Defends the tabloids
Tomasky, Michael
NEW YORK is a place of surfeits and shortages. Of office space, we have too much; of plain old space, too little. Of fileted fresh lobster meat, at $35 a pound, there is much too much; of...
...pART OF THE News' s problem—indeed the root of it—is that New York is a city that doesn't really want a working-class conscience anymore...
...Whatever defenses of the Solarzes were still being mounted—the most important of which had appeared, interestingly enough, in the Times, which ran a sympathetic frontpage piece on the embattled solon, complete with a photo of him with his dog)—vaporized immediately...
...The tabs explored those meanings, or at least the first, coarse drafts of them, and they did it fast, and moved on to the next thing...
...But in the Post, where black-Jewish tension—caused, needless to say, by restive and intransigent blacks—has been a useful leitmotif for thirty years, the words were on Page One ("the wood," in tabspeak) in huge type...
...Often, the Post is full of garbage, inaccurate, irresponsible, shameless in the way it lionizes its friends and crushes its enemies and slants its stories to serve its view of the world...
...One day, it tries to be too Post-like, too flippant and irreverent...
...And it's why, paradoxically, the future of tabloid newspapers is rather bleak...
...It bought color presses, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars...
...Three quick examples: • In 1992, then-Congressman Steve Solarz of Brooklyn was implicated in the House banking scandal...
...It was Pagnozzi's great fortune to have been sitting with Robinson at three o'clock in the afternoon, because it was at that hour each day, as Pagnozzi mercilessly reported, that Robinson purchased a bag of M & M's, lined them up on her desk by color, and ate them one by one...
...Its advertising base is a horror show—whereas the News at least gets lots of display pages out of Macy's and the outer-borough appliance chains, and so on, the Post gets considerably less of that action...
...and it bites back...
...At one point in the interview, Gingrich allowed as how he'd launched an offensive against Bill Clinton because, on a return flight from Israel aboard Air Force One, Gingrich was relegated to a seat in the rear of the plane...
...It was absurd, but it elicited no particular outrage...
...And, today, it isn't just tabloid newspapers that do it...
...it wants laughs...
...No regular person could possibly be interested in it all, but it's not in there for regular people...
...And yet...
...Solarz lost the next election, and his political career ended...
...Its circulation is around 430,000, making it a distant third to the Times and the News...
...how much more weight they gave the tabs, in fact, than the Times, and how it seemed odd to them to think otherwise...
...S0 THAT'S what tabloids do well...
...And white liberal New York, which once supported the city's working classes and worked in political concert with them, now is more interested in the market, scoring good Knicks tickets, finding the freshest cut of mahi mahi...
...News management had hired, to state its case at press conferences, a woman named Lisa Robinson...
...I remember, when I got my first reporting job in New York, being startled to see not merely how thoroughly my more seasoned colleagues read DISSENT / Fall 1999 95 these strange New York tabloids every day, but how much weight they gave to the local news in them...
...It made news everywhere in America, somehow came to represent everything people didn't like about Gingrich but couldn't quite articulate, and helped set a tone of negative press coverage from which he never recovered...
...they become Americans through television and Michael Jordan, but they hold onto their cultures through their newspapers...
...Beyond that, the Post was a serious newspaper—more news stories, a larger news hole, as they say, more "straight" reporting...
...100 DISSENT / Fall 1999...
...I've been talking about the "tabs," generically, but I think I should stop for a moment and note their differences...
...True, the number's gone down over the years...
...Their coverage of John Kennedy Jr.'s death was of course excessive and saccharine, with sixteen-page wraparound sections and endless interviews with the same few people and the "Goodnight, Sweet Prince" stuff...
...it wants gossip...
...MICHAEL TOMASKY is the political columnist for New York magazine...
...Today, there's virtually no category of news event that cannot be sensationalized...
...Senate campaign...
...Last year, in spite of two front-page proD'Amato editorials in the last week of the campaign, Chuck Schumer swamped Alfonse...
...And though it loses pots of money, it doesn't matter, because Murdoch is sitting on billions elsewhere, and what's a few million a year when the paper provides a voice, a screaming voice, for his politics in the country's biggest market, and makes him a player in electing and defeating politicians he likes or loathes...
