Should the News be Sexy?

For this piece, I am going to focus on the UK mainly for the reason that it is where the majority of my news reading/coverage takes place. I follow comedian-writers mainly such as Charlie Brooker and David Mitchell, to name but a couple. These are predominantly not the kind of writers I’m talking about with this headline, however I will indulge and see if there are any issues in their articles too.

I’ll backtrack – picture this, walking in a convenience store, tracing your feet past a rack of newspaper from; conservative to the highly commercial, right-wing to left. All are part of the corporate machine, some however are not bothered about wasting artists and writers’ integrity, it seems.

The array of awful puns for headlines such as – Match of the Pray (a play-on British Football show ‘Match of the Day’), End of an Eire after 14 years (a story that Irish group ‘Westlife’ have split up) and my favourite recent story ‘X-Factors Cocozza is up to Frankie Pankie’.

The latter referring to the sliding ratings of the show, as it has recently declined due to ‘poor talent’ according to the some news sources. So, this week to get this “talent show” more viewers and to make it even more of an entertainment show – they called for Frankie Cocozza to let loose to save the show. This news story is a story about him going to a club, drinking a few beers after an all-day rehearsal and leaving in a taxi with three ladies whom he apparently back to one of the dorms of and stayed until the next morning. Scandalous!

This is all very sexy and interesting if you want to read about a recent celebrity and what he’s doing outside of the show, which I’m sure happens with X-Factor USA – but is it really essential? Is this news?

There are currently so many news outlets, official and unofficial, that to stay competitively in the make they have to have differing news stories from the others, different twists on the same events. It is hard though to find numerous news stories every day, so stories are invented, exaggerated and twisted, including gossip to meet the deadlines.

Luckily, the papers I read are generally lacking in the celebrity news, though there are still some cases of whether news is still news or if it is all purely glamorised entertainment?

Take for example a Charlie Brooker article in the Guardian which is entitled: ‘When even Weetabix has turned evil, you know the world is in a sorry state.’ The article discusses the Celebrity Endorsements on say an Activia Yoghurt – “you think of Martine McCuthcheon and make positive connections”. Or, perhaps an article by David Mitchell in the Observer, entitled: ‘Keep your lion, Flanders – it’s a better look than a pair of slippers’, which combines a serious issue of the stereotype of Belgium, taking an issue of their official symbol, whilst questioning: “what’s their tulips-and-cannabis, corruption-and-fornication, sausages-and-genocide, paella-and-castanets equivalent?”

What I am trying to say here is that no matter the seriousness of the article or paper, they seem to be covered by entertaining tit-bits. An inappropriate joke here or there, which I’m not complaining about, it is one of the main reasons I read the Guardian.co.uk as it features the three newspapers which can be witty and comic at once. Still, next time you look at a newspaper, try and find a story that isn’t one-sided or in the shadows of an alluring image or joke, try.