Newspapers and Serious Issues

Looking at the top five highest selling newspapers in the UK, you can only really say that one of the papers; being the Telegraph, covers stories about serious issues that are effecting our world. It covers political, environmental, social and economical issues in detail. The other four papers being The Sun, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail and The Daily Star mainly cover stories about the latest reality TV star or gossip about who's dating who in the celebrity world. These are stories that basically have no effect on the reader's lives and yet people still buy these papers. If you look at The Sun's website's homepage which contains stories about celebrity big brother, Jordan and Ndubz, http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/. If you then look at The Telegraph homepage which contains stories about the Haiti earthquake, financial issues and the conservative's latest plan's if they were to win the general election, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/.

I believe as because papers like The Sun are being read by three million people on a daily basis then surely they should have a responsibility to be covering serious issues in more detail so people are better informed and educated about issues that could seriously effect them. Because they mainly cover issues about celebrities and so on, people aren't being informed about the serious issues and it means that they probably don't think it's as important as it actually is. Having said that The Sun's main aim is to try and sell papers, and therefore they only put things in the paper that people want to read. This means that if people don't care enough about global issues such as climate change then tabloids won't print as many articles about it.

I do believe that tabloids and low budget entertainment have too much power because it influences a high number of the population. If it's in our papers in the morning and on our tv's in the evening then it's very hard to get away from it. However if these thought un-provoking programmes weren't so popular then our screens wouldn't be filled with them. It might be because they're in the papers so much that they are popular in the first place, either way papers will continue to try and sell papers instead of printing factual information on global topics and issues.