Deregulation doesn’t stand still.
It is an attitude.
With many manifestations.
It moves.
It’s multi-headed.
Not faithful to any form.
But in as much as you can describe it, it can adhere to communicative principles, for instance:
This article appears in the Sun.
Pay Fury is efficient signalling. Pay is a short word and Fury is highly emotionally loaded. It’s words like this which earn tabloids their money. Fury is a brilliant word for a tabloid style article on anything you wish to highlight.
Pay Fury is a category, a genre in itself.
You can trot this out forever and it will always work.
Health Killjoys pocket £100k
Killjoy is loaded – it means meanspirited, no fun.
Pocket when used as a verb is like trouser – it means took home or earned but is more evocative of securing funds without really working for them, ie stealing.
More than 350 nanny state killjoys pocketed x for y.
The language is of sensation and excess. The emotion, morality, direction, size, certainty, outrage are all embedded in just a few words. That is what words can do. And if you know how to get words to do these things, then you can achieve big things. The tabloid press exist for agenda setting.
“For telling us what to do”
What do the top managers at the Sun earn?
They tell their readers what to think about. They don’t mention what they don’t want anyone to know.
They obviously underpay the underlings.
But the overall goal is to undermines public services and promote post-Brexit private healthcare.
All communicators should be monitoring this paper.
For uncut real time agenda setting you need to stick your head in The Sun.
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