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The Eigth Circle of Hell - Tabloids

The eighth circle of hell is home to the fraudulent, "those guilty of deliberate, knowing evil". At first I thought I was being a little harsh on tabloids, but having looked at The Daily Mail, Metro, London Lite and the Evening Standard as research for this, I feel quite vindicated. Dante divides his eight circle into ten bolgie (ditches) allocating charming individual punishments to each of the various types of evil doer.

The outermost ditch is dedicated to panderers and seducers, and there's a pretty fine line dividing them from their neighbours, the flatterers. The panderers get a slightly better deal in my opinion just walking up and down whipped by demons, the flatterers in the second ditch are buried in human excrement. Accusing tabloids of sucking up is hardly much of a stretch. The Daily Mail's love affair with Diana continues well past her death, with rarely a day going by when they don't manage to mention her somewhere or other. Tabloids have the power to pick ‘celebrities' out of the obscurity of the D-list and elevate them to the heady heights of, well, the C+ list. Particular favourites include put-upon girlfriends, youthful British sporting heroes and under-dog reality contestants.

The third ditch is home to those guilty of Simony, the act of paying for offices in the church. To be honest, I'm going to admit defeat rather than stretch a metaphor too far. Moving on...

The fourth bolgia is home to false prophets, who end up with their heads twisted backwards. Tabloids' marketing plans basically involve walking the streets ringing a bell chanting "the end is nigh" and hoping people will cough up 50p just to get the details. The Evening Standard has raised this to an art form. I have visions of there being a guide book in the Standard's offices where words are worth varying amounts, 'tragedy' is 40 points, 'mayhem' gets you 20, 'crisis' is 30; until you can add sufficient points together to earn a place on the front page. I'm sure they're got their fingers crossed waiting for a way to use "Global Disaster: Horrific Aliens Cause Gruesome Tragedy".

Corrupt politicians are sunk into boiling pitch in the fifth ditch. I know nothing about the internal operations of newspapers, but it seems unlikely they're the only profession on Earth that doesn't have some corrupt-ish dealings in their management. The very concept of paying people for stories is going to be a very difficult one to manage without drifting into dodgy dealings. Sometimes corruptness is just failing to ask the questions that maybe you should - "you didn't photoshop those pictures did you?", "you got permission to tap those phones didn't you?", "have you independently verified the drunken ramblings of this bloke who says the politician slept with a hamster?".

Hypocrites listlessly wonder the sixth bolgia. Tabloids are wonderful exemplars of hypocrisy. Having elevated a D-lister to the realms of stardom, they'll promptly turn on them when they unreasonably let said fame go to their head. I have to say my all time favourite is the Sun Editor Rebekah Wade ending up in jail for thumping her husband Ross Kemp at the same time as The Sun was running a campaign against domestic violence. Unsurprisingly The Sun didn't have much coverage of the story and the other tabloids thought Christmas had come early.

In the seventh ditch thieves are pursued by snakes (not perused as almost got posted thanks to spell check error). I'm not sure I'd like to suggest that tabloids are actually criminal, but I personally consider it day-light robbery to pay for a tabloid in London when there's a stack of equivalent freebie tabloids offered up every morning and evening. Believe me, they wrap up broken glass and soak up washing machine floods just as well as the ones you have to pay for!

Fraudulent advisers are engulfed in flames in the eighth ditch. Over the years I've read a fair number of columns purported to be written by people with brains which have left me wanting that fact independently verified. I used to have great fun watching my brother read my Grandmother's copies of the Daily Mail and wait for him to splutter and rage about the inaccuracies in the reporting and the ill-informed opinions of the columnists. Columnists are hired to make bold, opinionated remarks that cannot appear in the main text which is sort of pretending to tell the news without bias. It's a nice theory, but when the news itself is already spun to dizziness, the columnists have to go further and further to stand out, until they're clinging to the ledge of reason by their finger tips.

In the penultimate ditch those that sow discord are continually hacked at by a sword-wielding devil. When I started researching this article last week I was amused to see the Daily Mail were the only people out there to be implying that Wimbledon giving equal prize money to female and male winners was actually a bad thing. The really distressing thing is that they *did* successfully sow the discord; their arguments actually started making sense. At this point I decided that for my own mental health I should stop doing proper research and just wing it without checking facts. To hell with journalistic integrity, I just can't face the idea of agreeing with the Daily Mail.

The final ditch basically contains any falsifiers that are left over. Again, it's not really my intention to call tabloids liars, but every now and then, according to various courts of law, it's an approved label. Tabloid editors and writers spend a fair amount of their time embroiled in legal issues about them slightly, a little bit, marginally lying through their teeth. I'm sure that there's absolutely no one at the papers working out how much a libel settlement would cost and whether the original story would actually sell sufficient papers to make it financially worth it. Oh no. I'm sure no one ever does that at all!