Popular newspapers played a vital role in shaping British politics, society and culture in the twentieth century. This book provides an overview of the rise of the tabloid format and examines how the national press reported the major stories of the period, from World Wars and general elections to sex scandals and celebrity gossip.

The “enormously entertaining” (The Wall Street Journal) account of a shocking 1897 murder mystery that “artfully re-create[s] the era, the crime, and the newspaper wars it touched off” (The New York Times) AN EDGAR NOMINEE FOR BEST FACT CRIME • “Fascinating . . . won’t disappoint readers in search of a book like Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City.”—The Washington Post On Long Island, a farmer finds a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys discover a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumble upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. The police are baffled: There are no witnesses, no motives, no suspects. The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the era’s most perplexing murder mystery. Seized upon by battling media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the case became a publicity circus, as their rival newspapers the World and the Journal raced to solve the crime. What emerged was a sensational love triangle and an even more sensational trial. The Murder of the Century is a rollicking tale—a rich evocation of America during the Gilded Age and a colorful re-creation of the tabloid wars that forever changed newspaper journalism.

This edited collection brings together a range of contemporary expertise to discuss the development and impact of tabloid news around the world. In thirteen chapters, Global Tabloid covers tabloid developments in Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia, and both Eastern and Western Europe. It presents innovative research from eighteen expert contributors and editors who explore tabloidization as a phenomenon, and tabloids as a news form. With an awareness of historical dynamics where tabloids played a role in national news media systems, it brings the debates around tabloids as a cultural force up to date. The book addresses important questions about the contemporary nature of popular culture, the challenges it faces in the digital era, and its impact on a political world dominated by tabloid values. Going beyond national borders to consider global developments, the editors and contributors explore how the tabloids have permeated media culture more generally and how they are adapting to an increasingly digitalized media sphere. This internationally focused critical study is a valuable resource for students and researchers in journalism, media, and cultural studies.

Packed with examples from four popular tabloids, taken from recent editions in a month long study by the author, this book offers insight into how the tabloids have become so influential in everyday British life.

Fox Populism offers fresh insights into why the Fox News Channel has been both commercially successful and politically effective. Where existing explanations of Fox's appeal have stressed the network's conservative editorial slant, Reece Peck sheds light on the importance of style as a generative mode of ideology. The book traces the historical development of Fox's counter-elite news brand and reveals how its iconoclastic news style was crafted by fusing two class-based traditions of American public culture: one native to the politics in populism and one native to the news field in tabloid journalism. Using the network's coverage of the late-2000s economic crisis as the book's principal case study, Peck then shows how style is deployed as a political tool to frame news events. A close analysis of top-rated programs reveals how Fox hails its audience as 'the real Americans' and successfully represents narrow, conservative political demands as popular and universal.

The first newspaper arrived in England in 1620 and sparked a huge demand for up-to-the minute reports on domestic and world events. Men and women in Renaissance England were addicted to news, whether from the battlefields of Europe, or the scandal-filled salons of its courtiers. Newspapers commented on politics, crime, omens, bad weather, natural disasters, and strange apparitions. Breaking News traces the development of the newspaper in England, from its origins in manuscript letters and imported corantos in ShakespeareÕs England, to the introduction of daily newspapers, regional journals, and specialist magazines around 1700, as well as the first stirrings of American journalism. The examples of early journalism illustrated here reveal the indelible mark the early English newspaper has left on modern news culture. Chris R. Kyle is associate professor of history at Syracuse University. Jason Peacey is lecturer in history at University College London.

What skills do journalists exhibit in sensationalising, exaggerating and otherwise ‘tabloiding’ the truth, while usually stopping short of stating unambiguous falsehoods? Why has the tabloid news not collapsed as predicted, but thrived as a medium in an age of interaction and online commentary? This book is a comprehensive and accessible exploration of the British tabloid newspapers from the 1960s to the present day. Examining topics such as sex and the representation of women, national stereotypes and Britain’s relationship with Europe, war coverage, celebrities, investigative journalism and instances where the tabloids have misread the public mood, the author draws on Critical Discourse Analysis and Stylistics to take a language-led approach to the UK tabloids. With its interdisciplinary approach and readable prose style, this book will be of interest to a wide range of readers across language and linguistics, media and communication, journalism, political science and British cultural studies.