We went to the bookmobile today and I picked up a rather odd book with a rather bold thesis. After all, how could you not pick up a book entitled, “I Watched A Wild Hog Eat My Baby!” A Colorful History of Tabloids and Their Cultural Impact, by none other than Bill Sloan, former writer and editor of three of the most famous of our notorious tabloids. OK, normally I could have walked by such a title and though to myself, “Why?” But then I did marry my husband. And I spent many long hours early in our marriage with the Weekly World News, watching my husband paste articles into a sort of scrapbook, and wondering when he was going to start wearing a tinfoil hat.
Fortunately, he has recovered from this bizarre fixation with tabloids. And ironically, after years of hoping he’d snap out of it, I met the news that Weekly World News was shutting down with a twinge of sadness. Nostalgia, I guess. But I will admit that it was way more entertaining to learn about the Clinton’s adopted alien baby than the less farcical treatment of celebrities in the other journals gracing the check out aisle while I waited in line.
So I checked out this book. And right in the introduction it made a claim that I did not quite expect. Of course, Sloan is a tabloid journalist. But he is also a recognized, respected and award-winning journalist of the other sort, as well. He’s worn both hats, and makes an important observation on today’s media culture.
In fact, the success of the tabs, whose estimated circulation peaked at more than 12 million copies a week in the early 1980s, has forced the bulk of America’s print and electronic media to embrace a much more sensational approach to the news…(p. 14)
Imagine that. The National Enquirer setting journalistic standards for the media.
…They (journalists who switched from mainstream journalism to tabloids) recognized early on what William Randolph Hearst had figured out eighty years ealier and what practically every TV news executive and major-daily editor realizes today–what qualifies as “hot news” has only the sketchiest relationship to pure information. For all their lofty pretenses, today’s mainstream media are essentially just another branch of show biz…(p. 15)
“Hot news has only the sketchiest relationship to pure information.” Primed for scandal, what hath the journalist to do but call on a few basic suspicions and a hypothetical anecdote to produce yet another attention-grabbing piece of news on homeschooling? Throw in a quote by an expert and “balance” it with a quote from someone who sounds like they are on the fringes themselves and it takes on the appearance of respectable journalism.
At this point, the mainstream media simply “out-tabloided” the tabloids. By the last years of the twentieth century, most popular magazines and many metropolitan newspapers and major TV news operations had, in essence, become tabloids themselves, leaving the supermarket papers to sift through the leftovers or ballyhoo lesser scandals. (p. 16)
So the death of Weekly World News and the declining subscriber numbers for the other major tabloids is not because Americans are developing more refined tastes, nor a healthy skepticism of the articles contained within these sorts of “news” sources. They’ve just found their appetite for the bizarre, the shocking, the scandalous and the half-naked on the evening news. And in true tabloid fashion, there is very little in the way of actual research to get in the way of the shock value of a good headline coupled with a dramatic photo. Mixed with just enough information to make it all seem respectable.
But that is nothing new, I guess. Among all of the wonderful things Thomas Jefferson had to say about the freedom of the press, he also had a few choice words about reporting in his day.
To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, “by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.” Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers . . . I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. Thomas Jefferson to Tom Norvell, June 14, 1807
Sometimes, it is just too much work to dig up enough of the story to really know what is going on. But the really sad thing is just how easy it is to think we are informed because of the amount of info-taintment we consume on a daily basis. Worse than uninformed, we are often misinformed and do not even recognize the extent of our own ignorance.
One of my favorite reads for election season is The Image: A Guide to Pseudo Events in America by Daniel Boorstin. His definition of someone famous is someone who is well-known for their well-knownness. The book goes through many of the non-events that get reported as news (like press releases or press conferences) but that aren’t really events.
I don’t know if this is a result of the tabloidization of the major newsstreams or a cause of it.
Great post. I love the tie-in to the homeschool horror stories as well.
~Luke
My all-time favorite tabloid headline: Onlookers Gawk In Horror As Space Alien Impregnates 7-Year-Old!
That “gawk in horror” gets me every time.
It’s one of my greatest frustrations right now–news media that entertains rather than informs. I miss the days of real journalism and wonder if we have any real journalist left.
I just picked up a (tangentially) related book from the library. Parenting, Inc. .
I tried skimming it last night, but my brain felt like imploding halfway through. Disinformation for sales. :Þ
Oh, that explains why everything celebrities do is “news.” Skimming headlines to find something I want to read gets tiresome. So I just rely on you to do it for me.
(Not entirely, but I do appreciate the time you take to inform us.)
“Worse than uninformed, we are often misinformed and do not even recognize the extent of our own ignorance.”
Yup. I realized while watching the Va Tech Massacre coverage how the national media had absolutely no idea about waht they were reporting on, and that did not stop them one bit (Va Tech is my alma mater). They talked like they were experts on everything. But they completely did not get what Va Tech and Blacksburg were about and seemed surprised when they could not get students to condemn the university. I wrote about it back then:
http://www.throwingmarshmallows.com/home/2007/4/19/blaming-the-victim.html
I have pretty much stopped watching all mainstream news (and won’t go near the 24 hr news programs with a 10 foot pole).
The more you know about a subject, the more obvious it is that it is being misreported and at times even misused to make a point that should not be the job of a journalist.
But the more you see it in something you know about, the more you question everything that is reported. And you wonder how we can be informed enough to make good decisions in the political process.
It’s not just journalism.
Lawyers and courts operate on a similarly competitive, confusing, adversarial, story-controlling model, spouting the same lofty language about fairness, balance, objectivity, the people’s right to know, and “nothing but the truth.”
Our society has the information but apparently doesn’t understand what it means that journalism writes news at a sixth grade level, and lawyers exclude from the jury anyone who knows anything about anything — especially anything about how courts and newspapers really work!
And our judicial system LITERALLY (with no irony) forbids us ask questions or do our own fact-finding when it’s our turn to participate, or even to read the news reports outside the court or to talk it over with each other or people we know and trust to help us think it though. We know that. It’s not hidden from us! So what do we think about that?
Do we think, can we think?
I see both journalism and our judicial system as threatening iceberg tips warning of the real danger — “public education” that creates not an educated public, but an intellectually sleepy society who will swallow what it’s spoonfed like breakfast cereal and believe it’s the truth.
It is our whole culture, too. Look at blogs. You are rewarded for bad behavior with traffic and comments. Titles like “Edu-Nazis condemn homeschooling” garner much more traffic than “District officials express concern over homeschooling.” There are a great many fairly high traffic blogs out there who lack writing and basic research skills, but make up for it in sensational headlines and brash accusations.
Too many people like that, and too many people who disagree spend too much time checking back to see what annoying thing the’ve posted recently. “Irritainment” as I’ve heard it called.
But everything takes on an aura of truth when it is printed. Even on the Internet where anyone can post about anything they want.