Reading the Supermarket Tabloids

CLAUSEN, CHRISTOPHER

Culture Watching READING THE SUPERMARKET TABLOIDS BY CHRISTOPHER CLAUSEN When Governor Bill Clinton contemptuously described the tabloid Star last January as a paper that specializes in stories...

...If tabloid enthusiasts were as dumb as the caricature of them, it would be hard to imagine them reading anything at all...
...Well, for starters, a lot of Elvis stories...
...The most imaginative of the supermarket tabloids, carrying the sense of arch fun far beyond Sun, is Weekly World News...
...Such an endeavor would be fruitless with the tabloids, unless the political is defined so broadly that it becomes meaningless...
...As a Weekly World News reader (female, elderly, disabled, an immigrant from Yugoslavia) put it in a contest for a year's free subscription, "The News is simply the best paper in the supermarket...
...Most of the features are about relatively minor entertainers, who presumably welcome publicity of any sort, or about the obscure relatives of major ones...
...The mixture of titillation, danger and morality makes this story pattern ideal for a paper like Star, where the violence that sometimes shows up in Enquirer's treatment of similar material is almost entirely absent...
...Mother Teresa's vision of heaven, or a TV star's announcement of a change in sexual habits, are open to question...
...The statement of editorial policy provided for potential advertisers describes it as "edited with an emphasis on TV and Hollywood celebrities...
...Culture Watching READING THE SUPERMARKET TABLOIDS BY CHRISTOPHER CLAUSEN When Governor Bill Clinton contemptuously described the tabloid Star last January as a paper that specializes in stories about Martians walking the earth and people with cows' heads, he showed understandable ignorance about a branch of the press that had briefly emerged from supermarket obscurity by savaging him...
...President John F. Kennedy, not to be outdone by Hitler and Elvis, is alive...
...Globe piously asserted that this was merely a follow-up of "rumors that have been published in such newspapers as the Washington Times, Washington Post, Newsday, Chicago Tribune, New Republic [sic], London Times, and the London Daily Telegraph.'' As if in a conscious attempt to improve on the Anita F. Hill-Clarence Thomas showdown of a few months earlier, the article solemnly proclaimed that not one but two of the chief accusers had passed lie-detector tests...
...extraterrestrials are stealing our children (a more congenial space visitor, meanwhile, endorsed Bill Clinton shortly before the Democratic convention??a possible peace offering from the National Enquirer group...
...That may be a trait that sets them apart from tabloid buyers (although some polls suggest that much of the public doubts the accuracy of the mainstream press...
...It was the beginning of what my ninth-grade teacher would call a learning experience...
...He confused Star (circulation 3.4 million), where Gennifer Flowers' tales of her 12-year affair with the Democratic Presidential aspirant were running in teasing installments, and Weekly World News (816,000), a significantly different kettle of fish...
...Once laundered, so to speak, the story's newfound legitimacy was in turn exploited by the weeklies as a basis for investigative spinoffs...
...If all of this seems like a parody of investigative journalism, it nevertheless bears a disconcerting resemblance to some recent instances of the real thing...
...and Cybill Shepherd worries about how to juggle her children and career...
...But like regular newspapers, the weeklies print a wide range of items that inspire differing kinds and levels of credence, from sensational happenings to personal vicissitudes to astrology columns...
...In one issue, a full-page story about Mike Tyson praying for divine support in his then-pending rape trial, complete with color photograph, ran opposite a much more upbeat account of how inspiring syndicated TV talk-show host Maury Povich finds his wife, CBS News anchor Connie Chung...
...The text describes Hitler as "surprisingly fit" for a man of 100...
...The diversity of the tabloids suggests that our stereotype of a tabloid reader...
...What should we conclude from all this...
...A recent issue managed to combine an old obsession with a newer one by trumpeting Elizabeth Taylor's recounting of a near-death experience on the front page...
...Ted Danson's first wife is revealed to be living in poverty...
...Of course, Times readers like to think they can believe what their paper prints...
...If he ever did return, it would be the worst disaster in the history of tabloid journalism...
...Reiff...
...For skeptics, an accompanying full-page photo showed her proudly licking the bejesus out of an ice-cream cone...
