TABLOID CITIZENSHIP

Abstract

The UK tabloid newspaper, the Daily Mirror, waged two prolonged campaigns in 1956 and 2003 against the proposed invasions of Egypt and Iraq. This paper compares and contrasts the campaigns and explores the changing character and voice of the Mirror in the context of efforts to reposition the paper within the popular market, and exert political leverage. It reflects on the meaning of sincerity and identity in relation to newspapers. It analyses and compares the deployment of established tabloid techniques during the two campaigns, including stunts, the use of celebrities, petitions. Particular attention is paid to the presence—and absence—of representations of the reader and the tension between opposing the war and maintaining a patriotic posture by supporting front-line troops. The paper concludes that, although “tabloid citizenship” merely presents the illusion of political participation, in the case of the Iraq campaign, it reinvented the carnival of the popular press in interesting ways and temporarily gave space for some radical journalism attacking neo-imperialism.

Keywords:

• Daily Mirror
• identity
• newspapers
• invasion
• Iraq
• Suez

Notes

1. Piers Morgan in his “private diaries” gives this account of the sales disaster: “my circulation manager … brought me some more bad news. Sales have fallen off a cliff this week, absolutely crashed … Piers, I know you're anti this war. But we just can't go on attacking it while our boys are under fire. It's suicide. I looked at the figures and gulped. It's unbelievable: at least 80,000 readers have buggered off. I thought about this carefully, then wrote an urgent email to Sly Bailey [chief executive of Trinity Mirror]. We have a problem, and it's my fault. I'm afraid I misjudged the way our readers would respond to the start of the war, and our line has clearly been too confrontational and too critical for many of them. We need to be more news led, less attitudinal, without abandoning our line … but without ramming it down people's throats either” (1 April 2003; Morgan, 2005, p. 391). This might be viewed as a distinctly postmodern interpretation of the “diary” form—not private, nor consistently written up, but constructed from contemporaneous notes, photos, letters, cuttings, memos and emails “convert[ed]” into a diary (Morgan, 2005, p. viii).

2. As revealed in Gaitskell's diary “Wednesday 5 September 1956 … Hugh Cudlipp rang me up, and said he had some important things to communicate to me which he couldn't do on the phone and could we meet” (Williams, 1983, pp. 596–7).

3. Morgan claims this drew an anguished response from Mirror Chairman, Victor Blank:

“FRIDAY, 14 MARCHVictor rang early in the morning and was very unhappy. ‘This is wrong, Piers. You know I never normally say that, but this front page is too personal and too unpleasant. We can't, as a Labour-supporting newspaper, call the Prime Minister a monster like this’” (Morgan, 2005, pp. 384–5).