Celebrity gossip makes me miss Brexit coverage
History will show that, in these times of political and constitutional turmoil, Brexit wasn’t always the highest item on the public’s news agenda.
Puzzled future historians will surely note that the most read story on the website of the BBC, our national broadcaster, for at least one day in October 2019, was ‘Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy in row over leaked stories’.
The public falling out between the two footballers’ wives has been hailed as a badly-needed distraction from the trials and tribulations of our troubled exit from the European Union (unless you’re Rebekah
Vardy, that is, in which case the predictable barrage of online abuse is anything but a distraction).
The story has been a godsend for the kind of ‘cake and eat it’ journalism often seen in the more sneery news outlets. It seems to have been covered just as extensively by the broadsheets as it has by the Daily Star and The
Sun. Of course, the likes of the Guardian would never do anything so low-brow and common as a straight version of the story, instead disguising it with some pseudo-intellectual analysis of what the story says about our national psyche (while just happening to tell the whole story anyway; purely for context, you understand).
You may not have realised but the row
“provided a weary nation with a brief moment of delightful schadenfreude. Coleen Rooney’s claims about a fellow footballer’s wife have also highlighted the declining power of the British tabloid media.”
Further we learn: “Rather than undermining the rationale of gossip journalism in the modern era, [a media consultant] suggested the Rooney story has resonated so widely [because] the footballer’s wife and her management team have invested the time, effort and money to break an old-fashioned tabloid story.”
Either that, or people are just interested in a public row between two high-profile women. With everyone feeling the need to take sides and loudly denounce their opponents, Rebekah v Coleen is all getting a bit heavy.
We clearly need more Brexit stories to give us a break.