Using Barthes’ sensibility to analyze the myths circulated
during the recent Labour leader campaign, I think I can safely say that
charting the way Jeremy Corbyn was turned into a threat means understanding the
work of one particular tool: the headline.
Two days ago, the headline actually burst into the content
of the news itself when an editor at the Daily Telegraph, which presents itself
as a non-tabloid conservative paper, had to back down over his headline for
Corbyn’s appointment of John Mcdonnell to his shadow cabinet: Corbyn has just appointed a
nutjob as his shadow chancellor. Today’s
foxhunting set don’t go for that chav stuff, which is so much for the maid, so
the editor eventualy changed the headline.
In the process, though, he briefly lit up the politics of
headlines.
As writers know, and readers, for the most part, don’t, the
headline is not composed by the writer of the story or the review or column.
Headlines are thus, peculiar things, true relics of, if not the death of the
author, at least his or her continued subservience to the institution or patron
for whom they write. On the one hand, the headline must tip the reader into the
story in some way, while on the other, they must also operate to show how the reader is to read the story. In
this second function, headlines are more akin to the answer to riddles, or the
punchline to jokes, or the moral of fables, than they are to the entry in a
dictionary or encyclopedia. That is, headlines are less indexical, or
denotative, than oracular, or connotative.
They also exist systematically, which means that headlines
can be treated as a genre, with certain conventions. The Telegraph editor’s
mistake was one of misunderstanding the headline convention that is given by
the paper.
Tabloids, of course, are famous for exploiting certain
conventions of the headline – transmuting the typographical excess of the
headline into a more general rhetorical excess. Readers of the NY Post or the
Sun know that the game is all in the headline, and that the rest is, for the
most part, filler – thus neatly reversing the “normal” relationship between
text and title. Non-tabloid papers also transmute the excess of the headline,
but in a different way: here, the libidinal possibilities of the headline are
sublimated. It is the quintessential bourgeouis act, act least in the classic
Weberian sense – like the capital that is accumulated by the bourgeois and
spent prudently, the headline’s typographic independence is made subservient,
for the most part, to a more nuanced interpretation of the text that follows.
One might say that the non-tabloid paper understands itself to have an
indexical responsibility. Thus, the
print is normally smaller, the use of slang lesser, the spirit of gleefulness,
when released, turned into giggliness rather than sadistic display, and so on.
Of course, just as the answer to a riddle is different than the answer to a
mathematical problem (the riddle both solves a cognitive disjunction and
exploit the shock of it, for one thing; for another thing, a riddle limits its
systematic effect), so, too, is a headline different from merely a paraphrase.
It is in this difference that a certain politics ranges.
One noticed – readers noticed and commented on – the sudden
appropriation of tabloid like headlines by the Guardian and the Telegraph as
Jeremy Corbyn moved from being a political eccentric to the leader of Britain’s
second largest political party. Here, one feels, the headline, in all its
implication, started driving the news. Private
eye made a funny comparison of what Corbyn said and what he was reported to
have said – underlining the systematic bias of the newspapers. The abridgement
and distortion of Corbyn’s comments – whether about Hamas and Hezbollah or
about Osama bin Laden or about segregating trains at rush hour between men and
women – is not something I’m going to go over one more time. Rather, I want to
point out that the spirit of the headline, with its capacity to seemingly
contain a whole truth while actually operating a fiction-making abridgment, infected,
as it were, the reporting itself.
This does not exhaust the meaning of headline politics in
this instance, though. For passing beyond the effects of the text, there is
also the total effect of the headline in the newspaper context to consider. A
headline, after all, announces something new. In the case of Corbyn, much of
what was reported wasn’t new at all – he has been a remarkably busy speaker
over time. But the effect of the headlines was to make it seem as though new
information was being dug up about Corbyn – or, to put this inversely, that
Corbyn was hiding his past. This is of course an especially important maneuver
in modern image management, so much so that we have a name for it now: gotcha
journalism. It is not just that the figure who is “gotten” is exposed, but the
exposure implies that the figure has been busy hiding. It makes the newspaper’s
research, which is not actually very much work, nowadays, what with Google,
seem like an “investigation.”
There is probably much more to say about this rich topic,
but now I have to pick my son up from school. So that is it.
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