London tabloid slips from gutter to sewer

Press, 20 October 1987, Page 15

London tabloid slips from gutter to sewer

By

JOHN COOMBER

NZPA-AAP London Britons take the gutter tabloids pretty much in their stride, but one newspaper has now become so downmarket even the journalists and advertisers are jumping ship. The “Star,” alias the “Daily Bonk,” has just lost six top journalists and two major advertisers because its pages have slid from the gutter to the sewer. Tesco’s and Co-Op, two of the country’s biggest supermarket chains, have scrapped advertising contracts worth nearly $2 million a year because they no longer wish to be associated with a newspaper which specialises in pictures of naked schoolgirls.

The “Star” was the paper which was ordered to pay the author and politician, Jeffrey Archer, a record £500,000 (SNZI.2 million) in July over allegations that he had slept with a prostitute.

Since then the newspaper has declined. Among offerings from recent editions are: “Schoolgirls’ chests are getting bigger,” the paper revealed, together with pictures of Sally Anne (“The sixth form’s favourite blouse-buster”) both in an out of school uniform,

and a picture of a pudgy three-day-old baby with the sub-heading: “Even the babies are getting bounder.” Or, on the investigative line, a fantasy about Prince Charles ordering his chef to have fresh plums flown to him from London to Balmoral via chuaffeur-driven limo and R.A.F. flight at a cost of £6OOO ($14,880). The newspaper has now taken to publishing photographs with “word bubbles” coming out , of people’s mouths so the reader’s eye will not have to labour over captions. Caption writers have just negotiated a new deal under which they will average £30,000 ($74,400) a year — before expenses. But the denizens of Fleet Street do, it seems, have a conscience. At least half a dozen of the “Star’s” leading journalists have handed in their notice in protest against the paper’s content. The paper’s chief editorial writer, David Buchan, has been sacked for gross misconduct after telling another national newspaper that the "Star” had become a “soft porn rag.” The "Star’s” slide began

when it became linked with the very downmarket “Sunday Sport.” The Australian-born editor, Lloyd Turner, was sacked after the Archer episode and replaced by Mike Gabbert, who offers no apologies for the paper’s editorial content. “When somebody wants to become famous there is no length they will not go to, no lies they will not tell to get in the papers,” he said. “Then, when they become famous, having created this voracious public interest, they expect to be able to turn it off like a tap. Someone who chooses to be on the public stage can’t have the same immunity as a member of the public.” As for the accusation of pornography, Gabbert points out that far worse is available on the newsstands and that no-one is forced to buy the paper. The “Star” subscribes to the theory that nobody ever went broke underestimating the public taste, and with reason. Its sales soared by an extra 54,000 readers recently and now claims to sell 1.25 million copies a day — about the same as the “The Times,” “Guardian” and the “Independent” combined.