Monsters, Murders and Myths: Orality and the Tabloid Paper by risa
by AnneMarie Ennis
BAT BOY LIVES! FAMILY SERVED OWN PET AT RESTAURANT! UFO SPOTTED OVER EMPIRE STATE BUILDING! These are the headline stories of the tabloid newspapers of today. Glaring at us from supermarket stands, hidden away as guilty pleasure in shopping bags, the tabloid papers have a serious impact on the lives of 50 million Americans per week, and the stories within shape our cultural legends and mythologies every day. As a medium high in residual orality, and dependent upon traditions of oral storytelling, the tabloid papers form a sort of bridge between the fabliaux and ballads of the middle ages, and the news media of today, serving an important function in the definition and delineation of our social mores and norms. Today’s tabloid papers have a clear and marked history spanning hundreds of years of sensational journalism and cultural titillation, but perhaps the most important function of the tabloid paper is their role in the redefinition and reiteration of cultural legends and explanatory mythologies. Tabloids constitute a major folkloric form in American society: “The tabloid tales aren’t simply analogous to folklore, they are a form of folklore: dreamlike or nightmarish fantasies spun from the most homely of materials”. I propose to explore the origin (and perhaps the origin myths) of tabloids as we recognize them, their functions in our society today, and the role of residual orality within their composition.
Though our conception of the modern supermarket tabloid is intrinsically linked with a celebrity obsessed society and an urban/capitalist style of living, the history of the tabloid newspaper dates back long before the 20th century. The supermarket tabloid itself finds its origin in the fabliaux of medieval times; short tales told by professional story tellers and characterized by realistic detail and vivid observation using humor and cynicism to create stories of miracles used to explain the ever changing world. The fabliaux were stories or songs that built upon elementary jokes, puns, or wry situations to create a morality tale, or a cautionary story of fate, irony and the hand of god, such as the tale of a man drowning who has his eye put out by the boat hook that saves him. Fabliaux featured reoccurring characters (such as the cuckold, the lover, the wife and the naughty priest) and often ended with the moral tone of the deceiver deceived. Telling what Hogshire describes as “stories told of lives gone wrong, horrible accidents resulting in loss of limbs, mistaken identity and of course, sex and murder”, these ballads were sung from town to town, repeating and changing age old systems of myth to reflect the world as it was then. With the arising of the printing press, these ballads were converted from an oral medium to a printed one, and so began the life of the tabloid newspaper.
With the printing of the fabliaux (as they were called in France, or ballads, in England), the focus on monstrous and freak events increased, as did the grotesque sensationalism of the descriptions used. According to Stephens, the harbinger of the obsession with bloody and fearsome stories was “the arrival of the printing press, with its ability to spread accounts of more or less typical outbreaks of murder, lust and sin to an audience whose size as unprecedented but whose appetite for sensation was, more or less, normal”. Broadsides (as the new media was called) were single printed sheets posted on public walls, covering ‘freak’ events such as details of crimes and trials, burnings, fires, plagues, mysterious happenings and mutated citizens: re-teaching social lessons and re-iterating social fears for the population. The stories of our tabloids today are seen here as well; as in the grotesque tale of “The two inseparable brothers, of a true and strange description of a Genteleman (and Italian by birth), about seventeene yeeres of age, who hath an imperfect (yet living) Brother, growing our of his side, having a head, two armes, and one leg, all perfectly to be seene…(sic)” , the tale of disaster in the sad accident of 1661 (man burned alive, and lives!), or the ironic and fateful tale of the case of the woman who, in 1662, survived a fire because she changed her mind as to where to sleep that night. Especially common in the 17th century was the theme of the shapeless monster (such as the woman with the head of a pig), a motif used in village ballads since the 15th century, but fully developed in the broadsides, and reoccurring now in today’s tabloids with their story
of the crocodile , Batboy, or the lonely midgets and dwarfs. These stories of monsters, of irony and fate reflected cultural concerns with otherness, the presence of God, and the social boundaries of everyday life and were employed by the audience as a tool to help with the negotiation and re-negotiation of the social world.