...A few months ago, a judge gave one of the News's craft unions a huge settlement, and now the paper is cutting some of the cheapest corners imaginable: reporters now must have an editor's approval before they can take a source to lunch...
...The standards of journalism are only a shade better...
...They had to, or felt they had to, scream their news, and they were the only ones that did it...
...But there's a lot the Times doesn't tell you...
...I once paid a visit to the paper's morgue to study the transformation the paper underwent when ownership passed, in late 1976, from Dorothy Schiff, the New Deal-promoting liberal crusader who'd held the paper since 1939, to Murdoch, then an unknown and vaguely unsettling eminence who shocked New York in 1976 by buying up New York magazine, the Village Voice, and the Post...
...But the world of tabloid newspapers will have suffered a death blow, even as tabloid culture thrives...
...One wants to cheer for the News, but if you get on a subway, and a discarded Post and a discarded News are strewn about, which one do you pick up...
...Murdoch's first Post hit the stands on December 30, 1976, during a week when, according to agreed-upon newsbusiness tradition, nothing happens...
...98 DISSENT / Fall 1999 This is how the Post works...
...Fourteen years later, I guess I'm no longer a non-New Yorker, because I read the New York Post and the Daily News every day—more thoroughly, I'll confess, than I read the Times...
...When you saw her on television, you wondered what on earth could have possessed the Tribune Company to hire her, and where the hell she came from, other than Three Mile Island— where it emerged she'd been a management mouthpiece after the...
...Besides, much of that industry has shifted now to a muscular immigrant press—Polish and Russian and Indian and Arabic and perhaps nine papers in Chinatown alone...
...You can argue with it and bite it...
...I know them...
...Maybe sooner than that...
...the above-the-fold part of the front-page of the Herald-American looks exactly like a Web site home page...
...The day after she had her New York debut, up at Pat Moynihan's farm, the Post ran seven stories or gossip items slagging her in one way or another...
...incident...
...When she said that Jerusalem should be the eternal and indivisible capital of Israel, the wood read "Hillary's Chutzpah...
...If you are, or want to be, a New Yorker, in tune with the texture of life here, you should know who Elisa Izquierdo is (victim of horrific child abuse from a few years back), the tabloid nickname bestowed upon big-money, oft-facelifted divorcée Jocelyn Wildenstein ("The Bride of Wildenstein"), the layout of the penthouse aerie of a corrupt union boss named Gus Bevona (screening room, kitchen, steam shower), where Police Commissioner Howard Safir was when he told the City Council he couldn't attend a hearing on poice misconduct in the wake of the Amadou Diallo shooting (the Oscars...
...And though ownership has changed hands—it's now controlled by Mort Zuckerman, the developer who also holds the Atlantic Monthly and U.S...
...It can't quite figure out what it wants to do, and consequently, it fails DISSENT / Fall 1999 97 to remember what it's always done best: be the city's working-class conscience, get out there and launch crusades...
...of basic foodstuffs for the legion of hungry, far too little...
...The News has tried to copy the Post's example along these lines, but its passion just isn't located there...
...The Times has vastly improved its city coverage since then, but it did so in no small part because Times executives understood that it was the tabloids that were really driving the local news cycle...
...Today, almost everyone screams the news...
...There was much more change to come...
...Most people who watch this stuff are betting that either the News or the Post won't exist in, oh, five years...
...That, remember, was the mid-1980s, when the Times was more likely to base a correspondent in Khartoum than in the Bronx...
...Or, in the increasingly inflammatory case of the Post, when it's both of those things and profoundly reactionary to boot...
...It pains me to say it, but it's not even close...
...the tabloids are wonderful at deciding immediately how their readers should feel about them, turning them into an allegorical judgment about some aspect of city life—the heroism of an immigrant in the face of struggle, the inscrutable honor of a mobster that his Ivy League prosecutors could never comprehend, the louche profligacy of the upper classes and especially of their children (there is often a strong proletarian tilt to these stories...
...The Post has cleverly made itself into the second newspaper of the intelligentsia...
...This class distrusts sincerity...
