My friend Paul Douglas posted this to Facebook earlier. It’s been doing the rounds of social media, and sadly it isn’t a spoof. Those cover lines are real.

This is something I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while. The supermarket tabloids appear to be going aggressively downmarket and becoming incredibly lurid. This one’s bad, but it’s not unusual: the current issue of Chat has child murder, child sex slavery and wife murder on its cover, Pick Me Up a predatory hypnotist, another title the former girlfriend of LostProphets’ lead singer and an accompanying headline about paedophilia, and they’ve reached the point where I’m terrified my daughter will see them: she’s 6, reading absolutely everything and full of curiosity. I know she’ll discover all the horror of the world eventually, but not now. Not like this.

[The title’s a New Model Army lyric. It’s from Frightened.]