So this year came a scholarly book, called Family Newspapers?: Sex, Private Life, and the British Popular Press 1918-1978, by Adrian Bingham, a hot little number from the University of Sheffield. It recounts the delicate editorial dance performed by newspapers on behalf of the delicate minds of "the family" in the last century-an attitude which exists in various iterations to this day.

From the new London Review of Books (subscriber-only):

The idea of 'popular family newspapers' set a moral puzzle for editors and newspaper barons who had to reconcile the separate and shifting social meanings of 'popular' and 'family'.... The 'popular' newspaper needed to capture a mass working-class readership with whatever could be relied on to entertain and grab their attention, which was sex, gossip and juicy crime. But equally, the 'family' newspaper had to ensure that the sexual and social scandals which brought in readers were rendered fit for society's notion of what the family could and should know-whatever that currently was. The family, of course, meant women and children.... It's clear that popular newspapers were performing just the same desperate balancing act of titillation-with-respectability in their search for readers and advertisers in 1918 as they are today.

The inability to actually discuss things while discussing things reached dizzying heights:

Spluttering indirection went into overdrive on the subject of homosexuality, a regular standby for moral outrage throughout the 20th century. Bingham describes Hannen Swaffer's alarm call in 1924 about 'abnormality' in artistic circles: 'These "strange people" . . . interested in ballet and "attracted by everything written by, or about, the author of The Ballad of Reading Gaol" . . . You cannot, in a newspaper intended for general reading, put it more clearly than that.' Four years later, James Douglas of the Sunday Express announced that The Well of Loneliness was 'A Book That Must Be Suppressed' because 'its theme is utterly inadmissible in the novel . . . Many things are discussed in scientific textbooks that cannot be decently discussed in a work of fiction offered to the general reader . . . I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.'

This tone is part and parcel of the tabloids' attempt (both commercial and editorial) to insinuate themselves in the readers' lives. From a review of Tabloid Britain, from 2006:

To enact this pact, the tabloids make frequent use of first-person plural pronouns and a tone of shared indignation (conveyed most overtly through a consistent use of ALL CAPS), an emphasis upon features that promote a sense of interaction between readers and the paper, indeed giving the readers the impression of authorship and agency within the paper. Published on pages titled "THE PAGE WHERE YOU TELL BRITAIN WHAT YOU THINK" and "IT'S THE PAGE YOU WRITE," "the letters . . . are editorially themed around particular issues which act as a constructed dialogue between readers and newspaper, prioritizing the newspapers' agenda but in terms which appear to illustrate a seamless continuity between newspaper and readers as evinced by their letters."

Which has much to do with our man Murdoch.

In 1969 the public were deemed ready for Rupert Murdoch's relaunched Sun, which finally uncovered the nipples of the pin-ups who had always appeared suitably undressed for the times in the popular family papers. It announced 'We Enjoy Life and We Want You to Enjoy It with Us': 'The Sun is on the side of youth. It will never think that what is prim must be proper . . . It believes that the only real crime is to hurt people.' In a new, undisguised pursuit of their readers' pleasure, they advised women in a serialisation of The Sensuous Woman to move 'their pelvis and bottom as if they were loaded with ball-bearings'. Raunchy, harmless fun for a fun generation. But now that nipples, pubic hair, weird sex and celebrity scandal are available everywhere – on TV, in the cinemas, in magazines, on the streets of a Saturday night – the tabloids are having to rely more heavily on their old pumped-up rectitude and championing of family values as their unique selling point.

Why now do newspapers protect us from news, and from explicitness? In part-particularly for the tabloids-it is to sell papers through outrage; the tabloids speak on behalf of the family, against indecency. But for the "serious" papers, if one is to recount the daily facts of human life, why do newspapers from long-standing habit still turn to euphemism, polite language vagueness?