...Four years ago, it moved out of its splendid deco palace on East 42nd Street, the one with the lobby with the huge rotating globe, used in the Superman films because it was such a perfect epitome of what a big-city newspaper building should look like, and over to some noman'sland West 30s address...
...Here's what they do badly: they capture on a couple of hours' notice that first universal reflex and then package it in such a way that it both confirms...
...If you read the tabloids on any given morning, and then listen to one of the all-news radio stations during the afternoon and watch the eleven o'clock news at night, you'll see just how many stories that originate in one tabloid or the other get "pickup," as they say, in other media...
...It helped elect Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani and George Pataki and Al D'Amato, although it may be losing its juice a little...
...I must point out that the paper has a number of good and knowledgeable and responsible reporters...
...The day this column appeared was the last one Robinson spent Racking for the Tribune Company...
...there's an old story that a department store magnate once told Rupert Murdoch that "your readers are my shoplifters...
...To avoid them, to feel you don't need to know them, is in some sense to fail a basic test of citizenship...
...Of course, those ways are also sometimes false and shallow...
...Tabs sprang to life at a time, after all, when major cities had ten or fifteen or more newspapers and when street-corner news hawkers were killed, execution style, in the competition for the most lucrative corner...
...your driver will more likely be reading a paper in Arabic or Hindu than the News...
...I don't mean in the old, left-wing, cold-war sense, like blaming the Salvadoran rebels for blowing up a bridge when the right-wing forces really did it, although I suppose that sort of thing probably still happens now and again...
...In those quaint times, this was considered a dangerous concentration of ownership...
...While the Post has pretty much defined tabloidism in recent years, the News has been in the throes of a massive identity crisis...
...But there is one commodity, it seems to me, of which New York possesses exactly the right amount: newspapers...
...If this surprises you, I can say only that, years ago, it would have surprised me too...
...the next, it wants to be taken really, really seriously...
...but more than a few are beginning to note that, even for the Post, this is a bit much...
...Its coverage of media, in particular, of Tina Brown's parties and the goings-on at Conde Nast, has reached insane proportions...
...Most people are still rolling their eyes and saying, "Well, that's the Post...
...I found it vaguely entertaining, but I assumed, as I'm sure many non-New Yorkers do, that there couldn't possibly be anything of real value behind headlines like that...
...Well, that's the Post," people muttered, rolling their eyes, in the way one might speak of a lawless cousin on whom the family has long since given up...
...Enter, ladies and gentlemen, the New York Post...
...But they're fighting a fire with a garden hose...
...An asbestos scare in a Queens school district, a funeral of a hero firefighter, a high-stakes poker game in Albany involving legislators and lobbyists— these are tabloid dramas, delivered with the combination of splash, dash, pathos, and (quite often) bathos for which tabloid journalism is renowned...
...Until, that is, New York Newsday, the now-defunct city edition of the Long Island tabloid, reported that the congressman's wife, Nina, had stiffed a shoe retailer on Brooklyn's Kings Highway for $1,200 in unpaid bills...
...You still read the occasional paean to the days when there were nine or eleven or whatever it was, but the truth is, the thought of nine general-interest newspapers is overwhelming, even absurd, in an age when anyone is a couple of clicks away from reading El Pais or Suddeustche Zeitung...
...White once ruefully observed, there is always either too much or too little...
...not entirely untrue, but imagine how it would have read if she'd said anything but that...
...And so on...
...As much as people complain about it (and everyone does: it's too "politically correct," it's too square, the film critic is too soft, the theater critic too tough), and for all the premillennial updating and tinkering with format that has changed it so dramatically in the last decade, and all those new sections that tumble out when you open the paper, like shingles off an old roof, it remains probably the world's best newspaper...
...In 1990, the Daily News was out on strike against its owner at the time, the Tribune Company of Chicago...
...Take a cab...
...The column's first edition carried items about Henry Kissinger and William Paley, Jackie 0. and John Kennedy Jr...
...Perhaps it was out of respect for that tradition, more British (and hence Australian) than American, that Murdoch didn't tamper with the paper much...
...Though its circulation is around eight hundred thousand, down by a third from its (and New York's) glory days but still pretty hefty, these haven't been great times for the News...
...These are not stories with Big Implications...
