Was it the Mirror Wot Won it? The Development of the Tabloid Press During the Second World War

Bromley, Michael

doi:10.5949/upo9781846312489.004

Cited by 9 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…But in many ways these were anticipated by the Mirror's more populist, more pro-active and less news-based approach to political coverage (see also Bromley, 1999), the earliest and most powerful illustration being its famous "Vote for Him" campaign that dominated its election coverage in 1945. Whether the Mirror was offering a genuine or a pseudo-democratic populism on this occasion is a matter of subjective judgement.…”

Section: Negative and Journalist-centred Newsmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…One important contribution that links with this revisionist analysis is Bromley's (1999) more sceptical assessment of the impact of the paper's commercialisation on its relationship with "the people". He suggests that the Mirror's main wartime change was not its readership-inspired radicalisation but top-down, hyper-commercialised tabloidisation.…”

Section: "A Cloak Of Apathy"mentioning

confidence: 99%

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"A cloak of apathy": political disengagement, popular politics and theDaily Mirror1940-1945

Thomas

2004

Journalism Studies

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This article re-examines the relationship between the Daily Mirror and popular politics in Britain during the Second World War. It outlines how traditional journalistic and academic analyses have located the period as a high-point of 20th-century radical journalism and political participation in Britain, usually in opposition to a depoliticised and disengaged contemporary news environment. It then re-assesses the Mirror's place in popular culture during this period to suggest an alternative and more complex interpretation of a paper's relationship with popular politics, political disengagement and participation. This differs from both traditional, largely positive accounts of the Mirror's relationship with political engagement and revisionist histories that emphasise its negative relationship with wartime "apathy". It explores firstly the predominantly negative role the paper played in the political mobilisation of a disengaged electorate, both in terms of its continued prioritisation of entertainment over "hard news" and its pioneering of new styles of negative and mediated political coverage. Yet it also examines how the paper's coverage advanced a new, more youth-based, consensual and cross-party alternative for an electorate that was politically disengaged but far from apathetic. This more complex interpretation of the paper's relationship with popular politics and political disengagement parallels current developments and debates around these areas.

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Section: Negative and Journalist-centred Newsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: "A Cloak Of Apathy"mentioning

confidence: 99%

"A cloak of apathy": political disengagement, popular politics and theDaily Mirror1940-1945

Thomas

2004

Journalism Studies

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“…Arguably the Mirror's politicization has been overstated to the exclusion of its other trends. Michael Bromley suggests that the Mirror's main wartime change was not its readership-inspired radicalization but its top-down tabloidization, as it developed into a slick, professional product that allowed little room for public debate as it firmly directed readers to its skew on the chosen topic of the day [46].…”

Section: Vote For Who? Reconsidering Wartime Radicalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reflections on the BrokenMirror :The rise and fall of radical journalism re-considered

Thomas

2003

Media History

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“…Bearing in mind the pains taken to distinguish democratic from totalitarian propaganda by a commitment to the virtue of truth (Bartlett ; Rogerson ), we can see in Lorant's use of photograph‐as‐mediator‐of‐reality a timely and strident political gesture: ‘[T]hrough photographic realism the great themes of freedom were constantly reified’ (J. Taylor : 54). In deliberate contrast to popular newspapers like the Daily Mirror , according to historian Michael Bromley, ‘Britain's first truly tabloid newspaper’, and ‘the quintessential graphic newspaper of the 1930s and 1940s’ (: 114), often condemned for its bombastic sensationalism and irresponsible use of images (: 97), Picture Post strove to resist populism in favour of a purportedly neutral presentation of truth through the ideal of objective photography (Hall : 77).…”

Section: Knowing Strangersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who is my stranger? Origins of the gift in wartimeLondon, 1939‐45

Whitfield

2013

Royal Anthropological Inst

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The subject of this paper is the association of gift rhetoric with blood donation in London during the early 1940s. Querying the view that the original concept of ‘the gift relationship’ was the product of Richard Titmuss's influential study of blood transfusion of 1970, I locate the origins of the gift in propaganda materials of the Second World War, and describe their relation to images of transfusion recipients and the ideal of one‐to‐one giving. In order to offer an alternative to accounts that describe the gift as anachronistic and incompatible with modern methods of procurement and transfusion, here I demonstrate the profound connections between gift rhetoric and the anonymity wrought by techniques of cold storage and blood banking.

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Was it the Mirror Wot Won it? The Development of the Tabloid Press During the Second World War

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

"A cloak of apathy": political disengagement, popular politics and theDaily Mirror1940-1945

"A cloak of apathy": political disengagement, popular politics and theDaily Mirror1940-1945

Reflections on the BrokenMirror :The rise and fall of radical journalism re-considered

Who is my stranger? Origins of the gift in wartimeLondon, 1939‐45

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