...Yet this disparity is easily overstated...
...His bodyguards were so surprised to see our people, we just drove up, put him in a van and drove away...
...Corporate consolidation has become as common here as in the more conventional branches of the newspaper industry...
...it described a secretary in Detroit who has the world's longest tongue...
...They do have distinct specialties, and in many respects they vary at least as much as regular newspapers...
...Interspersed with these pieces on the moderately rich and marginally famous are a host of self-help articles, ranging from horoscopes to recipes to a rather sensible advice column along the lines of Ann or Abby...
...as well as human interest stories of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances...
...In any case, asking whether people credit these accounts is, I think, irrelevant...
...National Examiner is a less slick version of Star, with a pronounced secondary affinity for the occult...
...It should be noted that although the tabloids share certain obvious characteristics, it would be a mistake to lump them together...
...A few pages later came a piece about a sex-killing, with a photograph of the corpse and sly hints of necrophilia...
...Seeing their scoop seized on by the lead paper of the rival tabloid group, Enquirer and Star struck back in ways calculated to demonstrate superior journalistic responsibility while maintaining proprietorship over the story's gaudier elements...
...But to extrapolate these commitments into a political ideology, be it conservative or feminist or whatever, would be to miss the point...
...Inspired by Clinton's troubles, I made my way to a nearby store and bought copies of each of the six weeklies...
...Hence almost all of the nearly 4 million copies it sells every week represent readers, or at least consumers, who shelled out 95 cents...
...Perhaps it is simply a case of the far behind number two tabloid group trying harder...
...Regardless of their distinct specialities, the weeklies are designed for people who are indifferent, even hostile, to political doings of any sort, except when they cross the border into personal gossip...
...Comparing dailies to weeklies is, of course, unfair...
...Before the verdict of the Tyson rape trial, it ran Desiree Washington's account "for the first time anywhere," under the headline "I Gagged When Sex-Mad Mike Raped Me??He Stank So Bad...
...Both papers belong to a genre whose flagship is National Enquirer, founded in 1926??the only one of the six major supermarket tabloids whose name could be considered a household word...
...Thus Globe (1.2 million) ran a four-page report, including pieces, about Clinton's supposed relations with three black prostitutes and lis alleged offspring...
...In reality, each of the major weeklies is carefully edited for an audience with a particular subset of interests...
...Globe International, a Canadian corporation, also puts out National Examiner (805,000) and Sun (350,000) at its Boca Raton offices...
...Yet the tabloids' showing is still impressive, especially if you consider that they probably have few library or other institutional subscribers to swell their figures...
...The nearest approach to politics is a look at Amy Carter's humdrum life in Atlanta and her recent engagement...
...Furthermore, whatever one's views of their contents, they are anything but sloppily produced...
...Both interpretations tacitly assume that the authority (social, political, educational) given short shrift is worthier of attention than the multifarious kinds of personal behavior found in the pages of supermarket weeklies...
...Certainly the editors are straight with them...
...For good measure, it investigated the Globe report of a "black love child" and concluded that it was "the most outrageous of the rumors swirling around the White House hopeful," wholly without discernible foundation...
...In the tabloid tradition, but more emphatically, Sun prints optimistic accounts of the good fortune that has befallen individuals...
...Largest circulation of any paper in America" (3.8 million), National Enquirer declares on its front page...
...That description accurately summarizes the bulk of what appears in the paper, though it hardly conveys the full flavor of an average issue...
...Its definition of success tends to be modest: A brief story presented a woman who won a Yugo from a car dealership in Santa Fe after kissing it for 34 hours...
...Other articles in it focused on survivors of freak accidents, a booming stock brokerage business conducted from the bathtub, beneficiaries of strange operations, ingenious criminals, and so forth...
...Unlike much of what appears within, the claim is no exaggeration, if you accept the premise that Enquirer is a paper (news or otherwise) rather than a magazine...
...But a recent cover story reminded readers what an ordinary person is capable of...
...Most mainstream editors would be loath to admit it, but many, possibly a majority, of the pieces inside Enquirer??concerning greedy officials, the freak accidents of ordinary people, physical-fitness techniques, and the love lives of minor Hollywood stars would not look out of place on the pages of the average daily newspaper...
