Between March and September of 2002 I ran a web site that I called Wasted Inches. The idea was to demonstrate the about of space that the UK tabloid press wasted talking about trivial things while there was important news that was being relegated to a couple of column inches on page 5.
Although I stopped updating the site in September, I still think that some of the stories were pretty interesting, so on this page you have every story that I put on Wasted Inches during its short life.
Sunday 10 Mar 2002, 01:45PM
Was anyone really surprised that Will Young came out as gay? If you were surprised, have you ever watched Pop Idol? Didn't you see Will and Gareth singing "The Long and Winding Road" to each other?
Tuesday 12 Mar 2002, 12:05PM
Some distinctly average singer and her almost completely unheard of boyfriend have split up. Or have they? Do we care? Is this news? If they are are splitting up, then it's probably because she won't let him shag her.
Saturday 16 Mar 2002, 03:30PM
Obviously vitally important stuff here people, as it's all over the front page of today's Soaraway Sun. Apparently Posh (hah! have you heard her speak?) and Becks are spending a quarter of a million on a party for the England football team. Aren't you glad you're not invited? Imagine how bored you'd get at a party where all the guests were either footballers or Spice Girls.
Sunday 17 Mar 2002, 06:40PM
The singers (and I use the word in a very loose sense) from Hear'Say are all completely uninteresting. Their families are even less interesting (if that is possible). Why then did today's News of the World think that it was worth telling the world that one of their mothers is (or maybe was) a hooker. It must have been a really slow news day in tabloid land. I think they said it was Danny's mother. He's the one who looks a bit like a potato.
Wednesday 20 Mar 2002, 12:05PM
Mid-week sales indicate that Gareth Gates' single is out-selling Will Young's and that Gareth will be number one when the new chart is announced on Sunday. Although Will is (apparently) gay and Gareth is a member of a church that (allegedly) hates gays, they are still the best of friends and many of today's papers carry a space-wasting photo of Will congratulating Gareth. Wasting space on reporting who is number one is, of course, pointless. Wasting space speculating on who might be number one in a few days time is just taking the piss.
Saturday 30 Mar 2002, 11:46AM
A number of today's papers have telephoto snaps of Britney Spears without a vest on. Where's the news in that?
Sunday 31 Mar 2002, 10:30AM
We're not completely heartless here at Wasted Inches. We realise that the death of a member of the Royal family is a legitimate news story. But don't you think that today's hagiographies are taking it all a bit too far?
Wednesday 3 Apr 2002, 02:23PM
The front page of today's Mirror has a photo showing the (almost non-existant) queue of people waiting to sign the books of condolence for "the people's granny". They also run a leader bemoaning the fact that no-one seems to care. We see this as evidence that we're right. The general public really isn't interested in half of the "news" that the tabloids publish.
Thursday 4 Apr 2002, 12:47PM
There's all-out war in Palestine and parliamentary tributes to the Queen Mother, but neither of these are important enough for the Sun. Their main story today is the fact that David Beckham has hurt his foot and they don't know when he'll be able to play football again. I despair.
Wednesday 10 Apr 2002, 10:23AM
By "Era", I mean the last ten days or so when the tabloids have had nothing but the Queen Mother on their front pages. Now that she's been buried, perhaps we can get back to the usual nonsense.
Thursday 11 Apr 2002, 10:16AM
Beckham has hurt his foot (again? didn't we cover this just a few days ago?) and this apparently means that England won't do very well in the World Cup. Of course this really shouldn't be seen as the tabloids lining up excuses in advance knowing that England never do well in the World Cup. And anyway why do they give such importance to football? Does anyone really care what happens?
Friday 12 Apr 2002, 01:06PM
The story of Beckham's foot rumbles on. Today both the Mirror and the Sun have a photo of a foot taking up the front page. I guess it's supposed to be the broken "Miracle Foot", but there's really no way to be sure that it is. I'm starting to wish that another royal would die - to keep this nonsense of the front pages.
