Boris on the Tabloids

Boris Johnson writes in this morning's Telegraph in his usual witty way about the sensationalism of the Tabloids:

"

The paradox, the mystery, is that this paper - let us call
it the Beast - is just about the most savage and hysterical and reactionary
paper in Britain. In common with some other tabloids, the Beast's columnists and
editorialists seem to believe that Britain has collapsed into a Hogarthian stew
of licence.
They slobber and fume about marital breakdown and divorce and
single parents and degeneracy of all kinds. They rave about swearing on
television, and the casual pornography of the airwaves.
They denounce the
daily exposure of our children to sexual material; and yet how do they stuff
their news pages? They get their ace reporter to fly half way round the world,
laden with hundreds of thousands of pounds, and they buy the story of some poor
misguided girl who should have known better, and then they quote her in the
manner of a Readers' Wives column."

In case you didn't know he is referring to recent coverage of Ralph Fiennes exploits at 35,000 feet.

And he continues

The first thing to grasp is that these tabloids sell
sex. That is the name of the game. Every day for the past fortnight, the Beast
has been trying to boost sales with some red-hot DVD called Sins or Jackie
Collins's Guide to Adultery, or whatever; and every week these tabloid papers
pry, bribe, lie and bug in order to reveal that human beings are sometimes
engaged in carnal activity.
They then publish these titillating details,
which are devoured across the land with a mixture of gratitude and self-disgust,
and which are indispensable to maintaining circulation.
But you cannot just
give the public a tide of sex. People don't want to feel dirty, or that their
baser instincts are being manipulated. It is therefore vital, if you are a
tabloid editor, simultaneously to purport to disapprove of the filth you purvey.
That is why you also hire lots of columnists to engage in bishop-like
finger-wagging, to legitimate the sexual revelations; and of course the more
disapproval there is, the more titillating it all is.
That is the beautiful
symmetry; that is the magnificent hypocrisy of the product. The moralising
intensifies the pleasure of reading the revelations, just as Gladstone
intensified his pleasure in encountering prostitutes by flailing himself later
on. The exercise is therefore essentially literary, and to that extent it is not
to be taken seriously.