...On another level entirely are canards about a healthy Hitler or the activities of space aliens...
...Unlike other tabloids, Weekly World News has a political columnist, though one very much in keeping with its overall tone of gross hyperbole...
...It is the only real enjoyment I have all week...
...Cultural critics today often try to identify the concealed political allegiances of ostensibly neutral material...
...Its stories rarely live up to their headlines, and many lose air as they go along...
...Ironically, the Clinton story may have had greater moral significance for Star devotees than it did for better-educated readers of the mainstream press...
...Capitalizing on that obsession is the chief quality they share with the mainstream media, as the Clinton story amply demonstrated...
...Star ran a spread with new revelations by Flowers headlined "I Won't Go to Jail for Bill Clinton" and "What Bill Clinton Told Me About Other Women...
...For their part, tabloid readers would no doubt deny that assumption paradoxically asserting the value of the private against the public if the denial itself were not an alien form of impersonal generalization...
...Elvis (his surname rarely appears) has been a staple of the tabloids for years, largely replacing Elizabeth Taylor as a drawing card...
...Early in the year Enquirer featured an "amazing five-part series" alleging, in a front-page headline, "Elvis and His Mom Were Lovers," and promising other revelations of a similar nature...
...The tabloids may be providing their readers, at least occasionally, with modern equivalents of the tall tales that fulfilled a wide range of psychological needs for our ancestors...
...troops in the desert, Saddam, and the Fuhrer himself, not only in his prime but, thanks to the marvels of computer enhancement, as he looks today...
...He only inspires a psychic healer in Wales...
...With the Clinton story put out to pasture, the front page ballyhoos such nonbombshells as Erin Moran's gripes against the producers of her old sitcom ("Happy Days Was Hell") and Ed McMahon's wedding...
...The impression you get reading Sun is that it consists largely of rewritten material that comes in over the wire...
...Anyone who bothered to read on found out that the surgeon, who died in 1937, does not actually do scalpel work...
...His political philosophy and affiliations were completely unrelated to the Flowers allegations and their treatment...
...On the other hand, it is possible that most readers know exactly what to expect, and that they don't take Sun seriously enough to be let down...
...her father is barely mentioned...
...Actually, Enquirer subscriptions of any sort account for merely 10 per cent of its sales...
...a gullible, semiliterate gum-chewer of lower-class origins and pathological tastes??should be abandoned as a figment of the educated imagination, encouraged by the mainstream press to emphasize its superiority...
...Apart from Elvis, Enquirer is heavy on celebrity features, often of a salacious variety...
...A splenetic Right-winger, Ed Anger boasts of having a steel plate in his head from his days in the Marine Corps, fumes against homosexuals, and during the Persian Gulf crisis offered to fight Saddam "face-to-face, man-to-man, on some red hot sand dune...
...A few minutes later and he'd have been on his way to Iraq," declares Dr...
...Considering the potential for libel suits, he has the immense advantage of being dead, although every few months one of the papers will run a Christopher Clausen, a new contributor to the NL, is professor of English at Pennsylvania State University...
...Leo Reiff, a Swiss anthropologist and Nazi-hunter, the spread was embroidered with photographs of the yacht, Hitler's hideout, U.S...
...He could have been a liberal, a conservative, even a prohibitionist...
...A notice inside the front cover of every issue reads: "Sun stories contain opinions and seek to entertain...
...As for Sun, most of it is about ordinary people who have a variety of bizarre adventures...
...Probably less than we might wish...
...Of the many things I discovered about the world, the press and the devil, perhaps the most important was that these tabloids have a closer, more complicated relationship with the "respectable" news media than the latter would like to believe...
...Allegedly based on an interview with one Dr...
...Roger Moore's daughter tells of beginning to act in a soap opera...
...Enquirer went after the lady herself, purporting a whole series of affairs with married men...
...In early February, a New York Times analysis pointed out uncomfortably that a "symbiotic relationship has arisen between the two extremes of American journalism, with charges trumpeted by supermarket tabloids picked up by serious news organizations and converted from dross to journalistic gilt.' Each extreme was fulfilling the other's needs, and the process did not end there...