Sunday 14 Apr 2002, 02:08PM
Beppe is a character in Eastenders which is an extremely tedious soap opera so presumeably they aren't talking about "Beppe" but the actor who plays him. The opinions of an actor about a program he acts in should, of course, be a matter of supreme disinterest to the newspapers, but in this case it's obviously important enough to knock even Beckham's foot off the front page.
Saturday 20 Apr 2002, 10:45AM
Can someone please explain to me why it's news that two grown adults are (or maybe aren't) having an affair. It's been on the front pages for days now and it's just very boring.
Wednesday 24 Apr 2002, 10:56AM
Now I'm not saying for a second that this isn't news, but I really don't like the way the tabloids are reporting it. They all have headlines like "Millie - Body Found". Only by reading the details do you discover that a body has been found that just might be Millie. And a couple of hours later the police announce that it definitely isn't Millie and the papers all end up looking very stupid. Bet we don't see a follow-up on tomorrow's front pages tho'.
Thursday 25 Apr 2002, 12:16PM
Apparently the affair is over. Can we go back to discussing imoprtant and interesting things then?
Thursday 2 May 2002, 09:21AM
Britney's recently dumped boyfriend, the completely unknown pop singer Justin Timberlake, has said that, contrary to her claims, Britney is no longer a virgin. And says "I should know". Why would anyone care about this? Will hoards of pre-pubescent girls stop buying Miss Spears' records because she's known the pleasures of the flesh? We can only hope.
Friday 3 May 2002, 11:31AM
That's "Kylie is Single", not "New single from Kylie". It seems that Kylie has split up with her boyfriend (can't remember his name - but it's not important, he's a nobody). Why are all the tabloids telling us this on a day when the BNP are winning council seats?
Thursday 9 May 2002, 02:11PM
Everyone seems to think that something important happened in a football match last night. When will they learn that nothing that has anything to do with football can ever be at all important?
Saturday 18 May 2002, 10:24AM
Now this is a perfect example of exactly what is wrong with tabloid journalism in the UK. A third-rate has-been has a TV show to promote so she's suddenly seen around town with a man less than half her age. The tabloids then print this on their front pages. In what possible world could this be considered news? This is nothing more than a press release and it has no place in a newspaper.
Saturday 25 May 2002, 10:45AM
Much consternation amongst the tabloids this morning as someone from the Lottery has let it slip that the odds are against you actually winning any money. Well, what a surprise. It's not called the Stupidity Tax for nothing you know.
Monday 27 May 2002, 12:13PM
The third series of Big Brother started over the weekend. This is a godsend for lazy tabloid journalists. All they have to do is sit watching E4 all day and they can print stories about a group of complete nobodies who the public have suddenly become completely interested in. It's interesting to compare the different approaches that different tabloids take - the Star and the Sport will just be printing as many nude pictures of the women in the house as they can find, and on the other hand, the Mirror has declared itself the "anti-Big Brother" paper and fills it's pages with stories of how dire the contestants are. Here at "Wasted Inches" we love Big Brother, but we really can't see how it should be front page news. Every day. For the next nine weeks.
Tuesday 28 May 2002, 02:42PM
The Sport has a great way to fill its front page when its journalists are feeling particularly lazy (which seems to be just about all the time). They surf the web for a while looking for fake photos of some young starlet. When they find them, they print them on the front page with a story saying how terrible it is that photos like this can appear on the internet. I don't think they can spell "hypocritical" - let alone understand what it means! Today it's the turn of Britney Spears. They've found a fake that has her body attached to a large-breasted entrant from some "wet t-shirt" competition. Of course, the headline forgets to mention that the photo is a fake. You only learn that when you bother to read the dozen or so words that constitute the "story" under the photo.
Wednesday 5 Jun 2002, 10:25AM
We know that the Queen's Golden Jubilee is important and we certainly wouldn't suggest for a momoent that it's not news. But does there need to be quite so much coverage. On every front page. For four days.
Wednesday 5 Jun 2002, 10:28AM
More spectacularly dishonest journalism on the front page of today's Sport. There's a photo of one of the women from Big Brother that looks like she's topless. The headline is spread across her breasts so you can't see them. Inside the story says something like "we still haven't got any topless photos of the Big Brother women, but there are some great fakes on the internet already. Why does anyone buy that paper?
