17 Emotional narratives in the tabloid press
Jen Birks, University of Nottingham
Tabloid journalism is often disparaged for its use of emotional rhetoric, as a sensationalised, ‘dumbed-down’, and ‘soft’ form of news that is contrasted with the serious and dispassionate business of ‘hard’ news. Where tabloids appeal to base fears and prejudices against marginalised groups such as immigrants and welfare ‘scroungers’, this is clearly problematic. However, there are times when they attempt to use emotional narratives in a more political way that shares some characteristics with broadsheet investigative journalism and the more muckraking end of New Journalism, using human interest stories as forms of testimonial against official claims about social reality.
Recent scholarship has noted the lack of political challenge to the austerity agenda in the quality and public service sectors of news media, where the need for cuts has been broadly accepted as necessary. News media generally present cuts to welfare in particular as being supported by ‘the public’. However, in the wake of the Welfare Reform Act, the Daily Mirror and Sunday People, both owned by Trinity Mirror, ran campaigns in opposition to the ‘Bedroom Tax’, as opponents labelled the cuts to housing benefit for those deemed to have a ‘spare bedroom’. Both papers are centre-left leaning and Labour-supporting, though the Sunday People takes less interest in political issues in general and protest in particular, whilst the Mirror has been supportive of public sector strikes.
The basis of opposition to the policy was moral more than practical, so the ‘evidence’ presented to support the criticisms was of social injustice, something felt intuitively more than dispassionately calculated. Both campaigns focused primarily on anger as a politically motivating emotion. At first this anger was attributed to politicians, and then increasingly to readers responding to the campaign, principally in letters to the editor. The papers found some support in opinion polls that seemed to be shifting in their favour, but also took protest seriously as an expression of public outrage. Anger was also attributed to those affected by the bedroom tax, and despite being described as victims, they were not denied agency as is more typical in such campaigns.
The narratives of suffering aimed to legitimise a demand for political action. The newspapers encouraged affected individuals to write to MPs and even the Prime Minister setting out their case. However, these emotive tales of bedrooms used to house specialist medical equipment or kept as shrines to dead children were then treated as isolated cases that did not constitute a challenge to the policy as a whole. Government ministers were able to respond emotionally appropriately with sympathy and concern to discursively shut down the argument without actually doing anything. Commentators and letter writers accused them of being heartless – questioning the emotional authenticit