|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Those Titillating Tabloids: Love 'em or Leave 'em
| Article
# : |
14897 |
|
|
Section : |
LIFE
|
| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1988 |
2,674 Words |
| Author
: |
Harvey Hagman
Harvey Hagman often writes on adventure and treasure hunting. |
What has weekly sales of thirteen million and is read by more than fifty million?
Here are some front-page clues: "Genius Begs Docs: 'Cut out my brain and make me a nitwit!'" "The King Is Back! Elvis' Ghost Croons in Toilet Factory!" "Liz to Marry Malcolm Forbes in September!" "Baby 75 Million Years Old!"
The answer is America's six major supermarket tabloids--the National Enquirer, which states under its masthead "LARGEST CIRCULATION OF ANY NEWSPAPER IN AMERICA," the Weekly World News, the Globe, the Sun, the National Examiner, and the Star. While tabloid readers continue to love or hate them massive changes are sweeping through their pages--four-color printing, tighter editing, and toned-down sensational content.
Element of Human pathos
"They're good fun," says Charlotte Hays, a reporter on a metropolitan daily. "It's an unfettered kind of journalism. The good ones have absurdity, but don't veer so far beyond the believable. There has to be some element of human pathos."
"Three stories that exemplify that are 'Fat Swimmer Harpooned by Whalers,' Midgets Honeymoon in Cardboard Box after Eviction from Posh Hotel," and 'Family Flees in Shame after Daughters Impregnated by Alien,'" she said. "The alien story is obviously unbelievable, but it does capture human pathos and turns it into bathos. I can't analyze it; tabloids are just too much pleasure."
Free-lance journalist Jeanette Smyth, who has been reading tabloids avidly for fifteen years, says, "I like them because I don't have to read them with my brain. Some are too weird for me, like the kind that have two-headed babies or 'Dwarf Rapes Nun and Flies Off in UFO.'
"What I love about the National Enquirer is that these Brits who practice yellow journalism, the great tradition of Fleet Street, do not make any pretense that it is a profession for gentlemen with ethics and professional societies. We [journalists] get very pompous."
She senses tabs are getting "much bitchier, and cattier and snappier. They might have a best and worst dressed list of stars who were at some Hollywood premier. And they are right. Their eye for the tacky has always been unerring, but now they are doing it
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
