Tabloids—Trash or Treasure?
"ELVIS SEEN AT GAS STATION"
"MOLE-PEOPLE FOUND ON MOON"
"WOMAN MARRIES ALIEN"
"BIGFOOT LIVING IN MAN'S BASEMENT"
Tabloids—we see them all the time in our supermarket checkout lines (hence the name "supermarket tabloid"), those carriers of outlandishness and embellishment whose only real purpose as we see it is to take up space and make a quick buck. We laugh at them for the way they desperately try to come up with a story—no matter how ridiculous it is—because they know that we as a species are naturally curious and want to know everything about everything, even if the thing we're currently putting our eyeballs on could probably (definitely maybe?) end up not being true. The stories are always the same, our reactions are always the same, yet they keep being published because nothing sells like a woman marrying an alien. Meanwhile, Elvis only wishes he were alive so he could pump his own gas again, and how can anything live on the Moon when there's no oxygen in space?
People assume that tabloids are a relatively new construct born out of a secret desire to escape our dreary lives for a few minutes so we can live vicariously through someone else's fantasy (or power trip, if we're being cynical—because, hey, celebrities really are just like us), but the truth is they're actually older than the United States itself. Around 1770, someone in London decided that society of the time was living a little too high-life, so they started printing out the first scandal sheet (basically an old-timey version of the modern tabloid) chock-full of lowbrow gobbledygook that the working class would go nuts for; the United States followed suit—albeit slowly—in the 1840s, with Town Topics owner William d'Alton Mann loudly proclaiming that "[M]y ambition is to reform the Four Hundred (a list of wealthy Gilded Age socialites including the Caroline Astor) by making them too deeply disgusted with themselves to continue their silly, empty way of life." A more polite way of saying "you're going down a peg", basically.
While scandal sheets in London were focused primarily on gossip and making sure the One Percent knew how the rest of society really felt about them, those of the American variety were more focused on blackmail (because if there was one thing Americans really loved, it was figuring out how to scam each other), and thus weren't on the shelf long enough to make an impact. This isn't surprising, as one of the scandal sheet's three reasons for existence was literal extortion; the other two being an effort to make money ("scandal sells"), or someone had a bone to pick with someone else and the best way to do that was to air their dirty laundry in print.
Joseph Pulitzer (he of the eponymous Pulitzer Prize) took the "scandal sells" mantra to heart when he took over the New York World in 1883, filling it with sensationalist drivel that would make the fashionable elite clutch at their pearls; however, it wasn't all trash as there was a method to Pulitzer's madness—he believed that it was a newspaper's job to improve society, so he promoted stories that highlighted its dregs in order to get the public to wake up and pay attention. William Randolph Hearst (of whom the main character of Charles Foster Kane is routinely ascribed to be based off of) decided that he wanted a piece of Pulitzer's pie, so he took over the New York Journal in 1895 in an attempt to sway readers away from the World and over to the Journal. The "circulation war" of Hearst v. Pulitzer had begun.
With each man trying to one-up the other in terms of outlandishness and depravity, it soon became apparent that both were willing to sacrifice the truth if it meant more readers for their side and less for the other. More and more stories were being put out that strayed further from the truth (although there was a little bit of it thrown in to keep it from being outright fiction), but it soon became evident that the public was caught in the middle and suffered due to the dueling papers' inability to back down. The outbreak of the Spanish-American War was the writing on the wall that signaled the end of the circulation war and eventually caused both Hearst and Pulitzer to go bankrupt; while neither explicitly started the Spanish-American War (although it was apocryphally believed that one of them—specifically Hearst—had some hand in it), each side was viewed by the public as "war-hungry" and thus many people were turned off by the every-increasing levels of slander, which eventually resulted in both newspapers shutting down. Ironically enough, for all of the bluster directed at the competition, both newspapers were remarkably similar—both were Democratic, sympathetic to immigrants, and expended great effort in their Sunday editions (which were the first to feature full-color comic strips).
Tabloids after the turn of the 20th century carried the torch lit by Hearst and Pulitzer, with Broadway Brevities and Society Gossip—the United States' first national weekly gossip tabloid—launching in New York in 1916. While it started out with good intentions—covering high society in general, and the art world in particular—the tabloid soon devolved to publishing scandal and reputation destruction in the 1920s (again, scandal sells). This eventually got its editor Stephen Clow and two of his associates in hot water, as it had been alleged all along that the tabloid was a front for blackmail—which would explain all of the wild stories it had been publishing—and thus the three were convicted of mail fraud; Clow himself spent six years in prison. He tried to revive it twice more in 1932 after he was released and again in 1937, but was ultimately unsuccessful; the tabloid finally closed its doors for good in 1948.
To date, there are currently around 400 tabloids and gossip magazines circulating on store shelves; some, like PEOPLE and US WEEKLY, are primarily devoted to the lives of celebrities and the ways in which they're "just like us" (in fact, US WEEKLY has a section with that very title). Others like the Globe and National Enquirer feature headlines such as those that were listed at the beginning of this post, headlines whose only purpose is to catch peoples' attentions and hold while they're waiting in the checkout line.
Are tabloids a good or bad thing? Sure, they're great for cheap entertainment, but they also don't really contribute anything to society besides a way for the rest of us to live vicariously through those with more money, fame, and power than we do. Ultimately, the notion of what constitutes "good and bad" is entirely subjective, and thus is something that doesn't have a clear definition.
About the Author: Ronald Hamilton, Jr. is a graduate of Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communication and Media Studies. When he's not writing for COM-GAP, Ronald is a volunteer with the nonprofit Live Forever Project.