From at least the time of the ancient Greeks, sex, disfigurement and murder have sold. (“Oprah, my name is Oedipus Anderson and I’m in a support group for men who have slept with their mothers and blinded themselves.”) The 1890s are better remembered for Lizzie Borden whacking her parents than for, say, the Free Silver Movement. In a fine 1994 biography of Walter Winehell, the original gossip columnist, Neal Gabler explains that even the glory days of midcentury tabloids saw plenty of hand-wringing. The poet E. E. Cummings, for instance, fretted over how the tabloids encouraged “an infantilism in American life.” Sound familiar?
Winchell’s paper in the early years was the notorious New York Graphic, which ran “composographs” – outrageously doctored pictures. In 1924, the Graphic ran a composograph of a “witness” in the famous Peaches Browning divorce trial standing buck naked (viewed from the back) before the jury. Even Maury or Sally Jesse might draw the line at that today.
The latest round of sensationalism grows out of an anomaly in recent journalistic history. Strangely enough, daily tabloid newspapers have failed in this country since World War II. Even Rupert Murdoch’s print invasion in the late 1970s could not resuscitate them, except in New York. The big success story in print has been profitable, quality urban dailies in the major cities. For years, the weekly supermarket tabloids were seen as a popular but low-credibility and not particularly influential form of entertainment.
THEN, IN THE EARLY 1980s, MURDOCH AND OTHERS discovered tabloid TV, and the loosening of the old network system led to syndicated talk shows, “A Current Affair,” “Hard Copy” and the rest. These programs invaded the turf of the supermarket tabloids and made their fare more vivid and central to mass culture. The shows became so pervasive that mainstream news organizations like ABC News, The New York Times and NEWSWEEK began to play catch-up, though with higher standards. (The mainstream press doesn’t pay its sources, which means the sources have less incentive to exaggerate.)
Until the 1980s, network news divisions were largely insulated from moneymaking pressures. They were ornaments of respectability useful for status and license renewal. But now the ratings pressure is unrelenting, and the emphasis is on the hot story or interview. Add to that the proliferation of TV news-magazine shows, each trying to outsizzle the other. Even here the standards varied in 1994. Diane Sawyer’s interview with the family of Nicole Brown Simpson was OK; Connie Chung’s softball interview with Faye Resnick, a woman who claimed to be a friend of Nicole’s but had written a book with a National Enquirer reporter detailing the sex life of her “friend,” should have been beneath the dignity of CBS.
All of these stories tapped a deep ambivalence–even hypocrisy–within viewers. You know that you’re addicted–that you’re losing irretrievable July days outdoors in order to hear some minor pretrial motion by a hot dog like Robert Shapiro. But you can’t help yourself. That Paula Barbieri interview is coming up. At the same time, when everyone else complains about too much coverage, you join in: isn’t it awful? This should touch off a little self-examination on all sides. The people who run the news business should ponder whether they are selling out their principles for ratings and circulation. And the people who are consuming the stuff should acknowledge their contradictory feelings. If they don’t like it, all they have to do is turn it off. But that doesn’t mean they have to make everyone else turn it off, too.
The most pointless journalism of the year was the effort to lend analytical weight to the froth. Yes, Lorena Bobbitt’s act had repercussions for feminism and the now quaint notion of personal responsibility; yes, Tonya Harding’s behavior raised questions about the pressures of big-time sports, and yes, the trial of O. J. Simpson involved some intriguing issues of race and celebrity in American culture. But that’s like saying we eat popcorn for the roughage. We eat popcorn because it tastes good with our entertainment. These stories were horrendous (Susan Smith) or humorous (Heidi Fleiss) but always irresistible. Only the most pompous news executive could ignore them altogether.
But why wasn’t there more middle ground between adequate coverage and saturation? Here the rise of tabloid stories was eased by a change in the general news climate. Until Newt Gingrich, 1994 was not an especially newsy year. More broadly, in the post-cold-war world, summits, regional wars and other once portentous news events are suddenly viewed as less important. Without the threat of superpower confrontation (the ultimate “big” story) these stories can be jettisoned with less guilt on the part of editors. The threshold for entertainment stories was lowered, and for “duty stories” raised. The result was that in 1994 plenty of significant but unsexy issues didn’t receive the coverage they deserved. A NEWSWEEK Poll in October, for instance, showed that most Americans thought that the country was in a recession, that Bill Clinton had raised their taxes and that he had not cut the deficit. As a factual matter, this was exactly song. While it’s not fair to blame the ignorance of the American public on Heidi, Tonya and O.J., the coverage of their stories certainly didn’t help.
The long-term consequences of the tabloidization of news are unmistakable. While viewers know rationally that “A Current Affair” is not, say, NBC News, it all blurs together, especially when everyone is doing the same stories. When readers and viewers can’t recall or don’t trust the source of something-especially something sensational–they are right to believe less of it. And when they believe less of it, the credibility of the entire news industry declines. That, ultimately, leads to fewer customers. Beyond ethics and taste, tabloid excesses are simply had for the news as a business.
If it is amusing or gripping enough, any quirky news brief can now seize the nation. Lorena Bobbitt is far from the first woman ever to cut off a man’s penis; she wasn’t even the first in 1993. Her story started off tiny and made its way into the headlines only because the water-cooler conversation grew impossible to ignore. As 1994 progressed, the time lag shortened, so sharply that when Michael Fay was sentenced to caring in Singapore he became the celebrity du jour within hours.
The Simpson story would have been big in any era; with the possible exception of comedian Fatty Arbuckle in the 1920s, he is the most famous person ever tried for murder in this country. (Almost every other famous defendant became a celebrity as a result of the crime, not before it.) His fame, the televised chase and the broader appetite for sensation created the mother of all tabloid stories. To paraphrase Garrett Morris in the old “Saturday Night Live” baseball sketch, “O.J. been bery, bery good to media.”
This may sound cynical, but Tabloid America is also democracy in action. Readers and viewers who have overdosed on these stories may be irritated at the coverage, but the plain fact is that they are outnumbered. Once a significant portion of the public tires of the story, the media–via overnight Nielsens, newsstand sales and so forth–will immediately sense it and pull back. In other words, the public as a whole is getting almost exactly what it wants. The channel changer is a kind of ballot box.
The fact that so many have voted yes to tabloid news may even pull us together a bit as a nation. Traditionally, men have broken down some of the barriers between them with talk of sports. Such modest bonding exclude s most women – and men who aren’t interested – but it brings American men together across lines of class and race and gives them something to talk about beyond the weather. This kind of common conversation is also now possible in the world of tabloid stories. At a loss for anything to say about Bosnia or health care, millions of men and women with nothing else in common could, this year, share a theory about what the Bronco ride really meant. The promise of a shared experience in an otherwise fractured culture may have even helped make these stories so big in the first place. Who wants to be left out of the conversation? This connection between people is not going to save the republic; it doesn’t excuse the shoddiness, tawdriness or just plain excess of much of the coverage. But it’s something.
