Hannah Clutton-Brock

By Hannah Clutton-Brock

Content Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of wartime violence

In 1969, Rupert Murdoch and Larry Lamb relaunched The Sun, and with it popularised a new style of intrusive, sensationalised, and outspoken journalism: the tabloid. By creating a new commercially successful model of intrusive journalism, Murdoch and Lamb overturned the status-quo, altering the basic assumptions of the press market, and transforming what types of story were of interest. In the 1990s, the kind of content associated with the ‘tabloid profile’, an increasingly aggressive and outspoken journalism accompanied by £1 million bingo contests and celebrity exclusives, quickly migrated from its original specific media locations and pervaded other forms of popular culture. This process is known as tabloidization. It is important to consider how these changes in reporting style has affected humanitarianism’s complex yet inextricable link with the media. This article seeks to identify tabloidization as a turning point in the relationship between humanitarian communication and mass media, transforming the way humanitarian issues are framed, how the public perceive and interact with them, and what actors the media frame as legitimate humanitarian actors. It will track the impact of tabloidization on ‘humanitarianism’ as understood to mean the framing of international crises and aiming to galvanise public engagement, rather than considering work on the ground. This article will problematise this relationship in order to demonstrate how simple awareness raising cannot equate to meaningful or productive action if it relies on tabloid values of the stylised, the sensational or the celebrity. It will consider how tabloidization has increased the industry of ‘celebrity humanitarianism’, impacted the reporting of humanitarian issues in across a variety of media forms, and transformed the relationship between the media and the public from educational to representational.

The re-launch of The Sun and the success of the tabloid model constituted a turning point in journalistic style and conduct. As Martin Conboy notes, whilst there is ‘nothing new about sensation’, Murdoch and Lamb drew together pre-existing characteristics of sensationalised reporting into a commercially successful model. This meant that tabloidization became almost essential to survival of newspapers such as The Express and The Mirror in the face of a rapidly declining interest in print news. The BBC and ITV had been successful in providing respectable, entertaining, “middlebrow” content but had failed to satisfy the attitudes of an increasingly consumerist, youthful, and permissive working-class audience. Lifestyle journalism aimed at this audience resulted in a greater interest in the more intimate areas of celebrities’ private lives, with journalists hunting for salacious or scandalous “tid-bits”. Forced to contend with this unprecedented level of interest in and criticism of their lifestyle, celebrities turned to “do-gooding”, increasing the number of celebrities involved in humanitarian campaigns.

This was, however, not without its benefit to the nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) they support. The increase in visibility of and interest in celebrity private lives provides them with a social capital that affords a greater mobilising capacity and ability to act as an intermediary between political movements and the public. The Daily Telegraph refers to celebrityled campaigns as “guaranteed fundraisers”, citing John Baguley, a charity adviser, who attests to the effectiveness of celebrity involvement: “celebrities help reach audiences that normally would not be reached.” Throughout the twenty-first century, NGOs have utilised celebrity to a greater extent, recruiting celebrities to ‘front’ various campaigns. For example, Oxfam employs full time celebrity liaisons who work with and gather celebrities to matched causes. Whilst celebrities have been involved in humanitarianism prior to this period, Danny Kaye was appointed as the first UN Goodwill Ambassador in 1950 and Band Aid is cited as the first official manifestation of ‘celebrity humanitarianism’ in 1984, these celebrities utilised their fame in service of an existing campaign and kept the crisis itself at the forefront. The growing industry of “celebrity humanitarianism” instead appoints celebrities to “front” campaigns as they need to be re-invented. This places the celebrity rather than the crisis as the central focus of humanitarian communications, relying on an interest in them as an individual to drive interest in a crisis. This fascination with celebrity afforded by the tabloids therefore allows them to utilise their social capital and fan communities in service of humanitarian endeavours, but most often the individual fame of a celebrity is required to direct financial and political action to a humanitarian cause.

Goodman and Barnes argue that the growing focus on particular celebrity individuals and popular causes leaves ‘wider discussions of issues of inequality, political economy, ecology and justice even more to the wayside’, casting celebrities in the formative role of deciding who and what are worthy of being “saved” or “developed”. Celebrity and the development of brands has become almost as important - if not more important than - the cause itself, diverting attention from people in need of relief. The focus on individual celebrity as the front for an issue rather than maintaining a focus on the crisis at hand has created a consumer and celebrity-driven development. Humanitarian reporting becomes celebrity-focused rather than crisis-focused. This has been criticised as turning humanitarianism into a business venture, run more often than not by marketing experts rather than activists or development professionals. In this sense, actors within the celebrity economy, such as marketing executives and agents, are given a greater control over where funding and support is allocated, rather than an objective, needs-based assessment. Tabloid denigration of journalistic standards has been credited with encouraging journalists to accept greater risks in reporting and fostering less interest in the factual than the sensational. This idea that news should be an ‘entertaining spectacle’ has now carried over to the ways issues are framed by NGOs themselves.

