Almost every British tabloid editor has a moment in their career where they let down their guard just enough to show something awfully honest. When Piers Morgan, who used to be the editor of the Daily Mirror, sat down next to Anthea Turner on camera and said sorry, it was one of those moments. It wasn’t said behind closed doors or in a private letter. It was said on TV, where it meant something and, maybe not by accident, was entertaining.
It’s weird to see. At this point, one of the meanest tabloid editors of his time pretty much admitted that the press had taken a real person, put her in a box labeled “fallen woman,” and kicked it. What did Anthea do? She fell in love with a married man and ate a Cadbury’s caramel at her own wedding. The tabloid punishment went on for years.
Morgan’s BBC show quietly showed that the relationship between celebrities and tabloids has never been one-sided. For decades, the British press has been pretending that this doesn’t apply to them. It’s something much messier. Some might even call it symbiosis with a mean side. Each side needs the other. Each side knows it. And both sides put in a lot of work to act like it’s not true.
Victoria Beckham knew more about the deal than most people. She liked being photographed and hearing about other people’s lives. When it was convenient for her, she didn’t mind working with paparazzi. Her limits were also clear: “not career-wrecking gossip,” she reportedly said, sounding like she knew the area very well. That’s not being naive. Someone had learned the rules of a game that no one really says is being played.
But hypocrisy works both ways, which is why it’s so hard to condemn this whole ecosystem in a clean way. Catherine Zeta-Jones reportedly sold her wedding to a magazine for about a million pounds. She then sued another magazine for publishing pictures from the same event. That makes a lot of sense: privacy is a good that can be bought and sold, and it can be taken back through the courts when it’s not useful. The tabloids were right to be angry about that. They also didn’t deserve to make it because of how they behaved.
When famous people fight, it can be hard to hear what the real damage is. Heather Mills McCartney might be able to handle rumors about her personal life. The thing that really hurt was a lie told about her landmine charity, which caused sponsors to leave and, according to her, real problems for real people in war zones. That’s not tabloid trouble. That’s not what I meant. And you should think about it for a moment before moving on to the next page.
It becomes clearer that tabloids work in a way similar to how celebrities go through their lives. They find something, are happy about it, overexpose it, find a crack, make it bigger, and then sometimes feel bad about it all later, usually while the camera is still running. When their careers are going well, celebrities work with the press. When they’re not, they remember their privacy rights and hire lawyers to fight the difference. Most likely, the lawyers are the only ones who directly benefit.
What’s really scary is that this system doesn’t really have bad guys in the traditional sense. Morgan seemed to almost get this when he was being honest. It has people taking part. There are editors who want to sell more papers, publicists who help stories get written, famous people who trade access for coverage, and readers who keep buying the papers. Morgan talked about the bull and the matador. One difference is that the crowd doesn’t always know they’re in the arena.
Some people think that the whole plan might be changing. It’s no longer possible to believe the old tabloid certainties because of court victories, stricter rules, and the slow shift of attention to social media. But people still want to hear about scandals, hear about secrets in public lives, and spread rumors. It just found fresh channels. The awkward alliance stays together. Now it just looks different.
