Online tabloid newspapers

The place of the news media within popular culture – including, of particular relevance to this chapter, newspapers – has long been a matter of disputation. This is a question that goes to the heart of what it means to classify some forms of culture (such as rock music) as popular and so typically associated with unreflective commodified regimes of bodily pleasure, while other implicitly unpopular forms of culture (such as orchestral music) are traditionally regarded as having a more serious and, indeed, higher purpose of moral and spiritual edification (Rowe 1995). Newspapers are implicated in such hierarchies of culture (which are, of course, contested) because they bear elements of different cultural forms of varying degrees of distinction and so cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984). They are commercial enterprises, have mass readerships, and contain a good deal of lowbrow content about travel, sport, fashion and social events, but historically their principal rationale as institutions of modernity is as part of the crucial fourth estate that safeguards society as a whole by acting as a watchdog on those in power on behalf of the citizenry.