly through a consistent use of ALL CAPS), an emphasis upon features that promote a sense of interaction between readers and the paper, indeed giving the readers the impression of authorship and agency within the paper. Published on pages titled “THE PAGE WHERE YOU TELL BRITAIN WHAT YOU THINK” and “IT’S THE PAGE YOU WRITE,” “the letters . . . are editorially themed around particular issues which act as a constructed dialogue between readers and newspaper, prioritizing the newspapers’ agenda but in terms which appear to illustrate a seamless continuity between newspaper and readers as evinced by their letters” (20).

 
The body of Tabloid Britain focuses on how this compact relies upon the representation of British history, outsiders, gender, sexuality, popular politics, and celebrity culture. The use of demotic language consolidates these topics into a singularity of voice. Manifested in “us and them” logic, this voice crucially secures its market while promoting reactionary positions, often against the interests of its own readership.

 
Conboy ably describes and analyzes the rhetorical conventions that convey this relation. These conventions include using slang as a sign of anti-establishmentarian skepticism, the use of familiar first names (as opposed to British journalistic conventions of using surnames preceded by a polite form of address), a rhetoric of “violent encounter,” binary lists structured in a “good vs. evil” format, cross-page headlines, and salacious storylines, all of which serve to depict news in terms of outsized, hyperbolic clashes of personalities. Additionally, the tabloids emphasize their own importance and agency, rather than objectivity, as a way of promoting its shared suspicion of elites.
 

Several semantic constructions and narratives typically mediate the relation of textual community to the ‘us’ and ‘them’ so important to articulating the nation. These include demonstrations of unquestioning support for military personnel, assertions of the right to show explicit pride in nation and national symbols, and fashioning Europe as an antagonist. The primary narrative told through the tabloids is of national decline, with fault laid at the door of elites, political correctness, or invasions from abroad.
 

The narrative of national decline is supported by stories of history designed to reinforce Britain’s status as an exceptional nation. Reverence for, and knowledge of, celebrated moments such as the D-Day invasions provides one index of British identity that flattens class distinctions. Detractors from these carefully scripted stories, and figures who obstruct the remembrance and celebration of these narratives, correspondingly function as the agents of threat to or the decline of the nation (92).
 

In addition to moral indignation, the tabloids consistently operate in the register of humor. The punning headline–such as “THE POLE TRUTH” heading a story about the Polish president admitting to have worked illegally in London as a youth–is a staple of tabloid stories, as are humorous “menus” sending up current scandals as recipes for disaster, and other forms. The humor is at times subversive, but it generally operates to shut down “systematic investigation of the implications of language which may offend minorities or politically and socially marginalized groups” (157).

 
Such a use of humor also characterizes the tabloids’ rhetoric regarding scopic sexuality. The institution of the “Page 3 Girl,” a topless model available to readers of The Sun immediately upon opening the paper, is defended from allegations of sexism on the basis of being just “a bit of fun.” While innuendo about celebrities’ sex lives operates in much the same spirit, the tabloids also police the moral standards of its readership: “as soon as sex threatens to become real . . . the atmosphere changes very swiftly and the language used to describe it returns to the more puritanical end of the tabloid spectrum reserved for activities and people they disapprove of” (132).
 

This policing of the socioeconomic group ventriloquized in the tabloids coalesces in the common target of the ‘yob’–a term for a loutish member of the working class. Paradoxically, “the newspapers are written to appeal to the working classes but go to some lengths to castigate this particular type as if to draw on the Victorian moral distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor” (17).
 

The subtlest of these rhetorical strategies is an absence; while reportage may tend towards racism, xenophobia, sexism, and a variety of other strategies of exclusion, these tendencies are trumped by the anti-establishment agenda, which sometimes means taking radical positions. What is insidious about the tabloids, however, is the manner in which these perspectives tend to avoid critique of the relations of power; instead, “the structural and institutional aspects of the story are relegated to an incidental feature beneath the triumphant and self-promotional tone of the tabloid which emphasizes the end of racism at the centre” (177). The larger stakes of the argument, and a motif which emerges sporadically throughout Tabloid Britain, is that we should understand the political function of the British tabloids. Through “exaggerated foregrounding of sensation and ‘human interest’ . . . [the tabloids structure] the world in a way which rejects fundamental political issues and focuses instead on random events within a world of common sense” (15).

