My take. Which may be slightly different.
The shit is crap masquerading as journalism. A mix of celebrity fantasy and misrepresented reality designed to make the reader see a world in which most people are greedy, dishonest, violent, and obsessed by casual sex. Except for the reader and the reader's immediate family of course, who are merely showing an aesthetic interest in the breasts of the teenage girl on page three, and read with approval the editorial comments on the need to castrate anyone accused of paedophilia or the advisibility of hanging anyone claiming disability benefits, solely due to there concern about the welfare of their nearest and dearest and in no way because they enjoy getting violently angry about people they feel safe despising.
The problem is that whilst most readers of the tabloids don't actually believe their newspaper tells them the truth and nothing but the truth, they don't actually have much else in terms of information on politics. They may think they aren't being influenced, but the simple fact is that the constant drip of sensationalised garbage is nonetheless distorting their view of the world. It means that a very small number of newspaper editors and proprietors have a massive and covert influence over British politics.
That's the shit and that's the problem. The responsibility lies in accepting the shit and thus being part of the problem.
I'm not getting at Sun readers here. My view is that the entirety of the British press has gone downhill since the days of Harold Evans and co. There is no national newspaper that over the past decade hasn't had journalists faking stories, that hasn't had journalists acting beyond the law and well beyone morality to get the story they want, that doesn't routinely misrepresent people's views in order to create controversy that isn't really there, that doesn't routinely invade the privacy of perfectly ordinary people who just happen to be on the verges of a big news story. Even the Guardian, the Independent, and the Telegraph are part of this.
We shouldn't accept it. If journalists won't operate ethically and at least vaguely honestly then we shouldn't buy the garbage they produce. Any of it.
What happened was that the Mail and the Express headed towards the gutter in the seventies. Their circulation didn't drop. The Sun and the Mirror then dived below the gutter. Their circulation didn't drop. So when Murdoch bought the Times he lowered standards their, without a disastrous drop in circulation. So now none of the papers believes their readers give a toss about old fashioned obsolete ideas such as fact checking or right of reply.
