On repeat

(Warning: graphic content and links to graphic stories)

On the Mail homepage, next to a piece about an OnlyFans model’s “eye-popping assets”, there is currently a video playing of a man being blown up by a sea mine. Filmed by a surveillance camera from long distance, it shows a wide, empty beach in Ukraine on a sunny day, suddenly punctuated by an explosion at the water’s edge and a dark upsurge of sand.

There is no graphic content warning. The video autoplays when the site loads and repeats, so if you have just popped in to read about Coleen Rooney’s new bikini in the sidebar, your eye is constantly caught by the tiny figures of the man’s wife and son, running along the beach some way behind him and then stopping in shock – a three-second snuff movie looping over and over again. If you are trying to read the advertising feature immediately to the right about putting up garden bird feeders with your children, you may also notice the standfirst to the video, which tells readers that the explosion “scattered the 50-year-old’s body parts across the beach” as his “distressed” family looked on.

Twenty or so years ago, in the wild-frontier days of Web 1.0, there used to be a website that specialised in horrific news and paparazzi photographs that no one else would publish – the remains of suicide bombers after detonation, car accident victims in extremis, and so on. Covering itself, supposedly, with the mantle of documentary veracity, its tagline was: “Are you ready for real life?” But that was a small, dark corner of the old internet that wasn’t prominent on the search engines of the time – not a vast news site also eager to keep you updated on a “flash of bronzed legs” and capital gains tax on second homes.

In the unmoderated comments below, meanwhile, readers – no doubt all genuine Mail-reading yeomen of Middle England – are dismissing the video, which was supplied by Odesa regional police, as propaganda relating to the row between Kyiv and Moscow about the mining of the area. “Why would Russia with their mighty Black Sea Fleet want to put mines in the Black Sea?” writes someone listed as coming from Birmingham. “It would have also been Ukrainian since Ukraine seems to not anchor their mines in place very well,” writes Doug, from Sudbury. The Tribune is discreetly offering counselling to the picture editors who are processing the many explicit images coming out of the war, but that seems to be less of a problem for the commentators. “Photo of body parts please – need proof!” writes Dobby from the United Kingdom.

Even if this dispassionate panel of experts is right, in a sense it’s irrelevant: the point is that the Mail believes the video is real, believes it shows a death, and has thought it suitable to place, rewinding unstoppably, on the same page as a jolly read on bedroom turn-offs.

It would be easy to conclude that this bewildering collision of sensibilities is a byproduct of digital imaging and internet culture: a modern-day phenomenon that would have foundered on the gate-keeping and laborious production methods of times gone by. But tabloid tastes go back much further than that: consider the picture-papers of the 19th century, which ranged from respectable to publications such as the Illustrated Police News:

This edition, from September 1888, features the Whitechapel murders – that is, the Ripper murders – in a manner familiar to readers 130 years later. There is blanket coverage and an abundance of queasy detail. The twin tabloid tides of prurience and outraged respectability surge and ebb, between the savage man brandishing a knife and the women demurely holding up their self-defence weapons. They do not have a close-up photo of Annie Chapman as a corpse, so the artist has drawn one instead. There are even more pictures than you’d find in a modern Mail article. And, just for contrast, at bottom left we have “exciting scenes at the menagerie”; in the best desensitising tabloid tradition, there’s a cute animal story right next to the serial killings.

Open quotes

Thanks to all who took part in last month’s quotes quiz. If you did, you may remember it was observed then that the use of some quotations in British headlines remains impossible to categorise. The examples in the questions were chosen because they were clearly more one “type” than any other, but there are many cases where several rationales for the use of quotes blur into each other, and although it seems clear a phrase ought to have them, it is hard to single out why.

Take, for example, a phrase from Britain’s recent political past: “national living wage”:

At the time it emerged, the Tribune had been publicising the work of the Living Wage Foundation, which calculates a voluntary “real-world” minimum wage, higher than the UK statutory rate, which employers can sign up to pay. Then in the 2015 budget, the chancellor, George Osborne, announced a significant increase in the statutory minimum wage, alongside a rebranding of that rate as the “national living wage”.

However, then as now, the increase in the minimum wage fell some way short of the Living Wage as set and publicised for some time under that name by the foundation. (Currently, the campaign estimates it to be £800 a year lower.) The phrase “national living wage” was, as the Tribune has noted tersely, “simply the name given to the statutory national minimum wage rate for over 25s”, and it has been placed within inverted commas ever since.

So what do they signify? Are they neologism quotes? Yes, certainly at the time. Are they scare quotes? Also yes, and predominantly so these days: the phrase may not always appear surrounded by negative rhetoric, but you are still supposed to detect the Tribune’s dissatisfaction with what it regards as political sleight of hand.

The same thing was also true of “levelling up” – the current administration’s professed desire to address regional inequalities. That was placed in quotation marks when it was first mooted, partly because of its unfamiliarity, and partly out of the need – essential for any media organisation – to avoid uncritically parroting the names of government initiatives when they are rhetorically loaded. (As we noted last time, scare quotes are not always a dishonest tactic, and can offer a legitimate distancing from questionable claims or nomenclature.)

Also, there are subtleties even in the apparently straightforward world of direct quotations, as this recent exchange between a Conservative MP and a Channel 4 newscaster demonstrates:

I asked if you were “content to back a lawbreaker in office”. You said “I certainly am”. https://t.co/NHYkKbAEtd

— Cathy Newman (@cathynewman) May 24, 2022

This is a classic debate about whether agreeing to a summation of your position by an interviewer counts as saying what your interlocutor said yourself. You may feel that Newman is right to defend the sentence in its original form, or you may (as I do) agree more with this tweet in the replies:

(Is there something slightly odd about the word “certainly”, which Clarke-Smith did actually say, appearing in a sentence that was otherwise uttered by Newman and assented to by him?) But either way, there are two striking features about Clarke-Smith’s objection: (1) it’s impressive that even he knows the first thing you do is blame a sub-editor; and (2) it’s not the substance of the allegation he is complaining about, but the presence of the quotation marks. It’s not entirely clear why. He is arguably entitled to demand their removal, but if you ran the original sentence exactly as it stands without them, it would be beyond reproach and scarcely less damaging to the moral authority of a legislator.

Is it possible that Clarke-Smith’s objection is based on an understood Fleet Street convention that inverted commas plus attribution in a headline mean that a quotation is genuinely verbatim? At any event, his sensitivity to their presence, and the long debate that goes on in the replies under Newman’s tweet, at least show how highly attuned the British news-consuming public is to the use of quotation marks, in all their complex forms, in headlines.