What was perhaps the most important element of this shift from an oral medium of story telling (in the fabliaux and ballads) to a printed, written medium was what was kept, as opposed to what was lost or changed. The broadsheets of this time retained, and were defined by distinct elements of oral storytelling practices as defined by Walter Ong in his work “Some Psychodynamics of Orality”, and it was these elements that would continue to define the medium throughout it’s history. Alfred Lord explains that oral storytellers worked quickly to slot new information into frameworks that were understood by teller and audience combined, using “common stock formulas which gives the traditional songs a homogeneity which strikes the listener as soon as he has read or heard more than one song, and creates the impression that all singers know the same formula”. In much the same way, tabloid papers still use stock story lines, and formulaic characters to transmit folklore in written form. Using tall tales, jokes, stories and rumors to re-affirm the culture’s values and offer answers to our perplexing questions, tabloids allow us to define and redefine our world view with the importance placed upon the process of telling, and not in the effect or veracity of the story itself.
Throughout the 18th century the broadsides, combined with the personal published letters of news from travelers all over the world, combined to create a newspaper system. Disseminated in coffeehouses and by special order, these newspapers (such as the Newgate Calendar) were not as widely circulated as the broadsheets which still decorated the cities, but included the same socially regulating stories of monsters, fate, morals and grisly deaths, complete now with grisly illustrations and woodcuts.
The format of the sensationalist newspaper began to change in the mid 19th century with the development of the penny press, which was touted as being an accessible paper for the masses, a populist form of news for those who had been ignored by the elite newspapers of the time. With a change in size (to 12” by 16”, half the size of a broadsheet paper), and with an increase in pictures, and headlines, penny press papers were able to target an entirely new market. Using newsboys to sell penny papers at a drastically lowered price of one cent on street corners, The New York Sun quickly took control of this market in 1833 with their focus on feelings, human-interest stories and observational/interview styles of reporting. Billed as a smaller, portable, accessible paper, written in the language of the people, The New York Sun (under the guidance of Benjamin H. Day) targeted the growing number of semi literate urbanites and new immigrants in New York, and served a steady diet of active language, morally toned stories and gory accounts of last words, murders and executions. This change of writing style, as well as story focus would prove to be a turning point in the history of newspaper and tabloid media, as would the targeting of this new audience, an audience that remain key in tabloid sales to this day.
With the advent of new image replication technologies, sensational newspapers began to use more illustration, and to depend less on the writer’s ability to create a picture for their readers, thus decreasing the level of literacy needed to consume the paper itself. 1872 brought the introduction of the first American illustrated daily paper, The Daily Graphic, with its focus on murders, scandalous crimes, and sensational trials, and its willingness to create ‘news’ where there was none to be had. This new form of journalism (or yellow journalism; the creating of newsworthy events for your own use) was an accepted practice in the sensationalist newspapers, and yellow journalism soon became the standard for papers published by Hearst (The New York Journal), Pulitzer (The New York World) and others. No real war with the Spanish Armada? Once the story had been written, and the illustrations done, Hearst was famously able to create a tailor made war all of his own, for publication on the front pages of his papers. The fight between the sensationalist newspapers was one of publisher versus publisher, Pulitzer versus Hearst, and the outrageous nature of the content created reflected the high stakes at hand: use of reader competitions, fake stories, stock photos, drama and gore increased as the subscription and reader rates skyrocketed.
