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That is a "red-top" journalist's trick and one I despise

What's a red-top journalist?

In England some of the newspapers, usually the more down market ones, traditionally print the name of the newspaper in red ink.

A "red-top" is a UK newspaper that concentrates on sensational news of footballers' liaisons with ladies not their wives, pop-stars' indiscretions, and the like. They are so called because their mastheads are printed in red ink. They include The Sun, The Mirror and The Star.

Until a while ago they were also often known as "tabloids" because their size was smaller than the usual broadsheet style favoured by the more serious papers. However, a number of the more serious papers have switched to the tabloid format so a different distinction has to be made.

Due to the rather frivolous and sensationalist nature of many of the stories carried in red-top newspapers their journalists are not viewed as having the same level of integrity as those working for the very best newspapers like The Times or The Daily Telegraph. If we hear of a journalist using fairly suspect means to secure a story it may be viewed as a 'red-top journalists trick'. I think it is all very well planned and I suspect that many of these newspapers deliberately end up in court and paying fines and compensation because they know that the extra circulation gained will more than compensate them.

I find at school that I can use the 'red-top' newspaper argument to battle the 'popular' choices that the kids make. They may argue that the music they like is better than mine because theirs is more 'popular' but I can always counter by pointing out that The Sun is the most popular newspaper so that should tell us something about the nature of popularity.

I don't think we use the term in the U.S., do we?

I've never heard it, Kalleh. We talk about tabloids and rags . . . but we have some other terms for journalists of shady character:

yellow journalism
hacks
popparazzi (who started this one?)

Surely there are others.

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popparazzi (who started this one?)

The word is actually "paparazzi". The Word Detective has an article on this --

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"Paparazzi" take their name from the celebrity photographer Signor Paparazzo, a character in Frederico Fellini's 1960 film "La Dolce Vita." Fellini evidently didn't like the paparazzi any more than today's celebrities do. Before Fellini's film made "paparazzo" synonymous with "pushy creep with a camera," it was an Italian dialect word meaning "buzzing insect."

Fellini, agreat filmmaker, had the dubious pleasure of being harrassed by a group who took their generic name from a character in one of his movies. (La dolce vita is still a fun film, available on DVD.)

I saw La dolce vita recently and I wondered why Mastroianni kept calling his photographer friend "paparazzo". That's not very polite, I thought.