The banner headline, situated right across the top of the page, is clear and eloquent; – ‘The hunt for weapons of mass destruction yields – nothing’. There is a second, smaller headline in a less bold font introducing the text itself, this time going into more detail on the subject – ‘Intelligence claims of huge Iraqi stockpiles were wrong, says report’. If the reader is not already quite well informed on the subject that the article is dealing with, it may not immediately be easy to understand.
The report also includes a small cartoon showing a man with a torch looking under Saddam Hussein’s bed while he is asleep, and a speech bubble saying, ‘This really has to be the last hiding place’. This humorous drawing expresses the paper’s own political view; making fun of the government’s desperate search for weapons and their supposed embarrassment at not having yet found anything.
The Mirror and the Guardian are both very different in the ways that they have presented the article. While the Mirror’s article is sidelined and has rather a cluttered, cumbersome look, the Guardian deals with it as the most important story and has spent a lot of time organising it and putting it together in the most appropriate way. In the Mirror it is something you might want to read quickly or skim over after you’ve read the more enticing looking pieces about celebrities’ wives and high street fashion. The Guardian report is a lot meatier and contains much more text, so you would only read it if you wanted to know in depth about the matter and were prepared to read quite a large amount of writing.
When you look at the front page of the Mirror, your eye is first drawn to the bright blue strip above everything else with ‘Top of the Shops’ in bold, yellow writing and cut-outs of Gwyneth Paltrow and similar blonde, stylish actresses; then to the massive black headline emblazoned in the middle of that page announcing the death of a comedian’s wife, and the emotive, action filled wedding photo accompanying it. The very last item on the page that grabs the reader’s attention is the article on the weapons of mass destruction. The editors at the Mirror obviously consider the story important enough to give it a column on the front page, but they expect their readers to be more interested in the lighter, more gossipy news that they have to offer.
The enormous photo in the middle of the Guardian’s front page is immediately eye-catching and intriguing. It is a very unusual picture to see on the front of a newspaper – the face of a British soldier in protective head-gear which covers his whole face, taken close enough so that the helmet goes right to all the edges of the photo. If you look closely enough you will see there is a vague human figure reflected in each of his eye-pieces. It looks quite odd. This picture is attention-grabbing firstly because of its size, and secondly because the human mind is automatically drawn to images of other human beings, especially faces. If it were a photo of a landscape or a vehicle then we would find it less interesting. There are no other articles, adverts or pictures on the page which could possibly catch your attention before that one does. The Guardian has made absolutely sure that this is the most important article in the paper and drawn your attention to it by use of the massive photo.
The page looks good while not including a great deal of colour, giving it a professional, streamlined effect. The front page of the Mirror however, contains a variety of very bright colours such as blue and yellow, which makes it snazzy and perhaps more exciting to look at than the Guardian.
It is also worth considering the sizes of the newspapers. The Mirror is a tabloid, and the Guardian is a broadsheet, meaning that the Mirror is half the size of the Guardian. This makes the Mirror easy and friendly to read, especially while travelling, so it might be something you bought on the way to work and read on the train or a bus. The size of the Guardian is slightly more intimidating. It appears that in general it is men who you see reading the large broadsheet newspapers, and women reading the tabloids. This may be one of the reasons why men assume they are more intelligent than women, but in actual fact it is simply because women are drawn to more petite, user-friendly newspapers that can fit into their handbag, and cannot hold big, cumbersome broadsheets without all the pages falling out. Women understand that it is not very considerate or attractive to have to have your limbs splayed out at arms length with your fists in the faces of the passengers sitting either side of you holding a giant pile of paper which rustles very loudly every time you move it.
As has already been mentioned, the main body of the Guardian’s article contains a lot more text than that of the Mirror. The language used is also very different. The sentences used in the both Mirror and the Guardian are well-constructed, articulate and to the point. However in the Guardian they tend to be longer, with more complex structures, and they go into more detail.
The Mirror you can read quickly, as it is very easy to take in all the facts. It is quite a light read - taking into consideration that it is concerning a somewhat political and depressing matter - as it has left out a fair amount of detail and lists only the most important facts. The writing is not informal, but the language used is not too complicated and would be easy enough for most people to understand. They have used a couple of quotes from the major people involved, for instance CIA spokesman Bill Harlow’s ‘It will be just the first progress report and we expect that it will reach no firm conclusions, nor will it rule anything in or out.’ Other quotes used are similar and make up the essence of the story. Beyond this, the Mirror has expended no more space with unnecessary or superfluous quotations and facts.
The Guardian has really included as much information as it can on this story. The content is detailed and more involved than that which is in the Mirror, so that the reader gets a clearer and broader view of what is going on. ‘There is now a debate over whether it [a draft of the weapons report] should be released to the Congress over the next fortnight, as has been widely expected,’ is an example of a fact which has been included in the Guardian but left out of the Mirror. If all you need to know is that the government have failed to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, then you only need to read the Mirror which outlines all the major aspects of the story in an accessible manner. But if you are very interested or involved with the matter of the war in Iraq, then the Guardian is more informative.
