[Media-watch] Becks, Sex or Iraq? - Independent - Peter Cole - 18 April 2004

[Julie-ann Davies]

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/media/story.jsp?story=512397

Becks, sex or Iraq: you pays your money...

It's been a week of skewed priorities in the press. But who is better
served: the tabloid reader or the broadsheet reader?
By Peter Cole
18 April 2004


The saga continues. As with the war in Iraq a year ago, the Daily Mirror
labels each day. In the Mirror calendar, today is "Becks sex scandal day
14". There are two universes out there, the one peopled by factions trying
to drive the coalition out of Iraq and win the battle for power in the mess
that would be left behind, the other occupied by the sleazy, the chancers,
the manipulators, the fantasisers and the footballer. To those of us, the
overwhelming majority, who have never been to Iraq, the White House or
Number 10, and have never played football for Real Madrid, topped the pops
or retained Max Clifford, it seems like serious unreal versus ludicrous
unreal. One is serious because people get killed; one is ludicrous because
its central character, the footballer, says it is.

Are we literally paying our money and taking our choice? On the one hand it
is 30p for The Sun and 35p for the Daily Mirror; on the other it is 50p for
The Times, 60p for The Independent. The former buys you Posh and Becks and
Loos and Marbeck, the latter Muqtada al-Sadr and Bush and Blair and
kidnapping. And since red-top Sun/Mirror/Star sell about 6.2m copies a day,
while so-called quality Telegraph/Times/Independent/Guardian sell about 2.2m
copies a day, it would seem that approaching three times as many people are
taking Becks as Iraq.

Is it a simple either/or, a question of which sort of newspaper gives more
emphasis to which story? During this past week, on my rough count, the
Mirror and Sun have given about five times as much space to Becks as they
have to Iraq, typically five pages a day of sleaze to a little under one
page of Iraq chaos. The quality newspapers have given about six times as
much space to Iraq as they have to Becks, typically three pages a day
(tabloid or equivalent) of Iraq to half a page of Becks. And of course the
content has been qualitatively different in the case of the Becks story,
with alleged lovers kissing and telling in the red-tops while the so-called
quality papers restricted themselves to such anodyne items as Posh and Becks
consulting lawyers or Sky buying the TV interview with Ms Loos. The Iraq
story covered the same ground in both market sectors.

In terms of knowledge of the other universe the red-top buyers are in the
superior position. Despite the brevity of the reporting they know roughly
what is going on in Iraq. The readers of the quality titles, on the other
hand, know almost nothing of the detail of the Beckham crisis. This would
not matter if these papers ignored the story completely and treated it as
though it was not there. But curiously they behave as though their readers
do know what is going on, while not providing such information themselves.
The Telegraph even devoted an article to Miss Loos's fashion style while
saying little about who Miss Loos was or her position in contemporary
society.

Those living in the media village tend to disregard their readers in a
rather crucial way. They forget that most buyers of newspapers buy one
title, and gather their information from that paper. If that is The
Independent or Guardian, Times or Telegraph, then they know very little of
the details of the Beckham allegations. And yet their newspaper of choice
has made glancing reference to alleged infidelity, text messages or Posh's
reluctance to spend time in Madrid, without naming key names or providing
any context or quotation.

Journalists, who read all the papers, dine out on their knowledge of what
has or has not been published elsewhere. It is very hard to prepare a
newspaper when you have all that background knowledge and cannot get on the
wavelength of readers who do not. The usual excuse, that the public's first
source of news is radio or television, doesn't wash. For a start the News of
the World and others are claiming, and paying for, exclusivity. And second,
radio and television are as wary as the quality newspapers are - on grounds
of both legality and taste - of publishing allegations about the Beckhams.

Which makes for baffled viewers and listeners too. Take the case of Radio 5.
They have talked constantly of "the allegations" while going to great
lengths not to detail them. They have sent a reporter into the Alps to
"doorstep" the Beckhams' villa while pretending that they are not covering
the story. They have run phone-ins - one entitled "Are we fair to our
celebrities?" - in which studio guests are cautioned against even the
foothills of explicitness and members of the public call in to say, at
considerable and opinionated length, that they have no interest in this
inconsequential story. Even those admitting that they regularly read The Sun
or The News of the World claimed to have ignored the five or seven pages
dealing with the Beckhams. What a waste of money!

And Sky's viewers saw a long interview with a woman, Miss Loos, about whom
they knew little unless they had read a red-top. Why then was Sky paying a
lot of money for the interview and broadcasting it?

We are left with a situation in which viewers and listeners and readers of
non red-top newspapers know very little about a series of kiss-and-tell
allegations from women who have been paid a lot of money by red-tops and Sky
TV, and those who buy the papers that are printing the allegations claim not
to be reading them. Very odd.

Happily the few moments in which Posh felt wretched seem to have passed, and
she and her husband have returned to everyday celebrity life, breaking off
their intense discussions once an hour for a photo-call, to change into a
new outfit or to talk to their advisers. Normal soap service has been
resumed, and nobody seems to be pondering at all whether the allegations are
or are not true, or whether the marriage is under any strain. We have moved
on.

A poll last week (from Communicate Research) showed that MPs who were triump
halist about the Hutton report have not moved on. A majority was concerned
about the degree of impartiality of BBC news, and felt that ITN and Sky were
more impartial. They want regulation of the BBC taken from the governors and
given to Ofcom. Matters that will be debated. But are these MPs unaware of
the reaction to Hutton? That public confidence in the BBC is greater than
that in MPs?

Peter Cole is professor of journalism at the University of Sheffield