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Some thoughts on the poetics of the order of mediatized political discourse: Facts, fun and fulmination in the tabloids

There has been increasing attention in recent times to the manner and character, the form and content, of various aspects of what has been termed the ‘order of mediatized political discourse’—the discursive network (perhaps an intertext) through which the realm of politics (issues, processes and events) is represented in the media. Such work has encompassed a diversity of intellectual positions and traditions. This article, a brief sketch from a particular standpoint, stands as yet one more contribution to these ongoing debates. I want to focus on the poetics, the art and craft, the codes and conventions of the ‘story-telling’ of one particular genre with regard to political reportage— that of tabloid newspapers. The central theme of this article is that at the macro level these poetics comprise three key broad dynamics: the will to facticity, the will to entertain, and the will to moralize (hence, the facts, fun and fulmination of the title). Each of these, it should be stressed at the outset, is a tendency—they operate as a communicative ethos, the workaday predispositions or proclivities of authorial intent—rather than as an absolutist driving force. By the same token, I want to make no great claim that these three dynamics are necessarily exclusive of all others. That is to say, it is quite reasonable to assume that other, unspecified, less readily apparent, dynamics are also sometimes at work. Nevertheless, I want to claim that these three central dynamics assume something of a commanding importance. Their complex, sometimes subtle, sometimes ambiguous, interrelationship affords an artful (in the best sense of the word) final product—a form of modern-day folklore that seeks not simply to inform, to ‘tell it like it is’, and to ‘be straight with the people’ but also to amuse and to regale. All of this, at times, is couched in earnest quasi-moralistic tones, and invariably populist. Above all, such texts seek to persuade, to claim a certain authenticity, plausibility and authority. Much of the literature that looks into various forms of news coverage in the popular media can be said to fall into two broad categories—that of either ‘damnation’ or of ‘celebration’. The first perspective offers to critique or reproach that which it deems to be unashamedly down-market, distorted and lacking in objectivity; whilst the second, perhaps from a more distinctly postmodernist standpoint, finds much to celebrate in the robustness and playfulness of much that is also popular. In this article I shall attempt to steer a middle course between these two poles.