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  • BONKS and BLIGHTY? Oh, Tabloid Britain!
  • Brook Miller
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...

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