A book by a non journalist aims to attack tabloid journalism

A book about journalism but not by a journalist is deeply critical of the profession claiming that tabloid journalism is causing suffering in the name of sensationalism.

Peter Burden, interviewed in this morning's Independent,

is so fired up by what he sees as the News of the World's slide into the gutter that he has written a book about it, setting out in remarkable detail how the paper operates and how indifferent he feels it is to the suffering of those it exposes.

He says of the tabloid industry

"I'd always been a news watcher and I was getting more and more appalled at standards which started dropping in the mid '90s. Once it was understood that celebrity trivia was an international commodity – you can sell stories all over the world, which Murdoch recognised and that's why he appointed someone like Piers Morgan as editor – all the emphasis moved to celeb stories, to the cost of the one or two genuine stories they used to do."