...spelling, grammar and proofreading are consistently superior to those of, say, the New York Times...
...Globe offers different and altogether cruder fare...
...Staris in fact owned by Enquirer, so, for that matter, is Weekly World News...
...Nonetheless, it warns us not to be puzzled if we hear nothing further: Apparently, he suffered a heart attack during his capture and "could die at any time...
...Performers successful enough to have a TV series of their own, or repeated hit records, are invariably referred to as "superstars...
...Invariably, a confused but spunky young woman ends up marrying the man of her dreams, the perfect upbeat finish for a paper whose intended reader, although not averse to gossip and scandal, seems to value marriage and its traditional accompaniments above all else...
...Short of conducting a survey there is no way to be certain, but that particular reader is probably representative in valuing her paper less for its precision than for its flavor of the marvelous, the outlandish and, at the same time, what she calls "the heartwarming stories, especially the ones about people whose lives are saved...
...The articles typically alternate between extravagant fabrications, many involving space aliens, and wacky personal achievements...
...What are those consumers usually, but not always, female getting for their money...
...This shortcoming might have disappointed those who, for instance, looked for more from the Mother Teresa revelations than was ultimately delivered (unlike Gennifer Flowers, Mother Teresa apparently provided the writers with little help...
...The Wall Street Journal, the most widely read of the traditional organs, has a circulationof 1.8 million, with USA Today running a close second (1.4 million...
...Where else, in the grim fall of 1990, could you read a cover story detailing how after months of secretly advising Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler was captured in Peru as he prepared to board a yacht bound for Iraq...
...One could perhaps argue that along with their strong belief in marriage, Star readers, for example, readily accept the equality of the sexes, races and classes if only in the jaundiced sense that everyone is on equal footing with their pants down...
...All this is the stuff of tall tale and folklore...
...As in National Examiner, one finds a lot of occult stuff in Sun, like its piece about a doctor known to perform "miracle surgery from the grave...
...It may be said that the rejection of the political as an object of attention separates tabloid readers from followers of the traditional press...
...Articles are drawn from different sources, including the world press, free-lance correspondents and the general public, and are published strictly for the enjoyment of our readers...
...report proving that he never expired after all...
...Indeed, when the New York Post and the TV networks, a week before the Republican convention, revived an old claim that years ago George Bush had an affair, they did it without any help from the weekly tabloids??except in the important sense that Star had taught them how to transgress previous limits of journalistic decorum...
...What made him an attractive target for both journalistic branches was the obvious fact that, like Mount Everest, he was there, the highest object on the horizon...
...The tabloids merely cater, albeit at the extreme, to American culture's obsession with personality and generally weak interest in abstract ideas, political or otherwise...
...In a recent issue, for example, Julie Andrews talks about her alcoholic parents...
...One could nonetheless regard the tabloid readers' turning away from what others say they should be interested in as either a form of resistance to authority or a form of escape...
...Star's last two pages are regularly devoted to summaries of the week's soap operas and a short story ("every week a complete new romance...
...a UFO fleet is holed up in a Mexican valley...
...All, incidentally, shun the definite article in their logos and are published in Florida...
...One issue featured Mother Teresa talking about her own near-death experience...
...Whether the Clinton scandal as it developed revealed drastic differences between tabloid journalism and the practices of the legitimate press is debatable, but it certainly demonstrated a mutual dependence that made many in the loftier precincts profess embarrassment...
...Nowhere in America does the old-fashioned Southwestern humor of exaggeration flourish so luxuriantly...
...In addition, as a cautionary tale for the 1990s popular enough to have run several times with different names attached, a virile entertainer vows to cut down a bit on promiscuity to avoid aids...
...A majority of Americans, after all, are so alienated from the political system they rarely or never vote...
...Star and Enquirer, their single ownership notwithstanding, sometimes work different sides of the same street, as the Clinton story demonstrated...
...When it isn't being drawn out of its usual orbit by an election-year scandal, Star is noticeably less raw than its sister publication??more like Parade or People...
...Sadism is a garish thread throughout Globe...

Vol. 75 • September 1992 • No. 11


 
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