...They were interesting, though not entirely memorable...
...In other words, that first reflex is often the right one...
...one reads it...
...In 1997, then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich met with Lars-Erik Nelson of the Daily News (another good reason to read a tabloid: Nelson is the best newspaper columnist in America, and no one else is even close) and representatives of the New York Times and the Washington Post...
...two separate squibs), Margaux Hemingway and husband Errol Wetson engaged in two "rather loud slanging matches" (note the Aussie vernacular), and Paul Lynde tossing french fries at a heckler at an East 53rd Street "male bar called 'Cowboy.' " That a former secretary of state should share space with a man best known for being called on by certain game show contestants "to block" was a turn of events with little precedent in American journalism...
...Which is, at bottom, why most people read them...
...The test will come in next year's U.S...
...THE TIMES covers many of these things in its style...
...The Times and the News both noted the remark deep in their stories...
...But this "Page Six" was something altogether new, more bare-knuckled and raw...
...I was in Syracuse recently...
...It built a new printing plant somewhere in New Jersey, which did not aid in the timely delivery of the paper because somebody forgot that, to get from New Jersey to New York, you have to go through tunnels or across bridges, which tend to attract traffic...
...By most standard measures, the Post is a joke...
...And things just keep going wrong...
...of classroom seats, too few...
...This New York is still liberal in the way it votes, most of the time, but beyond voting it doesn't really want to be bothered anymore...
...It still does that from time to time—excellent recent series on asthma among poor children and the extortionate rates the Board of Education pays to lease space from private landlords to deal with the overcrowding crisis come to mind—and last year, the News's editorial page did win a Pulitzer, for a series of strong editorials about malfeasance at Harlem's Apollo Theater...
...I chuckled, but mildly disapproved, when I saw Eduard Shevardnadze referred to as "Shevy...
...It's not an easy thing to do, capturing on a couple of hours' notice that first universal reflex and then packaging it in such a way that it both confirms and augments the reader's prejudice...
...it's in there for the smart set, and if there's one thing the smart set adores more than itself, it's reading about itself...
...Once the first one dies, the second will probably experience a brief reinvigoration—it will, after all, be able to gloat over the other's obituary and hire the best people from the one that folded...
...to the lay reader, it was inside dish as it had never been served...
...For many in the upper classes, there is only the New York Times, the great and glorious Times...
...The store's clerks were quoted testifying to her regally supercilious manner (note: she subsequently pleaded guilty to two counts of skimming money from the coffers of an outfit she ran that "helped" women in Turkey), and the inevitable comparisons to Imelda Marcos were drawn...
...Until Murdoch, the only gossip, per se, that appeared in the Post was the "It Happened Last Night" column by Earl Wilson, which chronicled the comings and goings of Broadway's stars and advised readers on which cabaret shows they should run, not walk, to see...
...The broadsheet reporters clucked in silence...
...But, to me anyway, the coverage—the subtext of which was, "This is maybe the biggest Kennedy tragedy of them all, because this Kennedy transcended politics and still could have been president"—had a kind of poetic realness about it...
...The survivors, the great broadsheets excepted, will start looking more and more like the Web...
...The editor Murdoch brought in declared that he just couldn't parse the filigreed sentences of Kempton, a man of awesome erudition and style, and made Kempton submit his prose to the blue pen of the man who now edits the Star, Murdoch's supermarket property...
...They could work anywhere (the Times has hired more than few Post - ies over the years...
...They were sensationalist, of course, but back then, sensational news was generally limited to two or three topics: a mob rub-out, a murder in one of the tonier ZIP codes, the occasional rising of a stench from Tammany...
...They still do...
...The Daily News, "New York's Hometown Paper" as it calls itself, was started in 1919 by Joseph Medill Patterson and Robert McCormick, whose forbears had started the Chicago Tribune...
...Norman Mailer, speaking at a "Save the Post" rally a few years ago during one of the paper's DISSENT / Fall 1999 • 99 many recent near-death experiences, said he read several newspapers a day but he read the Post first because "it's alive...
...WHEN I FIRST moved to New York, in 1985, I regarded the tabloids as a curiosity, a circus act...
