One of the most evil manifestations of the entertainment journalism that is infecting modern media is relentless coverage of so-called fashion.
Fashion is possibly the most pointless and useless news topic in the world. In fact, there is no news in fashion – which is especially ironic since it holds the same basic characteristics as news: timeliness and disposability.
Something that is fashionable has, by definition, a time limit on it. It will only remain in fashion until something else is fashionable, at which point it is edging out of fashion. Ignoring the mindlessness of this for a second and recognising that human beings are driven by constant short-termism, the question still remains: why is the tiny, insular, ridiculous little world of high-fashion taking up more and more space in our national media?
I don't need to give lots of examples because I have one example that demonstrates the depth to which this madness has sunk. Only in a world utterly removed from the reality of everyday people would the following words appear on the front of the features section of a national newspaper: “Once the Oscars were all about the movies. Now they're all about the clothes…” It was yesterday's G2 cover feature.
This was the basic premise, as outlined by the standfirst: “On Sunday the film world will gather in Hollywood for the biggest party of the year, the Academy awards. But it's no longer just about winning an Oscar – what really matters is what you are wearing when your name is called out. Hadley Freeman on how the stylists took over the red carpet…” There are then four pages and 2,211 words dedicated to this ridiculous conceit.
First thing's first, the Oscars has never been “all about the movies”. It is a glamour show and a press relations effort and a showcase. Once that is over, it is about the movie industry. There are very few judges that decide the Oscars, they form a film elite which is unwelcoming to anyone outside their social circle, and they are relentlessly lobbied and wined and dined and so on. The people decide according to dozens of factors, only about half of which are to do with how good the films actually are.
There are numerous websites (here's one) detailing all the big errors made over the years in awards given. Great actors, actresses and directors that have never received awards. Great films missed; crap films honoured.
But no one has ever pretended that it isn't the awards themselves that are the whole point of the evening. To follow the Guardian's line for a second, an actress that has a great dress would receive more coverage than an award winner with a crap dress. Or, extending this nonsense to its logical conclusion, the woman in the best dress would be awarded an Oscar, irrespective of how good a film or her acting was.
But, you say, G2 wasn't actually saying that, it was just being, you know, silly.
Well, yes, G2 was saying that.
That's what it was saying. I don't want to have to read features in a daily newspaper with an ironic puff. And I don't want to read about the absurd creatures that surround these events, stylists and the like.
The reason I don't want to read about them is first and foremost because I have absolutely no interest in them. And nor should a newspaper. Is what they do significant? Do they reflect a part of society that should be understood? Are they representative of change? Is their voice not being heard? Do they have something worth bringing to people's attention? The answer is no.
A second, perhaps more important reason why this feature shouldn't exist is because it doesn't actually contain anything new. You could find this exact same feature in a dozen other outlets over the past ten years. In fact, you could probably substitute this feature for one written by a different publication in 1995 and no one would notice. Because it's not about the actual content, it's about the feeling, the sensation of hype and excitement.
This is what people mean when they say “dumbing down”. They don't mean fewer articles, or less information, they mean the lack of quality of information. How so much of it is mindless, how it serves no purpose or how it is simply a rehashing of the same feature from last year.
A third reason I don't want to read about the people in the feature is because if I was really interested in what these idiots had to say, I would be able to find it in a dozen other media outlets this afternoon.
Which of course begs the question: why is it there then?
I am constantly told when I start going on about these matters that I am simply out of touch, that somehow I am living in an out-of-date unfashionable timewarp.
But then I'm a big fan of reason. I supply reasons why this sort of material is of no value. Of why newspapers that supply real information are vital for a healthy society, and conversely, why newspapers without real information are damaging to society. And then I provide details of real stories that should be in newspapers and which society would benefit from knowing but which aren't because the pages are taken up with mindless chit-chat.
And the counter-argument to all this? Stop taking it so seriously. It's just a bit of fun. People don't always want to read heavy stuff.
I would argue that that is completely wrong. How do you know you don't want something if you don't have it? I would argue that a very, very large section of society would gain an enormous amount of real personal satisfaction from accumulating real knowledge. Human beings always have. Or are we to believe that in the last 20 years the human mind has erased one of its core stimulations? People clamour for real information. But if they don't know what's going on, how do they know to clamour for it?
So why is this stuff, this moronic prose all over our articles of record?
That is much easier to answer: money.
The G2 article isn't about the Oscars, it isn't about awards ceremonies, it isn't about stylists, or actresses, or the press, or anything. It is about having pictures of attractive women in tight and low-cut dresses A4-size in the newspaper. It is eye candy.
An extraordinary number of features, even news stories these days are commissioned on the basis of pictures rather than words. It seems extraordinary that the Picture Post hasn't had a revivial.
What has that to do with money? Because it costs money, lots of it, to discover and cover what is going on in the corners of our society and in the closed rooms across the land. To find what we commonly call news.
The UK (and Western) media has been almost universially characterised in the past few decades by wave after wave of cost-cutting. Newspapers don't cover a huge amount of real news for the simple reason that they can't afford to. There aren't enough trained staff and the staff that are there aren't allowed to spend time working on stories.
When freelancers – people like me – offer stories, newspaper aren't happy about spending money so they either turn it down or offer derisory sums of money. The net effect is that the sort of people with the sort of brains that can dig out news stories go into different trades instead.
So what do you fill a newspaper with if there isn't any news in it?
Stuff that sounds exciting. Entertainment. Whooping and hollering. And pretty pictures of pretty girls.
It is no mistake either that media owners these days are not rich men looking for political influence, but huge media multi-national conglomerates who have their fingers in a lot of other pies.
Since newspapers only exist at their very, very cheap price thanks to advertising, it is startingly obvious that anything in a newspaper is a form of advertising. It used to be “advertising” vital information about what was going on in the country and abroad.
But then if you own a newspaper, say, oooh, the Sun, and you also own a film studio and a satellite TV company, why on earth not just write about your film studio and satellite TV company. Not only is it cheaper, it also makes you more money.
Plus, of course, hard news usually only creates trouble and that can come back to bite you on one of your (corporate) arms.
If you want to know if you are reading a pointless article, ask yourself this: is anyone likely to get upset about this?
If the answer is no, you have to wonder what the point of putting it in a newspaper is. One of the great advantages of the fashion industry is that everyone is so pathetically pleasant and lovely about one another (at least in public and in print) that every feature is like a coloured candy.
Once this cancer of commercialism – where excitement is swapped for news, where pictures are given precedence over copy – takes hold, it is hardly surprising that advertising agencies and PR companies seem like better sources of information to fill your pages with than the complex, difficult and expensive news that journalists tend to bring in. A “news story” about a new advertisment brings a cost of zero, great pictures and no legal problems. Let's have it.
But things will change. And that's not just blind optimism. People have always hungered after real news. And all media companies care about these days is money. Fewer people are reading newspapers, providing editors with less money. The quality of news has diminished to such a degree that nearly half of all national newspapers produced in the UK are almost unrecognisable as fulfilling their primary function. And so people aren't buying them.
You are told that newspapers are giving readers what they want but what they are actually doing is giving only existing newspaper readers some of what they want. They are actively not providing what everyone not buying that paper wants. And there are more of these people every day. The economics of the situation will turn around very swiftly as soon as people decide they have had enough and will pay good money to find out what is really going on.
That day won't come until ludicrous, fake, mindless articles about dresses are banished from the pages of our newspapers. You want to look at pictures and read anodyne luvvie copy? Buy a gossip magazine. Give us our news back.