Both reports are generally geared towards a disapproving or mocking feeling towards the British and American governments because of the claims that they have made and not been able to back up. The Mirror is less strong about this, but they both imply that Tony Blair has been given a run for his money over the question of whether we went to war with Iraq on false assumptions, which it now appears the government were just using as an excuse to back up their actions. The Guardian uses a quote from David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector – ‘It’s clear that the US and British governments wildly exaggerated the case for going to war...I’m not surprised, given how incompetent this search has been. They’ve had bad relations with the [Iraqi] scientists from the start because they treated them all as criminals.’
Because the article in the Mirror is shorter and contains less information, there are fewer quotes or facts which make the report seem biased. The political opinion of the paper is less obvious in the text. Apart from the ‘WMD-Ometer’ joke, which is lightly fun-poking rather than politically expressive, the article is only mildly opinionated and generally just gives the reader the necessary facts. It would appear that the reporter was writing for a paper which did not have a very strong political view on the matter and did not want to force an opinion onto its readers either, expect for the inevitable general feeling of disappointment and irony. The Mirror does not expect its readers to formulate political and philosophical arguments and opinions by reading the article. They want to give the reader basic facts and concentrate more on the emotional and funny side of things. Political bias in the Guardian is present but subtle, so that it does not appear to be brainwashing its audience but merely informing them from a certain angle.
It is now very easy to see how different newspapers handle their stories differently according to the readership at which they are aiming. While some people want to be able to pick up a cheap, attention grabbing newspaper for an easy read, lots of light human interest stories and minimal ‘heavy’ news, some people prefer a paper which goes into more detail about the more controversial issues in the news and doesn’t bother with gossipy, irrelevant stories. Of course it also depends on your mood, and when and where you are going to be reading the paper. People usually prefer to have broadsheet papers like the Guardian delivered to them or to buy it from a local shop, so that they can sit and read it at home over a meal or when they have nothing else to do. Smaller more accessible newspapers like the Mirror are more suitable for reading on the move or early in the morning on the way to work or school while you are really not in a mood for mind-consuming activities such as reading a difficult and in-depth article. The Metro, a free tabloid paper available every morning from any London Underground station, is a perfect example of this. It is mass produced every day and issued out for free, so it is made sure that the Metro is readable for absolutely anyone who is travelling on the Underground and has nothing else to read. It is also provided as a way to occupy the travellers so that they don’t have to look at each other, as social harmony on the Tube is not exactly very comfortable.
The Guardian is more expensive so you would only really buy it if you were intending to read all or most of it, whereas with the cheaper tabloid papers you can flick through them as a way of occupying yourself when you have nothing better to do, and you want quick impact for less time, money and concentration. Information in the larger, more expensive papers is more thorough, but slowly assimilated.
Tabloids tend to contain more supposition and exaggeration to make the story seem more extreme and therefore more exciting for the reader. Language is fairly simple but expressive verbs are used to make the events seem more real. Usually tabloids focus more on the human element of their stories, in order to draw emotions from the reader and keep them interested.
Although the language used and the structure and presentation of broadsheet newspapers seems to be aimed at more intelligent people and vice versa, it probably isn’t entirely fair or accurate to say that more intelligent people read the Guardian and stupid, dumb people read the Mirror. Obviously this is true in a lot of cases, but the two papers are written for different purposes and occasions, and not necessarily just for different types of people. You will find that a lot of very intelligent people read tabloids for convenience and enjoyment, and similarly some less intelligent people who do not especially enjoy reading will read a broadsheet if there is an issue going on which they are particularly concerned with and want to follow in more depth.
Also, although (we trust that) facts in newspapers are accurate, and quotations and statistics are genuine…the ways in which they are dealt with depend very much on the newspaper’s own viewpoint. Especially with broadsheet papers, each one tends to support a certain political party, and the angles that they take on their stories are biased towards this. Papers cannot be objective, even if they try to be, because all the articles are written and put together by people, who have their own feelings and opinions about whatever they are writing about. People who buy newspapers regularly get into the habit of reading the one whose attitude is most similar to their own. This is why there is sometimes jokey controversy between readers of differently opinionated newspapers, and papers are stereotyped according to which political party they are biased towards.
There are many different ways in which the media can convey news and entertainment to the public, and you can see this very clearly in the different types of newspapers and news articles that people write. Just like any other piece of writing, newspapers are not just written to inform; but to persuade, to entertain, to advertise, to advise, and, in varying degrees of subtlety, to instruct. It is very important to be able to consider carefully the type of newspaper you are reading from and be aware of how it is aiming to affect its readers.
