Inevitably, someone's going to mention "Flat Earth News";
but you could go back further - at least as far back as Hoggart, in 1957, in The Uses of Literacy (London: Penguin Classics, 2009):
"We need to hold fast to the nature of popular publication - that they are now the products of large-scale commercial organizations, that they belong not to the history of the Press properly speaking, nor to affairs, nor to politics, but to entertainment; that their handling of 'opinion' is largely irrational manipulation for the purposes of entertainment, that when one of these papers says, 'We give the facts... astounding...', this is not so much a statement of their attitude as an entertainer's patter, of the same order as, 'There's nothing up my sleeve.'" (p 216)
( , Thu 24 Jul 2014, 13:05, Share, Reply)
but you could go back further - at least as far back as Hoggart, in 1957, in The Uses of Literacy (London: Penguin Classics, 2009):
"We need to hold fast to the nature of popular publication - that they are now the products of large-scale commercial organizations, that they belong not to the history of the Press properly speaking, nor to affairs, nor to politics, but to entertainment; that their handling of 'opinion' is largely irrational manipulation for the purposes of entertainment, that when one of these papers says, 'We give the facts... astounding...', this is not so much a statement of their attitude as an entertainer's patter, of the same order as, 'There's nothing up my sleeve.'" (p 216)
( , Thu 24 Jul 2014, 13:05, Share, Reply)