Prince Harry’s mission as the slayer of his tabloid demons, brought into stark public view earlier this month during his testimony in a London court in his case against the Daily Mirror, amounted to more than just an unprecedented break from royal protocols. It also seemed like an archeological dig into the last age of print mass media.
After all, what could be more fossilized than the portrait provided of the London print tabloids at their zenith? There was a quaint period quality to the recital of stories produced in newsrooms seething with ruthlessly competitive hacks in which no expense was spared in the pursuit of scoops, while in the basement the presses were printing millions of copies of the papers every day.
Culturally, the image of a newsroom as a zoo goes back at least as far as 1928, when Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur wrote the play Front Page set in the fictional tabloid, the Herald Examiner, where the editor, Walter Burns, drove the primates to abandon all norms of behavior in the hunt for scoops.