Thursday 6 Jun 2002, 11:45AM
Apparently David Beckham has said that he would be willing to cheat if it would help England win some forthcoming football match aginst Argentina. It seems that one of the Argentinian players did something similar the last time they played so he sees it as poetic justice. We, of course, can't understand why anyone would get so excited about a football match that they think it's important enought to cheat to win it.
Saturday 8 Jun 2002, 12:22PM
Only one story on the front page of every tabloid today. In fact it's on the front page of every paper. England won a football match yesterday. Apparently it's also important to note that it was Argentina that they beat. This gives the tabloids an excuse to report it as tho' it was the Malvinas Crisis of 1982 all over again. From the tone of the papers you could easily thing that they had won the World Cup, but our investigations reveal that it was a relatively unimportant match and we still have three weeks of this nonsense to go.
Sunday 9 Jun 2002, 11:28AM
The only sport that we at Wasted Inches hate more than football is boxing. It's amazing that a sport like that is even legal. It's very galling, therefore, to see that every tabloid front page today is about two grown men being paid obscene amounts of money to beat each other up. And we call ourselves civilised.
Tuesday 11 Jun 2002, 12:52PM
We're getting pretty immune to the constant stories about the world cup, but we were particularly impressed with the hyperbole on the front page of today's Soaraway Sun. Apparently the whole of the UK will be up early tomorrow to watch another England game. Sorry to disappoint them but we know of a number of people who wou;d rather stay in bed.
Thursday 13 Jun 2002, 10:37AM
England won their game and are thru to the next round of the World Cup. Predictably this was all over the tabloid front pages. We understand that they should be reporting it, but should they really make it sound like there's a war on? The Mirror was particularly objectionable with its jingoistic knocking of the Argentinian team.
Wednesday 19 Jun 2002, 09:32AM
There are still two days to go until England play Brazil in the next round of the World Cup, but the Sun still thinks this is the most important think to put on their front page. If you're going to insist on putting football on the front page, why not talk about something that happened yesterday (like the Koreans beating the Italians) not something that's not going to happen for days. To be fair to them, it wasn't the whole front page. There was also a photo of a woman who had gone to Ascot and had forgotten to wear a vest.
Thursday 20 Jun 2002, 09:45AM
The Sun still believe that this morning's most important news is tomorrow's football match. Of course, other than a bit of team news there's actually nothing to say about the match, so their story just consists of jingoistic exhortations for the team to do their best. What a waste of newsprint. And tomorrow's front page will, no doubt, be more of the same. Imagine how band it'll get if the team go even further in the competition.
Saturday 22 Jun 2002, 08:32AM
Only one story on the front page of all the tabloids today. England losing to Brazil in the World Cup. Oh well. Can we go back to normal now please? It's only a game.
Monday 15 Jul 2002, 10:06AM
Big Brother still isn't news, but most of the tabloids continue to act like it is. In particular The Star has had a Big Brother story on its front page just about every day for the last two weeks. Here's how it works. The Star hacks watch the TV show in the evening, pick up on some minor incident from the show and blow it up out of all proportion. Today's headline is a great example. They claim that Jade is pregnant. Their evidence for this seems to boils down to the fact that she's a bit porky and she eats a lot. Now I know that Jade isn't the brightest kid on the block, but I strongly suspect she would have picked up on some other clues if she was really pregnant.
Monday 15 Jul 2002, 10:13AM
Ever since Home Secretary David Blunkett announced last week that cannabis will be reclassified from class B to class C, the Daily Mail has been running a campaign to make him reconsider. Every day they have been running headlines on how terrible life is in areas of Lambeth where "drugs usage is rife". They completely ignore the fact that most of the crime surrounding drugs is caused purely because they are illegal. Today's headline is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. They have a photo of three or four people enjoying a joint in a sunny park. An innocuous enough site you might think - but not to the Daily Mail as only yards away childen play innocently unaware of the fiends in their midst. It's all total nonsense, of course.
