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.

How six conservative media moguls hindered America and Britain from entering World War II “A landmark in the political history of journalism.”—Michael Kazin, author of What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party As World War II approached, the six most powerful media moguls in America and Britain tried to pressure their countries to ignore the fascist threat. The media empires of Robert McCormick, Joseph and Eleanor Patterson, and William Randolph Hearst spanned the United States, reaching tens of millions of Americans in print and over the airwaves with their isolationist views. Meanwhile in England, Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail extolled Hitler’s leadership and Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express insisted that Britain had no interest in defending Hitler’s victims on the continent. Kathryn S. Olmsted shows how these media titans worked in concert—including sharing editorial pieces and coordinating their responses to events—to influence public opinion in a right-wing populist direction, how they echoed fascist and anti‑Semitic propaganda, and how they weakened and delayed both Britain’s and America’s response to Nazi aggression.

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.

The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia. We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK's presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination--in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C. . . . Where the CIA, the Mob, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Cuban political exiles, and various loose cannons conspire in a covert anarchy . . . Where the right drugs, the right amount of cash, the right murder, buys a moment of a man's loyalty . . . Where three renegade law-enforcement officers--a former L.A. cop and two FBI agents--are shaping events with the virulence of their greed and hatred, riding full-blast shotgun into history. . . . James Ellroy's trademark nothing-spared rendering of reality, blistering language, and relentless narrative pace are here in electrifying abundance, put to work in a novel as shocking and daring as anything he's written: a secret history that zeroes in on a time still shrouded in secrets and blows it wide open.

"An unrepeatable feat, a tour de force." --The Washington Post Book World In Tabloid Dreams, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler dazzles with his mastery of the short story and his empathy for eccentric and ostracized characters. Using tabloid headlines as inspiration--"Boy Born with Tattoo of Elvis," "Woman Struck by Car Turns into Nymphomaniac," and "JFK Secretly Attends Jackie Auction"--Butler moves from the fantastic to the realistic, exploring enduring concepts of exile, loss, aspiration, and the search for self. Along the way, the cast includes a woman who can see through her glass eye when it's removed from the socket, a widow who sets herself on fire after losing a baking competition, a nine-year-old hit man, and a woman who dates an extraterrestrial she met in a Walmart parking lot. Tabloid Dreams weaves a seamless tapestry of high and low culture, of the surreal, sordid, and humorously sad.

Less than a decade after the advent of democracy in South Africa, tabloid newspapers have taken the country by storm. One of these papers -- the Daily Sun -- is now the largest in the country, but it has generated controversy for its perceived lack of respect for privacy, brazen sexual content, and unrestrained truth-stretching. Herman Wasserman examines the success of tabloid journalism in South Africa at a time when global print media are in decline. He considers the social significance of the tabloids and how they play a role in integrating readers and their daily struggles with the political and social sphere of the new democracy. Wasserman shows how these papers have found an important niche in popular and civic culture largely ignored by the mainstream media and formal political channels.

Vivid and racy, a deep-dive into tabloids from their sixteenth-century beginnings to the National Inquirer and beyond. The Newsmongers unfolds the seedy history of tabloid journalism, from the first printed “Strange Newes” sheets of the sixteenth century to the sensationalism of today’s digital age. The narrative weaves from Regency gossip writers through New York’s “yellow journalism” battles to the “sex and sleaze” Sun of the 1970s; and from the Brexit-backing populism of the Daily Mail to the celebrity-obsessed Mail Online of the 2000s. Colorful figures such as Daniel Defoe, Lord Northcliffe, Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, Hugh Cudlipp, Rupert Murdoch, and Robert Maxwell are brought to vivid life. From scandalous confessions to the Leveson Inquiry into the behavior of the British press, the book explores journalists’ unscrupulous methods, taking in phone hacking, privacy breaches, and bribery. And now, in the digital era, The Newsmongers shows how popular journalism has succumbed to so-called churnalism while a certain royal is seeking revenge on the tabloids today.