As a clear precursor to the tabloid form, Pulitzer’s the New York World offered its readers what Elizabeth Bird terms; “a guide to the abundance of the metropolis of their time. With its dropped price, daily circulation and focus on the new sales demographic of women, the New York World (founded in 1883) was an instant success in the market, with a daily circulation of 250,000 by 1886. Competing against the populist New York Sun in it’s early days, the New York World promised “what is original, distinctive, dramatic, romantic, thrilling, unique, curious, quaint, humorous, odd, and apt to be talked about” to its readers, with women’s pages and comodified dreams alongside gruesome images of crime and violence (justified with the new social construct of ‘objectivity’ as a value in news reporting). In fact, The New York World has been credited with helping the build a consumer culture as we know it, through the publication of how-to columns and miracles for sale. In direct competition was Hearst, at first with his San Francisco Examiner, and in 1896 with The New York Journal. Hearst’s excursions into the bizarre and the erotic world of New York were formatted as short, pithy editorial content, and as human-interest stories taking up “where Pulitzer had the virtue to stop”. Adding comics and sports to the mix, The New York Journal battled with The New York World for readers throughout the end of the 19th century. Throughout this era, the reoccurring role of oral storytelling and of socially defining, controlling myths and legends was a major factor in sensationalist newspaper content. Thought the format, size, illustration and titles may have changed, the use of folkloric forms such as the urban legend, gossip tale, cautionary story and hero myth as used in ballads and fabliaux remains a constant.
It was in the 20th century that our conception of the tabloid became solidified in newspaper form. The early 20th century was a time of jazz journalism; of gangsters, flappers and affluence which allowed tabloid publishers to present to the reader a “sensational mixture of sex, crime, conflict and rags-to-riches stories”, and which was dominated by three big tabloid papers: Patterson and McCormick’s New York Daily News, Hearst’s new venture the Daily Mirror, and Bernarr Mcfadden’s The Evening Graphic. All three of these papers were dependant on use of oral storytelling traditions of stock tales, recycled with slight changes to make them ‘new’, and on fake stories (called cocks, or catchpennies in the broadsheets, and now called top-of-the-heads, or wingits in the publishing world). All three also made use of faked or fabricated images and yellow journalism, though the extent and impact of these practices varied in each publication.
A key element of the target marketing of these new tabloids was the appeal to the masses, mainly in the form of a new focus on ease of use and interpretation of the paper. For example, The New York Daily News was designed to be readable on subways and on busy streets, with no story continuing over two pages (so as to save the reader trouble), helping it to become the most popular paper in New York with a 1938 circulation of between 1,750,000 and 3,250,000 readers daily. There was, of course, criticism of this new form of ‘dumbed-down’ journalism, with critics citing “the excessive use of pictures to tell the stories in a way that leaves absolutely nothing to the reader. He need not read, he need not think. All he needs to do is clutch the paper,-and look!”. Once the Daily News reached a million in circulation in the 1920’s, to become the highest circulated newspaper in the country, it’s publishers stated that it “proved conclusively that only a sharp lowering of the IQ of a newspaper was necessary to make it attractive to a hitherto unexploited portion of the greater metropolitan rank and file”. Like it’s competitor, Hearst’s Daily Mirror, which billed itself as “90% entertainment and 10% information, and the information without ever boring you”, the Daily News used stories such as “Monkey Glands Give Man of 72 Youth’s Health” to permanently widen the gulf between ‘real’ journalism, and the tabloids. This division between legitimate and illegitimate journalism was further widened with the introduction of The Evening Graphic, the most reviled of the big three 1920’s tabloid papers (termed “the worst debauchery to which a daily newspaper has ever been subjected” due to the focus on pornographic representations of the human body.) Developed by Bernard McFadden in 1924, The Evening Graphic was notorious for its use of the first person confessional, mixed with a healthy dose of fictional news of the day, crime as news, or rather the re-creation of crime as news, first person accounts of grisly murders, hangings and assaults. With their mission statement of: “We intend to interest you mightily, we intend to dramatize and sensationalize the news and some stories that are not the news…if you read it from first to last and find something that does not interest you, we want you to write and tell us about it”, it is perhaps not surprising that The Evening Graphic became most famous for their doctored, and libelous photo manipulation practices, specifically the composograph. The Evening Graphic’s legacy and its downfall: the paper was cancelled due to libel suits resulting from the very image style that made it famous.