In March 2012, an online video, KONY 2012, was launched by Invisible Children, Inc. It campaigned for the arrest of Joseph Kony, the alleged Commanderin-Chief of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), to bring him before the International Criminal Court (ICC). Within six days of the video’s release, it had been watched by over 100 million people, affording it great capacity to inform an understanding of child soldiers and sculpt international efforts to prevent child soldiering. At nearly thirty minutes in length, one might imagine that this video produced by an “informed” humanitarian actor would espouse some of the judicial, political or economic complexities surrounding child soldiering.

Tabloid culture prioritises the sensational, the scandalous and the salacious. In the 1990s, these tabloid values ceased to be bound by the pages of newspapers such as The Sun, The Star and The Express. Graeme Turner conceptualises this shift as a turning point in the relationship between the popular and the public sphere. Despite demonisation of the tabloid as denigrating journalistic standards, providing elite journalism with a dark Other against which it could define itself more virtuously, tabloid values of reporting permeated the broadsheet press. The prioritisation of “celebrity-focused” reporting over “crisis-focused” reporting is exemplified by The Times Digital Archive. When searching for terms “charity” and “Bob Geldof”, results largely contain titles such as ‘£6m aid promise for Ethiopia’, ‘Screened from the Suffering Children’ and ‘Famine Relief’. However, upon searching for “charity” and “Angelina Jolie”, one is met with titles such as ‘A fitting revenge for Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt…’, ‘Celebrity Watch’ and ‘We didn’t hang out with other Hollywood kids.’ Contending with the shorter attention spans of contemporary audiences, media titles decide what’s important by deciding what’s first: celebrity first, crisis second. This linguistic structure in news about humanitarian endeavours is therefore significant in shaping the public’s cognition of humanitarian need. It demonstrates a change in how humanitarian actors mobilise the media and attract the attention of the public, as tabloid values require different framings of humanitarian issues with regards to what is popular or “interesting”. However, KONY 2012 has been criticised for its stylised content, deliberately airbrushed to increase attention-worthiness. The image KONY 2012 creates of child soldiers is not representative of child soldiering as a whole. It depicts all child soldiers as young boys, ‘turning the girls into sex slaves and the boys into child soldiers,’ when in reality nearly 40% of child soldiers are girls. The video is filled with imagery of

very young children staggering under the weight of automatic weaponry, but most child soldiers are 1517 years old and most often do not carry weapons.

It utilises traumatic imagery to shock the public for an emotive response, saying at one point, ‘He makes them mutilate people’s faces…And he forces them to kill their own parents.’ This imagery is alarming, but not accurate: most child soldiers are not implicated in serially committing acts of atrocity, even within the LRA. In the image below, KONY 2012 provides a striking representation of what Lisa Malkki refers to as a ‘sea of humanity’, using graphics that reflect 44

innumerable faceless African children to present Africa as a homogenous continent of mute victims.

Scholars such as Malkii and Tanja Mueller have criticised this dehistoricising universalism for its damaging impact on conceptualisations of agency, ‘replacing the full political citizen with a bundle of basic needs and physical states.’ The ability of NGOs to utilise platforms such as YouTube to bypass traditional media has therefore transformed the relationship between humanitarianism and the public as they are able to directly communicate with a much wider audience and exercise greater control over the framing of issues. However, simply creating “more attention” for humanitarian issues is not necessarily effective, as Mark Drumbl attests, ‘The content of the message itself still really matters.’ Incorrect understandings of the legal, political, and social context around an issue leads to misguided action and ineffective outcomes. Tabloid values that prioritise the story over the fact have therefore negatively impacted the authenticity and accuracy of humanitarian communications with the public. Throughout this article, the relationship between humanitarian actions, the media and the public has been conceptualised as uni-directional, whereby issues are communicated to the public using a range of media tactics and the public go forth and carry out financial or political action as a result. Hampton attests that tabloidization changed this relationship as it embodies an extreme version of the shift from an educational to a representational ideal: ‘one which no longer views the reader as an isolated consumer but instead as part of a network of capitalised relations including other entertainment media, celebrity culture and advertising’. A tabloidized humanitarianism is driven by popular culture, celebrity exclusives and public interest. This transforms the relationship between humanitarian actors in the media and the public into a dialectic process of representation, rather than education. Celebrities wanting to act on behalf of an NGO must first contest with the breadth of pre-existing knowledge about them which the public will use to assess their validity as a goodwill ambassador or fundraiser. NGOs “go viral” by sensationalising inaccurate representations of genuine humanitarian crises. However, simply raising awareness is not always useful if what the public becomes aware of is only a simplified and stylised representation of the issue itself. Humanitarian crises are not the latest “celebrity exclusive”, they are not “clickbait”, and they must be understood holistically as the complex legal, political, social, and cultural issues that they are.