Reading Tabloid Papers

JohnP199

So often we see threads/posts here b!tching about tabloid newspapers and questioning the intelligence of those who read them. But why? What's wrong with me reading The Star, Sunday World etc? When I'm looking for quality literature to read I buy a book. When I'm looking for some light-hearted daily reading one of the red tops is ideal.

Its funny though when you see threads started on Boards with a link to a tabloid article and nearly always the OP will say something along the lines of "well I never buy a tabloid paper but I just picked up The Sun without thinking and look what was written in it…". Why cant people just admit if the buy red top papers because there's nothing wrong with doing so.

And I do find it just a bit ironic that people who are regular user's of After Hours complain about another form of media and its lack of intelligent articles or over-exaggerated stories. Pot-kettle anyone?

FatherLen

i cant function without a read of the metro in the morning.
but pay for a newspaper????
never.

Richard Hillman

I think have turned into light entertainment rather than news. The likes of the Evening Herald and The Star might as well be classed as fictional reading.

biko

No, what you want is some easy-accessed, already-chewed articles and opinions.
Tabloids doesn't delve into the topics as broadsheets can do.
They offer a populist, paper-selling viewpoint that'll go down well with the masses.

Of course, sometime that's all you want.

Princess Consuela Bananahammock

The fact that they print complete lies and then you people and believe it and discuss it with your workmates as if it was bible truth makes a tabloid reader ignorant.

If you want news, buy a newspaper. If you want fiction, they go and buy a book.

thebigbiffo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI

Augmerson

JohnP199 wrote: »

So often we see threads/posts here b!tching about tabloid newspapers and questioning the intelligence of those who read them. But why? What's wrong with me reading The Star, Sunday World etc? When I'm looking for quality literature to read I buy a book. When I'm looking for some light-hearted daily reading one of the red tops is ideal.

When you're reading a work of fiction, there is nothing wrong with picking up a Mills & Boon. When you're reading up on current events and the news and things that actually matter, picking up the Sun or Star or Sunday World is a bad idea. Despite the Irish Sun/Star/Sunday World across the front, half of the news is from the English editions, the rest is thrash journalism - lazy and with a total lack of insight and just sensationalism and some girl's tits on page 3. Quality stuff OP.

xsiborg

JohnP199 wrote: »

So often we see threads/posts here b!tching about tabloid newspapers and questioning the intelligence of those who read them. But why? What's wrong with me reading The Star, Sunday World etc? When I'm looking for quality literature to read I buy a book. When I'm looking for some light-hearted daily reading one of the red tops is ideal.



Its funny though when you see threads started on Boards with a link to a tabloid article and nearly always the OP will say something along the lines of "well I never buy a tabloid paper but I just picked up The Sun without thinking and look what was written in it…". Why cant people just admit if the buy red top papers because there's nothing wrong with doing so.



And I do find it just a bit ironic that people who are regular user's of After Hours complain about another form of media and its lack of intelligent articles or over-exaggerated stories. Pot-kettle anyone?

an excellent post, and well worded too, that reflects my very thoughts every time i see a thread that begins with an article qouted from the daily mail. seems to be the paper du jour for AH to píss and moan about, and the sunday independent (thats the sindo, for AH'ers that may not recognise the full name of the paper!).

i like a bit of red-top reading myself, i dont read too much into a newspapers politics, i just read it for the pictures! but my paper of preference on a sunday then is the sunday business post.

some people have a hard on for dismissing a sensationalist newspaper as sensationalist, "i'd never read such low brow tripe, but look what it says here!", reminds me of my father when he used to watch that gerry ryan show on tv- secrets, "just to see how bad it gets!"

Penn

Nothing but sensationalist, lazy, dumbed-down, hypocritical, biased bullsh*t.

flutterflye

Never bought a newspaper in my life, but if I were looking for news or info, I would not turn to tabloids.

Mayaswell get OK mag or listen to Adrian Kennedy (is that still on?).

All stupid crap anyway.

