sex news

[Tina Brown, new Person-in-Charge-of Newsweek Magazine (couldn't find her actual "title", wrote about England's tabloid newspapers in her biography of Diana, Princess of Wales]:
---------- Just before Diana Spencer began to emerge so vividly into public life, a kind of journalistic global warming was altering the eco-balance between the British press and the British Royal Family. ...

For Americans used to local newspapers homogenized by the stingy monopolies of big chains and no national newspapers except the inoffensive USA Today, the staid national edition of the New York Times, and the staider Wall Street Journal, the volume and variety of the British print press feels bewilderingly promiscuous. In 1980, there were ten national daily newspapers selling 20 million copies, more per capita than in any other country in the world. Their relative positions along the spectrum of sensation have remained consistent, but the entire spectrum has shifted sharply toward the garish, a trend accelerated by the resort to checkbook journalism -- a practice of buying sources routinely denounced and routinely embraced. Three of the nationals -- the "red tops" of The Sun, the Daily Mirror, and the Daily Star -- are screaming populist tabloids, on most days almost entirely devoid of anything resembling serious news. Two more tabloids, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, compete in the same mass market but with a thin, translucent coating of middle-class respectability.

The Times, the Daily Telegraph, and the Guardian, and now the Independent, are supposed to occupy the high ground. Despite the advent of the Web, the Brits remain voracious newspaper readers, often buying more than one paper. That fact plus the country's compactness and newsstand culture make it impossible to ignore the daily blizzard of headlines, picked up immediately by television. When all the papers are on a rampage against some public figure, which nowadays is always, they invade your life. They are billboarded at every newsstand. They leap across your screen. They buzz around in your head all day like a low-grade fever. Paradoxically, it is the flair of the British tabloid press, its superb professional élan, that makes it so feared by its subjects and targets. So much good writing and theatrical presentation goes into mounting the daily crucifixions. So much competitive professional pride goes into finding just the right killer adjective.

The Royal Family used to be exempt from routine abuse. But in thirty years the tabloid view of royalty moved from the benign to the malign without a pause for magnanimity in between.
...
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The culture of deference was beginning to crumble. ...
The tempo of the tremors increased with the arrival in London in 1969 of the young (he was thirty-eight) and iconoclastic Rupert Murdoch. Riding in from Australia, he defeated Robert Maxwell to buy the biggest of the Sunday papers, the prurient News of the World("All human life is here"). Murdoch upset the better sort from the get-go. His first act was to exhume the affair between the call girl Christine Keeler and the Secretary of State for War John Profumo. Murdoch's purchase of Keeler's memoirs for serialization in the News of the World was seen as a staggering breach of the British sense of fair play. Profumo had spent the previous six years in redemptive charity work, so Murdoch found himself a pariah overnight, condemned by the Press Council and fricasseed, to his great displeasure, on London Weekend Television by David Frost. (When Murdoch left the studio, says Frost, he told a reporter, "London Weekend Television has made a powerful enemy tonight.")

The great thing about being a pariah, however, is that it sets you free. If everybody is already pissed off, what does it matter if you piss off everybody even more? A year after he bought the News of the World, Murdoch snapped up a faltering broadsheet called The Sun -- the sad descendant of the Daily Herald, once the crusading voice of the Labour Party -- and relaunched it as a rollicking, up-yours tabloid featuring bare-breasted pinups every day. And he let his editors know that when it came to coverage of the circulation-building Royals, the gloves were off.
-------------------- [end Excerpt]
{from The Diana Chronicles, by Tina Brown. Copyright 2007. Doubleday. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Auckland}

Rampaging after public figures?
Writing about sex scandals from a half-dozen years in the past?
Topless "pinups"?
Those are all something, but they're not "news."
The rampaging = petty, bullying harassment.
Writing about sex scandals from the Past = recent history, exaggerated and sensationalized, for sake of Entertainment.
Topless "pinups" = -- well, topless pinups.

None of that sounds like "news," to me.
What would Walter Cronkite say?
What would Edward R. Murrow say?
...Rupert Murdoch is guy who owns "Fox News" which tells us what to think, and how to vote.
It seems like -- first he took control of England's media, and then moved on to America's media.
(I think, there used to be laws in America against one company owning such a large amount of the media, for obvious reasons, but someone -- got those laws repealed.)...

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