Colors

Red Tops

"Red Tops" is the nickname given to the tabloid newspapers in the United Kingdom as opposed to the broadsheets. The name comes from the red banners the newspapers have across their tops.

The red tops include:

• The Daily Mirror
• The Daily Star
• The Sun

How It's Used

“Until the early 1960s there were as many news stories on the front pages of The Daily Express and Daily Mail as there are today in The Times or The Guardian—and neither The Daily Herald, from which The Sun was created, nor The Daily Mirror was afraid that serious issues would bore its readers.

“Editors had fought in World War II, seen the creation of the National Health Service and welcomed the 1944 Education Act, which opened grammar schools to the working classes. They knew that their readers, who had suffered the experience of war and supported the reconstruction of British society, shared their concerns. So they did not condescend to the common man or woman or aim for the lowest common denominator. That slowly changed in the 1970s and reached its apogee in the dumbed-down era of the 1980s and 1990s, when the popular broadsheets became tabloids and the red-tops chased the shallow TV celebrity culture.”

“In their news stories, the ‘red tops’—Britain’s trashy tabloid newspapers—as well as the august Times insisted that the 79-year-old painter [Lucian Freud] is the country’s ‘greatest living artist,’ making it more painful when, further down, they put the boot in.”

“Journalistic values are often revealed by attitude to foreign news. American television, for example, generally covers few events outside the states, and is even wary of giving airtime to wars fought by America overseas. And, as a rough rule, broadsheet papers will have four or five foreign pages, while red-tops allocate one or fewer.”

“Class shift, the rise of give-away newspapers and privacy rulings by courts all seem to be putting extra pressure on the papers, which are loved and loathed, renowned for their sometimes adroit, sometimes atrocious puns and their steady diet of sex, sports, crime and celebrity. Readership of high-end British newspapers has fallen about 8 percent since the 1970s, according to the National Readership Survey, a market poll used widely in the industry. The tabloids, known here as 'red tops' for the red banner at the top of the paper, have fallen 34 percent.”

“For nearly a century, a joint committee of government and media representatives has existed that aims to prevent publication of information which would endanger national security—it encompasses the military as well as secret services. Contrary to popular belief, it is not—and never has been—a compulsory form of censorship. It is a voluntary system of self-censorship under which the media agree to a set of guidelines delineating areas of sensitivity that editors take into account before publishing a story…

“Among those that readily accept the system are the tabloids, which noisily resist any attempt to circumscribe their right to pry into the private lives of celebrities—but then the red tops have always presented themselves to their readers wrapped in the flag and fully supporting the nation's battles against its enemies.”

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