We never get factual, non bias info anyway, but I'd still choose The Indo over The Sun.

MungBean

Tabloids are pure entertainment the same as astrology or Jim Corr. They are not in anyway credible as a source of information. If your just wanting a bit of lazy reading about pointless crap then go ahead, but dont be surprised when you forget how to tie your shoelaces. That crap is mental poison.

Naikon

i refuse to take anyone who reads these papers on a daily basis seriously. Not to mention the outright lies. Yellow Journalism imo.

krudler

It may appear light hearted but when you look at smear campaigns, bare faced lies, out of context quotes and pictures and the myriad of utter bullsh1t printed in tabloids its sickening, and there are a lot of gullible idiots who read them and think its factual.

mikemac

The Daily Mail has one of the better websites, it's constantly updated

And sometimes the articles are full of lies but some are good too
But the headlines are nothing to do with the articles and just look for a cheap anger inducing slant.

There was one yesterday about a Boeing test flight that went from Seattle to Pittsburgh.
And the pilots went to Primani Brothers for a sandwich, it's famous in Pittsburgh like going to the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin or going to Baltimore, Maryland for crabcakes and so on.

Article was well written and I'm interested in aviatiion
Title: Crew flies Boeing's new 747 from Seattle to Pittsburgh… for sandwiches

OutlawPete

OP, are you trying to say that it's not true that the only newspaper that After Hour regulars but is the Irish Times?? :eek:

I'll not have it said! Why it is a scurrilous accusation that the good folk of this forum would buy such filth as a red top. I'll have you know that the Times is the only publication that would ever be purchased by our esteemed patrons. Why it is read by them each morning before the then go online and fap to Georgia Salpa and blast the world wide web with piss.

xsiborg

krudler wrote: »

It may appear light hearted but when you look at smear campaigns, bare faced lies, out of context quotes and pictures and the myriad of utter bullsh1t printed in tabloids its sickening, and there are a lot of gullible idiots who read them and think its factual.

that's hardly the fault of the paper though, i think there are a lot more people out there who are capable of making the distinction between what's written as fiction and whats reported as fact.

reading a red top rag doesnt "make" you an idiot, for me personally speaking, i find it an amusing diversion, bit of entertainment for €1 so to speak. after i've it read, it'll go in the trash, and i'll ponder no more on the articles within.

of course it's lazy journalism and it's everything the detractors on thi thread say it is, but as the OP suggested, why take it so seriously? if the people that read these papers are gullible idiots well its not like they're going to have any signifigant impact on world politics any time soon now, is it?

best leave that to david norris then, shining example of a highly articulate intellectual he is. :rolleyes:

Naikon

xsiborg wrote: »

of course it's lazy journalism and it's everything the detractors on thi thread say it is, but as the OP suggested, why take it so seriously? if the people that read these papers are gullible idiots well its not like they're going to have any signifigant impact on world politics any time soon now, is it?

You fail to understand the concept of office politics. Idiots get promoted.

Eric Cartman

making tabloids is like teaching secondary school , intelligent people trying to dumb down information to get it accross to a bunch of easily distracted people who wont understand most of it

xsiborg

Naikon wrote: »

You fail to understand the concept of office politics. Idiots get promoted.

genuinely not meaning to be a smart-ass Naikon, but, i fail to understand your point...

walked myself into it now!

Naikon

xsiborg wrote: »

genuinely not meaning to be a smart-ass Naikon, but, i fail to understand your point...

walked myself into it now!

Fianna Fail is a good case study to follow this train of thought:P

RobbieTheRobber

All tabloid journalism isnt bad, some of the crime writers who work for the tabloids can do some good pieces on exposing crime.
However what seems to sell magizines and newspaper and even news on telelvision is celebrity gossip, so no wonder the tabloids pander mainly to this area.


so far everyone on boards is denying being a reader but the readership figues across what could be called tabloids (im including the Indo and Sindo) account for a huge majority of newspaper readership figures in ireland.

