CELEBRITY EXCLUSIVE! Humanitarian Reporting and the Tabloid News 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 have 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.
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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.