 
The weakness of such an approach is that it fails to take significant account of the political allegiances held by particular tabloids. The Royal Commission on the Press’s 1977 Final Report (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1977), for example, noted the emergence of a gap in centrist and central-left perspectives created by the demise of the Daily Herald and News Chronicle, and it notes the extent and degree of dissatisfaction with the coverage of industrial relations and trade union affairs as a significant weakness in newspapers” (100).
 

John Tulloch, in his introduction to Chris Horrie’s Tabloid Nation, argues that “one of the most debilitating aspects of debates on the press is the tendency to lump different newspapers together–and the most notable example is the tabloids.” While such a critique might apply to Conboy’s Tabloid Britain, Tulloch further claims that the debates tend to center upon the notion that because tabloids obey “the same economic laws . . . . They’re not newspapers, but consumerist magazines . . . [and thus] abdicate the arena of political debate.” Tabloid Britain‘s contribution, then, is to make political sense of the consumerist tendency in the tabloids. In so doing, Conboy provides significant substantiation for James Curran’s and James Thomas’s observations that since Wapping there has been a significant rightward turn of the popular press.
 

In addition to Tabloid Britain, readers might find interesting Chris Horrie’s analyses, in Tabloid Nation, of the internal politics of the tabloids and the state of the tabloid press. Horrie makes two observations that seem particularly fitting here–first, he notes a movement away from ‘bonk’ journalism in the 1990s evidenced by the rise of celebrity magazines such as OK! and Hello! and their partnerships with tabloid papers. Second, Horrie observes that “by 2003 young people in Tabloid Britain were starting to turn their backs on the tabloid newspapers,” primarily as a result of increased access to the same material through television and the internet.”

 
Tabloid Britain provides a satisfying anatomization of the various rhetorical strategies employed in the tabloids, but Conboy’s suggestion of deep affinities with other literary and cultural discourses often feels cursory. For example, he repeatedly links the tone of indignation to the traditions of the moralizing folk tale and to melodrama, but neither of these links are established in any serious depth. Treated as conventional ideas the reader would be expected to understand, such linkages largely lose their potential to reveal the tabloids’ deep fascination with soap opera and reality television.

 
Lost as well are some of the more interesting meditations upon the tabloids’ simulation of working-class rhetoric. In a provocative aside, Conboy notes that studies have indicated “a male tendency to bond with lower socio-cultural patterns of language” (23). The possibility that the tabloids’ rhetoric is associated with machismo suggests a complex class dynamic that Conboy never explores. Further, he does not fully delve into one of the paradoxes immediately evident upon opening the website to any of the tabloids–while a profusion of bared female bodies hails a heteronormative male gaze, the papers directly appeal to female audiences as well. Perhaps a deeper excavation of the heteronormativity of the tabloids would secure the claims for its heritage in melodrama and folk tale, but Conboy does not explore this territory (he does, however, mention lesbians as a group particularly targeted by the newspapers). Moreover, one wishes that Conboy had explored his notion that the national community evoked by the tabloids “recalls something of Baudrillard’s simulacrum” by considering the way tabloid coverage, like much of the contemporary blogosphere, is often a re-processing of news narratives offered elsewhere (13).
 

One of the key questions that emerges from this engagement with nationalism is the impact of global and transnational culture upon the tabloid market. Conboy argues that although nation is a construct, “national news may exist within global communications conglomerates, but it needs a strong local resonance for its continued success” (47). The circularity that underlies this response is crucial, for it legitimates the extensive analysis of “narratives of nation” while refusing the insistent question “why” that emerges in response to a multitude of claims. Tabloid Britain is a fine, insightful analysis of rhetoric, but it leaves this reader thirsty for a deeper grasp of the contexts, forerunners, and implications of the rhetoric it treats.