...Details dribbled out here and there about various other-than-scrupulous activities Solarz was involved in...
...Of opinions about the schools crisis, too many...
...She was awful—arrogant, icy, robotic, the worst caricature of a corporate spokesperson you could imagine...
...And of heat, as E.B...
...but what happens when it's wrong or irresponsible...
...ANOTHER THING occurred to me as I was reading through the old Posts from Schiff's era: how remarkably tame they were by comparison to today's editions...
...they worked for about a week before the paper went back to its old black-and-white...
...0 N JANUARY 3, the thick red stripe that still underlines the paper's name across the front page appeared, as did an even greater augury...
...Congressman (now Senator) Charles Schumer had it blown up to poster size and hauled it down into the well of the House...
...And if people can get the same sort of news that was once the sole province of the tabs most everywhere else, and can get it in a modem-zapped instant, why do they need tabloid newspapers, when newspapers are dying in every city in America...
...Because you just should, that's why...
...Nelson immediately ran and called the desk, and the next day's News had a cover 96 DISSENT / Fall 1999 illustration of Gingrich in diapers with the headline "CRY BABY...
...It's no longer the union town it was, and the new immigrants, which the News has tried admirably to court, don't seem all that interested...
...To the initiated, the fingerprints of publicists and other sources using the column to settle scores were evident enough, as they are today...
...You can...
...Its classified section, a time-honored cash cow for most newspapers, runs to about three pages on a good day...
...The people there know every tabloid trick, because as far as America is concerned, they invented them...
...The paper has changed since then, but the essential tone was set in those first months, anticipating and probably starting nearly every disquieting trend in American journalism...
...Sinister, even...
...There was something different about this Kennedy, and his death had meaning, or meanings—political, social, cultural...
...But they are human and meaningful and important to the life of the city...
...In recent months, the paper has been out of its mind over the thought of Hillary Clinton becoming a senator from New York...
...Its politics aside, it is entertaining, funny, sometimes brilliant...
...But even when sinister, they usually manage to be entertaining...
...No—I mean that there are other ways to present the collection of crises and clashes and folderols that make up "the news," ways that are sometimes more genuine, that get to the heart of the matter more efficiently...
...He was, in addition, a "Red Big," as in, "Red Big to Kampelman: Nyet on Arms Pact...
...But the paper is somehow missing its soul these days...
...But the tabloids have a way of developing them into a narrative, and an eye for the defining detail, that can muscle more sober analysis out of the picture...
...It is by tradition the newspaper of outer-borough Catholicism, which meant the Irish and the Italians in the old days—"Tell It to Sweeney," ran the News's traditional dictum to its reporters, and by and large they did...
...This is what the tabloids do brilliantly...
...In other words, it's a tabloid world now, to such an extent that the tabs' very success may have laid the groundwork for their downfall...
...The tabloid newspapers invented this, and still, no one does it better...
...Over time, known liberals among the staff were given the message that the Post was perhaps no longer the place for them...
...About a year ago, former mayor David Dinkins, at a press conference, infelicitously but inoffensively used the phrase "Park Avenue Jews" when discussing the 1991 Crown Heights riots...
...For a week...
...No, three seems about the right number—still more than any other American city, which of course is, to chauvinistic New Yorkers, the main thing (and you can stretch it to four if you throw in the Wall Street Journal), and still offering a sufficient diet of variety and spice...
...it's certainly why tabloidism has come to dominate the way news is manufactured in this country...
...there are fifteen other media —the cable channels, the screamfests, the Web sites—anxious to follow them, or more often to lead them, into the hurricane...
...News & World Report—its mission has always been more or less the same, even if today Rodriguez and Chang are very much born in mind alongside Sweeney: Give the people the news they need, the sports, and a little gossip, without much of an ideological slant and with lots of pictures...
...Who knows whether that's true, but on any given day, the bulk of the Post's display ads hawk cell phones and beepers, and maybe mattresses...
...Big columnists, like James Wechsler and Murray Kempton, were untouchable, but life was made difficult even for their like...
...it wants irony...
...Amy Pagnozzi, a great tabloid columnist writing for the Post at the time, interviewed her and wrote it up...
Vol. 46 • September 1999 • No. 4