Check out the stats for dec 2010 http://www.nni.ie/v2/broad/portal.php?content=../_includes/circulation.php

mikom

Newspapers, yesterdays news today.
Most are opinionpapers rather than newspapers anyway, helpful for those who need people to tell them how to live or how to think.

jimthemental

I occasionally buy the Star for it's sports coverage, not much else in it. I gave up buying the Independent because of the level of pretentiousness in it, and that was before Kevin Myers started writing in it. I just get news from a bunch of websites now.

Spread

Mostly immature and boorish rants against some of the best investigative tabloids. This is very elitist and snobbish and is likely to breed the type of solicitor who when he goes on to be a judge asks, "Who are Oasis" or mistakes Kiri Te Kanawa for Kerry Katona. Light entertainment with both truth, half truths and fibs included. If you are slandered, you can consult Senior Counsel and collect a decent wedge for your pension. If you cannot tell the difference and are not streetwise enough pick up the IT and it will have done the sifting for you. The days when the IT was a great read, with decent journalists that gave news and analysis and not spin, are long gone.

ScumLord

xsiborg wrote: »

that's hardly the fault of the paper though, i think there are a lot more people out there who are capable of making the distinction between what's written as fiction and whats reported as fact.

Of course it's the papers fault, they know full well what they're at and the vast majority of people who read the papers take what's written as fact. Then go off in a tizzy thinking the sky is falling down.

The tabloids pass of propaganda as news and I think something should be done to highlight that to people.

Soups123

For me it just the bull some write, I have witnessed incidents and then seen them wrote about, the stuff they make up is shocking.Also its always old news, if I have time to read the paper, i tend to not and go online instead as most things have nearly always progressed alot since print.

Spread

Why then, did the grandiose and self-appraised boffins of the world, spend so much time/money/hot air trying to prevent a meltdown at 00:00 on y2k? Most of the highly exaggerated, end of world scenarios were tabloid driven, but extrapolated in a nerdy way in the broadsheets. And mostly all a load of horse manure.

Forest Master

Everyone I know who reads tabloids are lower class and/or really dumb and/or work on a building site/garage, etc. Co-incidence? I don't know - but that's my experience.
I don't read newspapers at all, BTW. I find the tabloids are full of moronic brain-dead bullsh*t, and the broadsheets are full of boring pretentious w*nk & D4 journo opinion pieces.

Abraham

Tabloidism exists....ie that's where we are. The content is pure manure but it's inescapable. But then just consider the TV media scene. Take a glance across the hundred or so channels available to us here and I'll bet that 90% of readers would agree that 90% of the channels dish up utter tripe day after day. It's just mindboggling to think that money and expertise is wasted on such utter bilge. Take a decco too on some of the 'religious' channels and get a flavour of utter idiocy. The Lord must be uplifted to think he has created such complete apes on planet earth.

Eoin_Sheehy

They're total rubbish, I read an open letter from a Journalist to the owner of the British Star complaining about how fictional everything in it was, (that Journalist was working in the Star) and he had said he was openly encouraged to make up whatever he wanted and that once he wore a Burka in pretending that a council had made a 'Muslim only toilet' none of which was true. I'll try and find that letter it was a bit back, I saw it on the Guardian.


Sure it's all only fun and games until comeone prints a front page editorial in support of the English Defence League.

EDIT: Found it http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/mar/04/daily-star-reporter-letter-full Now I know this doesn't have naked women in it and is longer than a paragraph!

OctavarIan

Barrington wrote: »

Nothing but sensationalist, lazy, dumbed-down, hypocritical, biased bullsh*t.

Fixed that for you.

At least we have After Hours as a refuge from those things.

mikom

Forest Master wrote: »

Everyone I know who reads tabloids are lower class and/or really dumb and/or work on a building site/garage, etc.

