Not only does this touch on all of the above issues but it now seems to be an interesting item in the discussion of branding, brand identity and the ideology of both media institutions such as the Sun and the way that other non-media companies such as Disney perceive how their relationship with them impacts on their own corporate brand identity and their sales.
More than this, we can extend this into the debate about media control and the notions of the growing power of social media.
There has been opposition to Page 3 since its inception. The fact that the tag itself - Page 3 - has come to represent an ideology of men's [society's?] attitude towards women says much about the power of a media icon / convention. Page 3 has not only entered the national vernacular but has come to represent the public's idea of the ideology of the Sun reader more than the rest of the paper, even more so than it's infamous jingoistic headlines during the Falklands War sinking of the Belgrano [Gotcha!] or the anti-European campaigns ['Up Yours, Delores'].
The comment that :
“Page 3 piggybacked
the sexual revolution, persuading women that they were sexual pioneers
when they were actually reprising ancient gender roles.... The
message of Page 3 was never “strong” and “assertive”. It was “available”
and “passive”
seems to sum up the whole issue regarding the page 3 as a battleground for competing ideologies surrounding women and their role in what was a male dominated society.
Of current interest is why now? What provoked this move? Was it, as the first article suggests, a commercial decision , a financial calculation that the icon of page 3 had outlived any commercial [sales] value? The balance being that any loss in sales would be compensated for by acquiring new readers who had previously found the paper objectionable and attracting new commercial advertisers who could now justify placing adverts to their customers in what remains the UK's biggest circulating newspaper.
Perhaps the 'why now' question is answered by looking at two issues. [1] the Irish edition dropped Page 3 in 2014 with no significant impact on sales and [2] the Sun sees its future as digital with more than 4 million readers aged 15-34 across print and digital and 40% of its readers being female. Murdoch [the owner] suggested in 2014 that the Page 3 was old-fashioned and maybe no longer relevant to the digital age.
And there we may have it. the digital age has brought with it many advances, one of which being social media such as Facebook and Twitter. One thing that such platforms offer is the opportunity for fragmented groups or individuals to gather together and to create powerful campaigns aimed at such institutions as The Sun and Page 3. It is little coincidence that the video we looked at earlier in the term [The Experiment] and the decision of Tesco to change all of its news displays to hide sexual images from younger children come just weeks before this announcement. Social media pressure groups have a power to influence large institutions. The Turn Your Back on Page 3 campaign and No More Page 3 and others have proven this. The latter attracted 217,000 signatures to an online petition and The Experiment film has had over 100,000 viewings. clearly, social media, a digital platform has provided a means of effectively getting a single message out to a wide audience - consider how long it might previously have taken to get a traditional written petition together and to have attracted such numbers.
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