Ryan Giggs is getting the old Princess Diana treatment from the Daily Star. By which I mean, no day passes without a front page headline mentioning the Manchester United footballer.

Daily Star, 21 June

This is today's example. In a lengthy analysis, the Tabloid Watch blogger points out that the paper has had a Giggs' splash every day since 6 June.

It appears like a sorry attempt to ramp up sales by continuing to embarrass the man with increasingly far-fetched stories that manage to be both pathetic and sordid.

Getting sex and Giggs into a headline is good enough for this tacky Richard Desmond title. By the way, he's the publisher who boasted recently in a TV interview that he "made" another footballer (David Beckham). So, presumably, he is happy to break one. Here's another "story":

Daily Star, 20 June

No, I can't work out what that jumbled collection of words means in reality. It isn't actually a story at all. And that's par for the course because almost all the other splashes aren't provable stories either. Then again, that's not the point, is it?

Tabloid Watch also points to an editorial last Friday, Ryan Giggs kids the victims, that is laced with hypocrisy:

"It's easy to forget there are little children at the centre of this scandal. Innocents on both sides of the family whose lives have been ripped apart."

And who is making sure that the little children - plus their friends and neighbours - are reminded of the scandal day after day?

Here's another example. Note the way in which Giggs forms the key headline reference even though he has nothing to do with the the substantive story itself, such as it is.

Daily Star, 10 June

Tabloid watch concludes: "Despite churning out this inaccurate, misleading, utterly tedious drivel day after day, the Daily Star still manages to be the fourth best-selling daily newspaper in the UK.

"But is the 15.9% fall in sales between April 2010 and April 2011 a sign that their readers are getting tired of being treated like fools?"

And before any commenter points out that, with 702,000 sales, the Star outsells The Guardian (263,000), I answer: so what?

Big hat tips: Tabloid Watch/The Media Blog