My monocle steamed up upon reading this.

bean

Yep, those tabloid papers, if they are not complaining about the warm/cold weather, they are giving out about those foreigners, calling radio presenters names or praising the vigilante justice system....
oh wait that was boards out of hours this morning.

xsiborg

Forest Master wrote: »

Everyone I know who reads tabloids are lower class and/or really dumb and/or work on a building site/garage, etc. Co-incidence? I don't know - but that's my experience.
I don't read newspapers at all, BTW. I find the tabloids are full of moronic brain-dead bullsh*t, and the broadsheets are full of boring pretentious w*nk & D4 journo opinion pieces.

why would you associate yourself with those who you consider to be lower class, less intelligent than your good self? i wont even bother with the rest of your stereotyping, sounds like it really is coincidental of your own experience. either that, or you're just making it up, in which case that just makes your post laughable.

Forest Master

xsiborg wrote: »

why would you associate yourself with those who you consider to be lower class, less intelligent than your good self? i wont even bother with the rest of your stereotyping, sounds like it really is coincidental of your own experience. either that, or you're just making it up, in which case that just makes your post laughable.

I don't associate myself with them - I said people I know - not people I hang around with.

The Highwayman

Wow I was not aware you read said newspapers, I just presumed you just looked at the pictures?

Forest Master

The Highwayman wrote: »

Wow I was not aware you read said newspapers, I just presumed you just looked at the pictures?

Who are you even talking to? Use the quote function, FFS.

Craebear

If you took everyone who writes, sells and read tabloids and chucked them in a fire, the world would become a much better place.

I am coming for you OP. Make peace with your maker.

Einhard

JohnP199 wrote: »

So often we see threads/posts here b!tching about tabloid newspapers and questioning the intelligence of those who read them. But why? What's wrong with me reading The Star, Sunday World etc? When I'm looking for quality literature to read I buy a book. When I'm looking for some light-hearted daily reading one of the red tops is ideal.

Its funny though when you see threads started on Boards with a link to a tabloid article and nearly always the OP will say something along the lines of "well I never buy a tabloid paper but I just picked up The Sun without thinking and look what was written in it…". Why cant people just admit if the buy red top papers because there's nothing wrong with doing so.

And I do find it just a bit ironic that people who are regular user's of After Hours complain about another form of media and its lack of intelligent articles or over-exaggerated stories. Pot-kettle anyone?

Irish people like to think that we're not snobby as a nation, but we're terrible for it. The only difference between us and the Brits in terms of snobbery, is that they tend to go for the social side of it, whilst we're snobs about practically anything! Music, media, even deodorant as I found out in a thread here recently!

xsiborg

Forest Master wrote: »

I don't associate myself with them - I said people I know - not people I hang around with.

i could play silly semantics, but i was simply pointing out the folly of your argument, put forward from a stereotype school of thought, there wasn't anything that seemed like an original opinion in your post, just the same regurgitated BS one tends to hear down the pub (AH does seem to liken itself to the virtual pub atmosphere).

i wont get into a píssing contest with you about my academic, professional, or occupational achievements, but suffice to say that i could simply counter your argument by saying that in MY experience, i presume you meant manual labourers-

i havent met too many i would consider intellectually deficient, and since you talk about those on building sites i know of one particular quantity surveyor/engineer who i would consider at least academically intelligent, dont know if he reads tabloids though!.

Forest Master

xsiborg wrote: »

i havent met too many i would consider intellectually deficient, and since you talk about those on building sites i know of one particular quantity surveyor/engineer who i would consider at least academically intelligent, dont know if he reads tabloids though!.

You're clearly not able to grasp what I was saying. I never said that everyone on a building site is stupid, or that they all read the tabloids - I said "everyone I know who reads tabloids are lower class and/or really dumb and/or work on a building site/garage, etc". It's an observational comment about tabloid readers - not builders or tradespeople.

Do you know the difference between what I said and what you think I said?

Here's an analogy, since you're struggling: everyone who likes Black Eyed Peas has sh*t taste in music - but not all people with sh*t taste in music like Black Eye Peas.

Do you understand?

xsiborg

Forest Master wrote: »

Here's an analogy, since you're struggling: everyone who likes Black Eyed Peas has sh*t taste in music - but not all people with sh*t taste in music like Black Eye Peas.

