From irreverence to irrelevance: the rise and fall of the bad-tempered tabloids
Rodney Tiffen argues that tabloids have given up on trying to reflect the range of views in society, in this crossposting from The Conversation.
“Kick this mob out” shouted the front page of The Daily Telegraph on the day that Tony Abbott triumphed in the 2013 federal election. Restraint and modesty have never been the hallmarks of tabloid newspapers. Sometimes they celebrate what they claim is their impact – most famously when the London Sun proclaimed “It’s The Sun wot won it” after the 1992 Conservative victory.
But it is a long time since any tabloid newspaper could plausibly claim such a role because their reach has shrunk so markedly. In 1972, the biggest-selling newspaper in Australia was The Sun News Pictorial in Melbourne, with a daily circulation of 648,000. Its stablemate, the Melbourne Herald, was the biggest-selling afternoon newspaper with 498,000.
By 2018, the print circulation of the merged Herald Sun was around 303,000, still the largest in the country. However, in 1972, Melbourne’s population was 2.6 million and by 2018 it was 4.9 million. The Sun’s circulation in 1972 was around one-quarter of Melbourne’s population. In 2018, the Herald Sun’s was about one-14th.
Amen
‘Bad-tempered-tabloids?’ Isn’t that a bit twee? Tabloids have never been read by academics and ‘intelligent’ people. They’ve always been money-catchers. They’re on the skids now, not because of R Murdoch and A Bolt. Facebook has made them redundant. People can now have tabloids of their own, and they can fill them with copy and pictures that once appeared in print. Even so, tabloids still have enough clout to rob Geoffrey Rush and Craig McLaughlan of their careers.