Номер E, страница 48 - гдз по английскому языку 11 класс учебник Комарова, Ларионова

Unit two.

Language in use.

Society and culture.

News from the gutter.

We all remember learning about how bad junk food is at school.

Few of us, however, stop to think about the effect that junk media has.

According to politicians, a diet of junk T.V. and tabloid newspapers is bad for society.

Why? Because this section of the media prioritizes celebrity news over current affairs.

This dumps down public debate, because people stop understanding the important issues of the day.

For this reason, politicians sometimes call tabloid newspapers the gutter press, because their news agenda is literally rubbish.

However, tabloid style journalism is not new.

For example, in seventeenth century Germany, the papers were obsessed with royal gossip.

The sadistic actions of a Transylvanian aristocrat, Vlad Tepes Dracula, were regularly front page news and made him the inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula stories.

And in the eighteen thirties, U.S. politicians regularly complained about bias and lack of analysis in the penny press.

Cheap newspapers with mass circulation.

If politicians remember to learn these lessons from history, maybe they will stop trying to change the media.

Because, unfortunately, as long as sensationalism sells newspapers, gutter news is here to stay.