Anyway you have to get *some* UK news too….?

Tim J #11 – I think that’s a fair comment. But I still prefer the Ny Times even over our broadsheet press.

It is fair because what he said was actually reported in the Telegraph, the Times and The Guardian constantly, again, again and again.

Yes I’m not sure why we’re comparing tabloids and broadsheets but if we are, the American press win again.

You may hate the National Enquire but it broke Jacko’s weird drug issues and the fact he was going to die at least 6 months ago…

TMZ broke OJ Simpson AND Britney AND Jacko…

WTF have we done??

We’re no good.

The writting?? Lack of wit? The desperation?? The obsession with mediocre celebs and TV presenters??

Again, the US do it better. You may hate Paris Hilton but she’s a hell of a lot more of something then Jordan.

We were never this bad, in fact we used to be the best but this dumbing down…means that we can’t even DO tabloid very well!

Coulson was CRAP as NOTW.

There’s a fair place for high and low brow culture to appeal and entertain all BUT god damn I wish we could do both well!

Paul Dacre then boasted about it in a speech, while also condemning Nick Davies’ book without even deigning to mention it. He also mentioned that also attending the dinner with Brown where they protested, was Les Hinton, another of the NI executives who of course knew nothing, Manuel style. http://www.septicisle.info/2008/11/daily-mail-in-flesh.html

Rather balanced out by out ludicrously restrictive libel laws.

This I don’t think is a fair criticism, not because these things are good, but because they are endemic to low-rent tabloid journalism the world over.

You subsequent point seems to be that the real problem is the influence that the British press has over politicians. And this is something that I’d broadly agree with, noting only that this is more the fault of the politicians than the press.

very few in the free world have all the downsides which ours has, such as the incessant sensationalism, lack of honesty and hardly any grounds for recourse unless you’re fabulously wealthy.

I’m not going to defend any of these things as good, but I honestly think that you’d struggle to find any nation with a developed press that does not have a tabloid end that displays all of these ‘qualities’. Bild in Germany, the Italian tabloids, the Spanish – all of them are as bad as the British tabloids.

You run the risk, like Sunny above, of comparing other nations’ serious papers with our gutter tabloids. ‘The WSJ is a more serious investigative newspaper than the NoTW’ is surely not news to anyone.

So really it’s a comparison between the Mail and the likes of the National Enquirer – and are you really going to put those US papers in a different league?

So you’d rather have swine flu hysteria and weeks of nonsense about Michael Jackson than proper reporting on politics and well-funded investigative journalism?

I don’t think that was the choice was it? Exactly how investigative is continental journalism? Mitterand’s Vichy past (and love child) were known by everyone in the French media but never covered… And have you tried reading the Italian press? The US press is almost unbelievably tedious – and its political coverage is generally dire. Where is this paragon of journalism to be found?

Though he is a cheeky monkey.

I liked his reply to Tom Watson – along the lines of: I was as unaware of what my reporter was up to as you were of what Damien McBride was up to.

Genius.

And I would rather have our tabloid culture than most other countries’ newspaper cultures anyday.