You misrepresent me, Craig. All phone hacking is contemptable; the alleged hacking of Milly Downer's and of grieving families particuarly repugnant. (On the other hand, many a famous scoop has been had with a bit of good "old fashioned" wire tapping and bugging.) My point was that we should be careful at whom we point fingers. Where does the demand for these types of story come from? As Junvenal once lamented: "the people long eagerly for just two things — bread and circuses."
It's a very simplistic argument to claim that the buyers of newspapers are responsible for the corruption they exercise. I bought NoTW for the football reports only, so does that mean I condone the phone hacking? I think you might be a bit isolated in Budapest to appreciate that this is by far the biggest story in the UK and not just tomorrow's fish and chip paper and there is a good chance that it could get a lot bigger.
I think Budapest made his point very well, the NotW is driven by it's readership, the more salacious bollocks it prints, the more copies it sells. Some people read it for the sports pages, some people read it to see who David Beckham's been shagging and everyone who reads it will see Milly Dowler's phone hacking as being disgraceful, but the reality remains, scandal sells papers and that's what most people seem to want to read.
You are in no position to speak for the readership of any newspaper. Sure there are some idiots who love the scandal. There are also quite a few blokes who bought it to see a pair of jugs and many who bought it for the sport. I personally thought it was a bit of a comic when it came to news, but I'm not going to pretend that I have any knowledge of other people's preferences and neither should you.
When news is freely available on the internet, physical papers are dying out. The only way to get people to buy them is have a scoop that can only be read in that paper. Unfortunately most people seem to care about who's nobbing who and who's sunbathing topless where. Bread and circuses is exactly right for the masses.
I don't speak for the readership of anything, the fact that the bigger the scandal, the bigger the sales, is merely a statement of fact. It became the biggest selling weekly paper in the UK based on it's format, which was concentrating on celebrity-based scoops and populist news. A fondness for sex scandals gained it the nicknames News of the Screws and Screws of the World. It had a reputation for exposing national or local celebrities as drug users, sex freaks or criminals, setting up insiders and journalists in disguise to provide either video or photographic evidence, and phone hacking in ongoing police investigations(that's not my opinion either by the way, I lifted it from a real newspaper).
Again you can't generalise that the majority of the readership condoned the behaviour of journalists and editors because they bought that newspaper. It is possible that many regular readers (possibly even the majority) were disgusted by that crap. The fact that sales figures for the paper rose when they printed scandals is circumstantial evidence that those additional readers were not regular buyers of the paper.
Fair enough, I take back everything I said, most of the people who bought the NotW were probably just looking at tits and sport and the fact that the sales went up whenever there was a scandal was probably just coincidental.
i agree with OLM. there is no point in putting pearls before swine. the NOTW merely played to its audience (the jeremy kyle generation) and gave it what it wanted which was dirty scandal and celebrity sex stories. all well and good being appalled after the event but the reason this is SUCH big news is because it sold shedloads of copies each week! the dowler situation is abhorrent but the NOTW did it (allegedly) because scoop/exclusive about that case would have flown off the shelves being bought by the exact same hypocritical scuzzbuckets who are now stood atop their ivory towers spitting vitriolic morality at the murdochs! COYH
I don't think either of us believe that fully, but I am an example of someone who totally rejected everything about that rag apart from the sport (which was good). If you follow your own logic I must have loved the scandals because I also bought the paper when they printed them.
I didn't go in my local on Sunday lunch (despite the Yorkshire puds and roast spuds!), nor on the night (for the quiz), because they had NotW on the bar, or floating around the tables. Now that rag's gone, they get The Sun daily. So I don't go in at all. Call me precious if you like, but not buying it/them myself isn't enough. The Murdoch rags insult my intelligence as well as my sense of morality.
My local doesn't have; to get to one that does is a 5-mile drive. But - yes, I do. I avoid Murdoch media.
Sorry - I didn't know what you meant, but have just heard the news. The guy will most likely get done for (attempted) assault. He picked his way of opposing the Dirty Digger. I choose my own way.
I have always had the feeling that most people don't actually want to read about Jordan & Pete or big fat gypsies ect. They buy whatever rag they buy,just because it's cheap or whatever.I think the kind of people who buy tnotw dont really consider whats in it.If the stars editor tried leaving out 90% of the gossip,i think he'd find that sales stayed pretty much the same. People who buy these rags aren't interested in politics,the stock market and so on.They want sport,tits a t.v guide.Where i work pretty much every paper gets passed around,and people tend to read the rags in ten seconds flat.Myself for instance,i see two or three of these rags every working day and i dont even know who the big fat gypsies are,but i do scan these papers. Most people seem to do the same to me.
Exactly. To suggest all of those people agreed with the agenda of corruption within the newspaper is rubbish.
