call it "news"

"I think it's hard to find happiness as a whole in anything. ... I think you can be delirious in your youth, but as you get older, things happen. We take our instruction from the media. The media just gloats over tragedy and sin and shame, so why are people supposed to feel any different?"
--Bob Dylan [The Bob Dylan Companion, Four Decades of Commentary. Edited by Carl Benson. Copyright 1998. Schirmer books. New York, New York.]

-----------------------
If you call something "news," you can, I think, immediately reach a much larger audience than you would if you called it "Dumb Gossip and Trivia spiced up with sexy (if empty) allegations, designed to get your dollars out of your pocket and into our corporation's bank account."
For one thing, the word "news" is shorter.
It sounds smart, and somehow -- cheery.
"News." "News!"
That one-syllable word has the effect of making the reader (viewer, listener) feel
a) smart, and
b) virtuous. ("Sshhh. Quiet! I'm watching the news!")
So -- if you want to sell a lot of it, call it "news."

--me.

------------------------------
[excerpt]------------ Lady Diana Spencer took her bow at the nexus of a national malaise...and an ever-hotter press competition for royal stories. The plebeian tabloids -- The Sun, the Mirror, and the Star -- no longer had the field to themselves. Under a swashbuckling editor, David English, the Daily Mail converted itself to a tabloid format in 1971 and quickly eclipsed a wilting Daily Express as the enduring bible of middle England; English's successor, Paul Dacre, has only increased its power.

(By 2006, the Daily Mail was selling more than two million copies a day.) The magic formula of the Mail was a combination of curtain-twitching class envy and strident rightist politics, with the added spice of the most waspish gossip columnist in London, Nigel Dempster, whose scoops from the highest circles of the Establishment were read at every upper-class breakfast table like a ransom note. Dempster had a thirty-year reign of terror until he was felled by ill health. He was a miniaturist in tabloid takedowns. ...

The Daily Mail -- and Dempster -- thrived on the national malaise and day after day stoked it with outrage. By the end of the 1970s, faith in British institutions had nose-dived like the pound sterling.
... At Oxford ... the fashion throughout the seventies was for sarcastic embracing of national decline. "Situation Desperate but Not Serious" is a headline that could summarize what it felt like to be English then. Let's not make too much of a fuss, but we all appear to be going to hell on a sled. The Oxford Union proposed the debate motion that "This House believes the British Isles are sinking into the sea."

Everything about England increasingly seemed a joke, a disaster....That's why we all loved Monty Python's Flying Circus....

But Cleese and his fellow Pythons represented a high-flown Oxbridgian take on the New British Impotence. Down in the streets, something else was happening. The unemployment rate among England's youth was at an all-time high, and nothing in the culture could speak to their explosive rage....It took an inspired neo-Marxist entrepreneur named Malcolm McLaren to scoop up an unemployed (and musically inept) construction worker named John Lydon, rechristen him Johnny Rotten, and launch the Sex Pistols -- a cynically manufactured but profoundly apt expression of the emerging British self-hatred. ...

A gossip industry flowered on the nation's decay of self-esteem. The apotheosis of the British style and mood was the weekly Private Eye....The "Grovel" column, written by Nigel Dempster among others, trafficked in the rumors, exposés, and inflammatory blind items that could never make it into the mainstream press. It worked both ways. Often stories originating from anonymous notes to "Grovel" were test-run there for future life in the more "respectable" outlets. And the Eye's tone migrated along with the stories. It instructed British journalists on the attitude of seeing Establishment figures as essentially comic material and any kind of aspirational sentiment as pretentious or absurd.

..."In the old days, the status of the person who featured in the story was the most important aspect of the story," Peter Tory, the journalist behind the William Hickey column in the Daily Express, told [the author] in 1979. "Status is still important but only in so far as there is a genuine story." What was a genuine story?

Anything bad or embarrassing that happened to the titled or rich. As Dempster himself put it, "There is a holiday in my heart when I discover another marriage breakup."
------------- [end Excerpt]
--Tina Brown. [The Diana Chronicles. Copyright 2007. Doubleday. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Auckland.]

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