To what extent do best selling UK Newspaper cover stories related to serious issues? To what extent would you think that is that is their role to do s

The purpose of a UK newspaper is ultimately sell copies and the amount of copies sold is how the success of the newspaper is measured. Obviously in order to sell copies the newspaper must be entertaining and for whatever reason the general public seemed more interested in celebrity gossip and sport than “serious matters” although some people are interested in different things and most major news story are covered in the papers. The general public have the option of choosing broadsheet but if they choose tabloid newspapers than that is there decision. In this respect a tabloid newspaper is telling people what they want to know? Whether there methods of doing this are moral is another question altogether.

I have heard many times that the tabloid media and low budget entertainment have too much power and influence and maybe to some extent this is true. the media can deicide certain things for example in a general the media have to some extent swayed public opinion on Gordon brown (although to be fair his lack of charisma made it easy) .

On the contrary however the media has raised awareness for things that were once considered taboo for example homosexuality ( aka puffs and dykes) which is now much more tolerated . Another example is turrets syndrome which was once considered as a mad syndrome but now is seen as a common mental health problem. There are many over examples of this as many programmes such as x factor and soaps continued to raise awareness.

Many soaps often use their storylines to create awareness on certain issues. For example after a lot of hard hitting storylines in Eastenders they offer a helpline for those that have been affected by storylines in the programme. However soaps can also cause problems. As they include storylines that are usually farfetched to get viewers it makes certain impressionable member of the public think that is the way life should be and that and that certain behaviour is condemnable when it clearly isn’t.