 
One regrets missed opportunities within the criticism that would have permitted Conboy to clarify some of these critical dynamics. One pertinent example is his use of Homi Bhabha’s work on nationalism: citing only Bhabha’s introduction to Nation and Narration, Conboy misses a central analysis of the duality of nationalist discourse as both pedagogical and performative, a conceptual frame that would strengthen his argument. Another is the significant absence of Ernest Gellner’s perspective on the relations between nationalism and the elite celebration of ‘peasant’ culture, which might strengthen his claims about homologies between tabloid rhetoric and the folktale.
 

In light of recent critical arguments over the “kinda hegemonic, kinda subversive” appropriation of Foucault in literary analysis, it would behoove Conboy to explore questions of consumption more closely (see Miller). In examining the rhetoric as an ideological support for the political economy of the papers, Tabloid Britain refuses to confront the point any representative of the papers would immediately make: that they are simply giving the people what they want. For Conboy, the tabloids “enable the reader to use the newspaper as a textual bridge between their own experience of the culture in which they live, and their own attitudes and beliefs within a range of language which is a close approximation to what they imagine themselves to be using when they speak of these things themselves” (11). But do tabloid readers use it as such, or are the tabloids consumed for their deeper coverage of sport and celebrities? How have changes in the tabloid audience and changes in tabloid rhetoric and content related to one another over time? And are tabloids typically consumed as a proletarian voice, as a source of political information and opinion? James Thomas notes mixed information in the studies done to date on this topic: the public, even when restricted to tabloid readers, tend to express distrust of their content; on the other hand, researchers have found evidence that readers “had absorbed the information they claimed not to believe” (153). While the answers to these questions are indefinite, some consideration of reception would strengthen Tabloid Britain‘s argument about the insidious nature of tabloid rhetoric.
 

Questions of readership arise throughout Conboy’s extensive use of primary evidence. While not the book’s stated intention, stronger distinctions between the particular tabloids, and careful examination of the evolution of tabloid rhetoric in relation to the publishing industry, the growth of the internet, and British politics would evoke great interest and fall outside of the purview of the critics he has quoted. Conboy does occasionally indicate the targeting of a particular tabloid towards gender or political affiliations, but his intention to illuminate the political economy of the tabloids is underserved by an absence of deeper analysis of these concerns.
 

In terms of tabloid content, one of the odd omissions of the book is any extended analysis of how the tabloids represent the British royal family, surely the sine qua non of national self-iconography. Conboy’s study resonates with the contemporary reader because of its continual use of examples from the Blair administration, including debates over immigrant asylum, the War in Iraq, and the Global War on Terror; and examples from celebrity culture, including internet sex-scandals involving British soap stars and the personal and marital travails of British football star David Beckham. With “Teflon Tony” and “Becks” poised to fade from the front pages, one must wonder about the currency of Tabloid Britain five years hence. Indeed, one deeper problem with the book is that, in engaging in rhetorical analysis, Conboy’s emphasis on the synchronic blurs into an emphasis upon the ephemera that are supposed to function merely as examples of the tendencies he chronicles.
 

The book is admirably up-to-date in terms of how new technologies have had an impact on the consumption of the news. Yet the prevalence of references to email and texting speaks to the need for periodic updates if the book is to maintain its currency. On its website at the time this review was written, The Sun had a number of features that Conboy would certainly find interesting, including ‘virals’ for readers to forward, blogs, YouTube-style comedy videos, interactive gambling games, a fantasy football game, online shopping featuring Sun gear, a weight loss club, and numerous other features.
 

Were such an update to occur, the argument would be strengthened by specific attention to the ways in which email, texting, and other forms of virtual participation in the tabloid’s imaginary community changes, or perhaps deepens, the sense of creating a simulacrum of the natio. Were Conboy to explore such an analysis, he would be well-positioned to make a significant addition to critical work on media culture, capitalism, and nationalism.