How The Media Runs The World

Many years ago, long before the age of computers and the internet, we lived in a world of what is called Print Media. PM means newspapers and magazines, of one sort or another. And what sustained those print publications financially was advertising revenue, rather than the sale price of the newspaper or magazine.

It may surprise you to hear that a major newspaper such as The Sun, a UK tabloid newspaper with millions of readers, actually lost a great deal of money on the sale price of each and every issue printed and sold, every single day! The cover price only covered about a third of the actual cost of printing and delivering the newspaper to your door or local news agency.

Where did the money come from to cover the shortfall and produce massive profits for the owners, News International? Advertising. But how exactly did the Sun newspaper become so successful in the first place? Good question. Read on and learn.

When multi-billionaire Rupert Murdoch launched The Sun he settled upon a winning formula. Give the readers what they want, build that readership up into the millions, and then watch the big corporations clamor to pay a fortune to get their products in front of such a huge buying public.

But what exactly was the draw to get those readers on board in the first place? Without wishing to cause offense to any of our female readers, to quote Murdoch’s instructions to his editor, “T*ts, I want to see lots of naked t*ts in The Sun.” And so the concept of what was called Page Three was born, with some nubile, big-breasted female teen baring her body for all the world to see.

What Murdoch knew at that time, and historically, was that the main buyers of newspapers were men. And what hot-blooded heterosexual man does not like to look at pictures of naked women? Ergo, give a man a nude bathing beauty to ogle at every morning and he will buy the newspaper. It was like offering worms to fish, bones to dogs, fish to cats.

Okay, so now you have the man’s attention, how do you keep it, without filling every page with yet more nubile nymphs? Well, the language used in The Sun uses what is called bar-room vernacular. That is to say, the language and mode of address were along the lines of how your average working-class man spoke when he went to the pub for a chat with his mates. I’ll give you a couple of examples.

If a story was about some Bishop being caught with his trousers down around his ankles, having sex with a prostitute, and the Bishop was denying it, the Sun’s headline would scream out “Come off it Bish, you know it’s true.”

If a story was about football manager Brian Clough getting angry with a referee, then the headline would shout out “Calm Down Cloughie.” In this way, the language presumed a tone of familiarity. It was the way men spoke to each other.

What The Sun also gave to its predominantly male readership were affirmations of the typical attitudes of close-minded men and women. The Sun, like all major publications, panders to the prejudices of its target audience. Literally, as well as pictorially, men were portrayed as strong, stable, and in full control of their lives. Women were seen as nothing more than attractive, sexual, temperamental adornments, as objects of gratification. This objectification of women sold all women very far short of who and what they really were in reality. They were seen to be used by men, which when you think about it, doesn’t say much for men either.

Delving deeper into the language used by the Sun, one could detect certain other attitudes, concepts, and perspectives at play. In short, The Sun was, and I presume still is, sexist, misogynistic, racist, jingoistic, xenophobic, and homophobic. Why? Because those things are among the prejudices of the target audience. Another matter to consider is national politics.

It is only over the years of The Sun’s success that we have seen the rise of Conservatism among the working class, a social class now called ‘Working class Tories’. If the Boomer Generation’s parents could see their offspring now voting for the Tories, they would be turning in their graves.

The biggest axe I have to grind with Murdoch is the amount of political sway he has in a country he does not belong to. He wasn’t born there, and he doesn’t live there. He most certainly is not British by nationality. And yet he wields more power over the electorate than any British Prime Minister or senior politician. Murdoch indirectly runs the country. The Tory politicians are merely his puppets on a string.

As for the opposition, the Labour Party, to keep them from ever winning a General Election, a shameless hatchet job has been executed on one leader after another, each successfully has been taken down with salacious, derogatory, highly effective smear campaigns that have been very damaging in portraying those leaders as unfit to govern.

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In a nutshell, Murdoch became successful because he gave the widest, lowest common denominator among his target audience what appealed the most to their baser instincts. He gave them what they wanted and it was lapped up by the million. The end game of this play was to make Murdoch obscenely rich and to persuade the electorate to his capitalist, political point of view. And it is Murdoch’s political stance, clearly displayed in The Sun, that has helped to elect a Tory Government whose right-wing policies will ensure favorable social and business environments that allow multi-billionaires like Murdoch to financially flourish ever more beyond their wildest dreams.

However, Murdoch’s greatest achievement has been in comprehensively persuading a nation of people to vote very much against their own better interests. It has been like turkeys voting for a Sunday roast. The best we can do is hope for enlightenment to arrive before it is too late for all of us.

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Below is a video clip of a hilarious discussion about who reads the newspapers from the comedy series Yes Minister.