In late June 1963, the front page of the Daily Mirror had a banner headline: ‘Prince Philip and the Profumo Scandal — Rumour Is Utterly Unfounded’. Excited readers scanned the story in vain for what the rumour might be. The Prince Philip ‘allegation’ was a perfect example of the knife-edged skill the press developed over many decades of offering up everything and nothing to the gleeful but detail-starved public imagination. The imprecise nature of scandal reporting provided the most fun for readers at their breakfast tables, the haven around which tabloid editors and owners expected their products to be read.
What Adrian Bingham’s Family Newspapers? shows clearly, if a little solemnly, is that the popular press has always tried to suck readers in with banner headline titillation, inside-page innuendo, and pictures of women as déshabillée as the times would allow: to publish whatever they could get away with in whatever way they could get away with it. The constraints on editors were not only legal, but also, and primarily, what was deemed acceptable, by a curiously cross-class but nevertheless exclusively male, authoritarian and sentimental consensus, for ‘the family’ to set eyes on.
Oxford |
298 pp. |ISBN:
9780199279586