Do you understand?

i understand what you said perfectly, and your analogy only serves to further confuse the issue, if thats what you use to support your opinion as merely a coincidence.

my point, throughout this thread, has been that not all tabloid readers are lower class knuckle draggers as you and many others in this thread have tried to imply.

Eric Cartman

Craebear wrote: »

If you took everyone who writes, sells and read tabloids and chucked them in a fire, the world would become a much better place.

I am coming for you OP. Make peace with your maker.

in all reality tabloid journalists and other staff cross over to broadsheets and visa versa all the time , the intelligence of the people researching and producing the content is no different, its just targeted at a different audience , infact sometimes it takes a lot more effort to write a tabloid story as you have to try explain complex things in simpler ways and still keep it fitting to a certain amount of paragraphs.

as for people who sell it , if every shop keeper in the country sold only what they thought was to their taste youd probably have most of them out of business and it would become very hard to get anything other than the local parish rag outside of dublin

Forest Master

xsiborg wrote: »

not all tabloid readers are lower class knuckle draggers

Yeah, they are. Really dim thick people, who are easily entertained by a pair of boobs, an article on football, and a bit of sensationalised scandal.

Sticky_Fingers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPlEIryW8zA

xsiborg

Forest Master wrote: »

Yeah, they are. Really dim thick people, who are easily entertained by a pair of boobs, an article on football, and a bit of sensationalised scandal hyperbole.

i have no interest in the football Forest, but boobs (particularly sam fox back in the day!) and sensationalised scandalised articles, overflowing with hyperbole, not to mention the lung bursting laughter i get from the dear deirdre pages after i read my stars!

yeah, i'll gladly fork out a euro to have it put a smile on my face in the morning, twenty minutes later it'll go in the bin, or be left on the bus seat, or given to the taxi driver, and i'll think no more about it.

gosuckonalemon

In work I pass the canteen on the way to the jacks for a dump. I often pick up one of the red tops to pass the time. I feel this is acceptable.

But I think it's justifiable to call anybody who would actually pay for a tabloid to be just a little bit retarded or at the very least, uneducated.

xsiborg

gosuckonalemon wrote: »

In work I pass the canteen on the way to the jacks for a dump. I often pick up one of the red tops to pass the time. I feel this is acceptable.

But I think it's justifiable to call anybody who would actually pay for a tabloid to be just a little bit retarded or at the very least, uneducated.

everyone on the internet has an opinion i suppose. at this stage, quite frankly i couldnt give a toss, in after hours we can talk about the most mind numbing nonsense, but mention that you read a tabloid, purely for the entertainment (i think i can just about manage to part with a euro, even in these recessionary times!), well, thats just wrong!

*off to flagellate myself* :rolleyes:

Son Of A Vidic

I don't read or buy tabloid newspapers but you do make a good point OP.

dx22

gosuckonalemon wrote: »

In work I pass the canteen on the way to the jacks for a dump. I often pick up one of the red tops to pass the time. I feel this is acceptable.

But I think it's justifiable to call anybody who would actually pay for a tabloid to be just a little bit retarded or at the very least, uneducated.

Ya they are very handy if you run out of bog roll, the broadsheets are too big and might block the loo!

profitius

JohnP199 wrote: »

So often we see threads/posts here b!tching about tabloid newspapers and questioning the intelligence of those who read them. But why? What's wrong with me reading The Star, Sunday World etc? When I'm looking for quality literature to read I buy a book. When I'm looking for some light-hearted daily reading one of the red tops is ideal.

They were always viewed as being trashy newspapers from where I come from. Some like yourself will say theres nothing wrong with them but actually there is.

Its not a ligh hearted read in the slightest. Its designed to do the opposite. Thats why its full of people with mental issues (celebrities etc).The more you read that garbage the more normal their behaviour will become in your mind. Just like a parents protects a child from reading trash, adults should also stay away from reading or looking at trash in the media.