As a journalist, I know all the tricks to a good headline. It must grab attention, raise questions, spark intrigue and tempt the reader to click the link to the story. I’ve done as much above, and if you’re reading this, then it obviously worked.
The British press is a hotbed of creative excellence when it comes to the Headline. For all its faults, The Sun newspaper is always good value for pun fun and alluringly alliterative headlines. The Guardian’s matter-of-fact reporting may win the integrity awards, but The Sun outsells it by almost ten-to-one on a daily basis. They know their audience, and how to speak to them.
But when you’re privy to the machinations that go on behind the lead-press curtain, certain behaviours can appear disproportionately disconcerting. The fall of the News of the World newspaper, for instance, reverberated more dramatically throughout Fleet Street than the average High Street, for example. Journalists are their own worst enemy.
Which is why the coverage that the British press affords Spain troubles me. So tainted with barely veiled glee and prejudicial ignorance, so hyperbolic and blinkered, so willingly one-sided and ill-informed, it’s almost sacrilegious how poorly represented Spain is in the British media.
Don’t believe me? Take these recent headlines. The first, delivered by the normally relatively sober and rational voice of the BBC, is a classic example of mendacious reporting:
‘Spain’s year: Football glory, economic gloom’
Now you may read that and think ‘OK, there now follows a balanced appraisal of Spain in 2012 – the football success and the economic crisis’. In actual fact, aside from the opening paragraph that outlines that it’s been a bad year for Spain economically, the entire article is about the country’s unprecedented football success. That’s fine, but why frame it in the context of the country’s economic woes?
Why? To generate hits. To attract naysayers and non-football fans who want to sneer and silently tut to themselves how – yet again – those lazy Club-Med countries have failed to sort out their finances. This is never explicitly stated but always implied.
Then there’s this one, from The Daily Telegraph – which sometimes struggles to straddle its self-appointed position of being extremely pro-British but catering for Brits keen on moving or buying abroad:
‘One in ten Britons with property abroad hopes to sell’
However you read that, there’s no escaping the underlying negativity threaded through every word. The ‘beleaguered’ Brits are rushing to escape those nasty and unstable foreign shores for the safe sanctity of old Blighty, it might well have said. But it won’t, remember, because the press have to remain implicit. But any non-prejudiced reader will very quickly deduce that nine out of ten Britons are very happy with their property abroad.
But you don’t see that written as a headline, do you? Bad news, panic, loss and upheaval sell. Contentment, happiness, peace and prosperity don’t, at least not in the current climate. You see, things aren’t that great in the UK. The country has just suffered a double-dip recession, unemployment is high and England has just battled through its wettest year ever.
Millions of Brits are surviving, struggling by, getting on with things. It helps – and the press know this – if the majority at least think that things are bad for everyone. Nobody wants to hear tales of successful expats making a happy new life for themselves in Spain. That was so 2005.
Today’s stories, at least where Spain is concerned, must be spun so that their predicament, and that of the hundreds of thousands of Britons who live in Spain, is even worse than their own.
So just like how during the boom years it was wise not to believe all of the hype, extend the same courtesy and consideration to Spain now – things may appear bleak, but that’s just one side to the story…
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