The scandal surrounding Phillip’s Schofield departure from This Morning has eclipsed many other news items over the past week.
The scandal is that several years ago Schofield had an affair with man 30 years his junior while at This Morning who he’d initially met when the younger man was just 15 years old, and then he had lied to This Morning bosses and everyone else about having had the affair when questioned.
So he held his hands up last week and quit, not only This Morning, but he says his TV career is now over.
This whole event has been headline news for a week. It’s a very popular news item, according the the BBC’s most read item list Philip Schofield’s career ending is more interesting than the government potentially losing its legal battle over breaching covid rules, for example.
The above screen capture was taken on Friday 3rd June, the same day Schofield did a brief interview with the BBC in which he was questioned about his relationship with the young man, it was emotional, but content thin.
Interestingly around the same time the BBC also did a similar style interview with the scumbag Andrew Tate, in which he is challeneged about his misogynist views, but that is nowhere in trending.
It seems people are much more interested in trivia compared to critical issues of power and politics.
Why is Schofield Trending?
I think probably the pluralist view is the most applicable here: Schofield has been a presenter on national British T.V. for decades, many people grew up with him, and here he is having his career ending early.
And it’s a tragic end in real life to a great career, brought down by one mistaken relationship and one little white lie, it’s a real tragedy, a real life drama.
People love this kind of thing, this is just pure demand for drama and entertainment and so the media provides.
I don’t think we can find any support here for the Marxist theories of the media which argue this is all about media manipulation of content and agenda setting to keep people stupid, this event just happened too quickly for that to be the case.
Of course maybe the public have been trained to need this kind of content over the longer term, so this could be a result of a long term drip-drip effect of trivia in the mainstream media, which may offer some support for Marxist theories, but this is very difficult to prove empirically!
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