Thursday 8 Aug 2002, 09:49AM
Two tabloids have attempted to cash in on the story of the two missing schoolgirls by offering rewards for information this morning. The Soaraway Sun offers £150,000 (and they're giving away a free poster so you know they've got to be serious!) The Express have trumped them however, by offering the ridiculous sum of £1,000,000. Of course the Express offer is all funded out of pornography, so you might feel a little uncomfortable accepting the money.
Tuesday 20 Aug 2002, 10:59AM
The whole tabloid world has gone mad over the disappearance of the two young girls Holly and Jessica. For two weeks now the story has dominated the headlines. It's obviously an important story, but do we really need to be quite so Liverpudlian about it? Today there's no new news, but it still has to be on the front pages so the tabloid reporters have digging around in the past of the two people who are being questioned. They've discovered that the chap's ex-wife got married to his brother. Obviously that's really important news as it shows us exactly what kind of family he comes from. The kind that can oh-so-easily produce paedophiles and child-killers. Or maybe it's not news at all and is just another example of unwarrented intrusion into people's private lives.
Wednesday 21 Aug 2002, 05:24PM
What the Sun headline writers are trying to say (in their stumbling, and very nearly English, way) is that Ian Huntley, the man charged with the murders of schoolgirls Holly and Jessica, won't be able to convince the doctors at Rampton that he is mentally ill and thereby escape trial. As always, the Sun doesn't let inconvenient facts get in the way of a good story. In this case they ignore the fact that either Huntley is mentally ill, in which case no conning will be required, or he isn't, in which case he has already managed to con some doctors in order to be sent to Rampton in the first place. Logic was never the Sun's strong point.
Monday 2 Sep 2002, 02:02PM
It must be a good headline as both the Sun and the Mirror came up with it independently. The story is, of course, the birth of a second son to a bad singer and a sportsman. The bit that apparently makes this news (tho' we strongly suspect it would have made the front pages even if he'd been called "Fred") is that they've chosen the name "Romeo". And, according to the tabloids, this has confused the fans. It also gives the tabloid hacks a chance to show off their education by paraphrasing Shakespeare. With the Earth Summit going on in South Africa and the US once again rattling its sabre at Iraq, it's difficult to see this as the most important news of the day, but then we don't run the tabloids. Here at Wasted Inches we hanker for the days when this would have been a small announcement in the personal columns of The Times.
Friday 6 Sep 2002, 06:05PM
Deep in the Australian jungle (well not that deep as a 5-star hotel is only 5 minutes walk away) eight British C-list celebrities have been camping for two weeks. It's been great TV, but it's certainly not news. However the tabloids have all had it on their front pages every day. Today they were full of the story of how Tara Palmer-Tomkinson (who is she anyway, and why is she famous?) tried seducing Darren Day (the 'popular' singer) by grabbing his hand and putting it in her pants (whilst she was wearing them). And the tabloid editors think this is important enough to go on the front page. On a day when car bombs had been exploding in Kabul.
Wednesday 18 Sep 2002, 10:22AM
Classic example of misdirection in this headline from today's Soaraway Sun. It appears with a picture of spikey-haired homophobe and pop idol Gareth Gates standing next to Big Brother winner and general waste of space Kate Lawlor. We're obviously supposed to infer that they are getting engaged, but further reading reveals that in fact they've just exchanged phone numbers (so they can give each other "a ring" - geddit!) If we were feeling particularly cynical we might point out that Gareth has a new single out on Monday and that the BB3 video has just been released so this could all be a big publicity stunt. But, of course, the Sun is a serious newpaper that would never allow its front page to be used like that.
Monday 30 Sep 2002, 01:48PM
There are some big stories around today - the opening of the Labour Party Conference and the US still trying to find a good excuse to attack Iraq are two good examples. But all of the tabloids ignore all of that and present us with news that would have been pointless even when it was current (in the mid 1980s). Anyone would think the editors are being told what to print by the Labour Party spin doctors in order to minimise the amount of coverage that the Perty Conference is getting.