After what was called the ballyhoo war of the 20’s, the serious tone of 1930’s era tabloids was a drastic change. And though the tone of the tabloids did become less sensational, they remained permanent features on our media landscape: by 1937, tabloids had reached a circulation of 3,525,000 daily, relying mainly on subscription and newsstand sales to reach those numbers. It was at this height of reader numbers that the scandal or confessional magazine was introduced as a hybrid genre, showcasing new societal attitudes towards pin-up girls, and violent gore. Targeting the new markets of women and African Americans, most scandal magazines were one-shot experiences, covering one theme or motif (such as the sexualized threat of white slavery, the eroticized opium trade, violent crimes towards women, or violent women committing crimes). These confessional/scandal magazines specialized in titillation and implied hedonism: women in confessional/scandal magazines were depicted in a highly eroticized manner as either the crazed murderess, or the bound damsel in distress, often in a cliché cover image of barely clad breasts and imminent danger. Perhaps the most influential, certainly the longest lasting of this genre was the magazine Confidential, created in 1952 by Robert Harrison, most famously of such ‘girlie’ titles as Eyeful, Whisper, and Titter. Confidential magazine “Told the Tales and Named the Names”, going through the closets and garbage of celebrities to find anything at all that could be turned into a scandal or a story. Using unprecedented techniques such as long range lenses, hidden microphones, tape recorders, strong arm convincing and planted moles (or ‘stringers’), Confidential magazine exposed not only the celebrities of the time, but the fears of a society as well. With such story titles as “Will a Robot Take Your Job” and “Ava Gardner—Dark Men in Her Bed Chamber”, these magazines worked much in the same way as the fabliaux of medieval times to expose and confront the fears of a culture. Like the Evening Graphic of the 20’s and early 30’s, Confidential magazine was eventually cancelled due to lawsuits and litigation, mainly as a result of their use of doctored photos and slanderous composographs.
With the dying out of the scandal/confessional magazines, America was ready for a new tabloid form. This time however it was not the style of writing or the techniques of reporting that created a new success, but the marketing strategy. Having bought the full sized broadsheet style New York Enquirer in 1952 from Hearst, a new publisher named Generoso Pope reincarnated the daily paper, with its focus on gore, grotesque photo retouching and gossipy advice columns as the weekly National Enquirer in 1960. This was the beginning not of tabloids, but of what are called supermarket tabloids: with his reluctance to compete with the daily, city based tabloids, and with the focus on more family friendly story lines Generoso Pope revolutionized and revitalized the medium.
By creating content with a focus on murders, accidents, unexplained mysteries, vicious celebrity gossip, ironic twist tales and fraud conspiracies, and by distributing it in grocery stores all over the country, Pope was able to return to a model almost directly based on the fabliaux, ballads and broadsheets of an earlier time while increasing circulation to one million readers between 1958 and 1968. This figure triples when the reader rate, and not the purchase rate is considered (as it is estimated that 3 people read every purchased tabloid paper). In retrospect, the majority of the subjects covered by the National Enquirer explore the same motifs as the fabliaux: creating morality tales of the wonders of God, the social fears of the day, and the importance of fate. It was at this point that the industry standard of success measurement was solidified: headlines (the only real important element of the paper in terms of selling strategy) were rated as a “Gee Whiz” (such as “Seven Year Old Girl Has Baby On Rollercoaster”), a “Hey Martha” (such as “Headless Body Found in Topless Bar”) or the most illustrious rating of a “Must Buy” (such as “Jackie O’s Blazing Bedroom Diaries Inside” or “John Lennon Found Alive”). Though the National Enquirer maintained a celebrity focus (much like Confidential magazine), their reporting was centered on the celebrity stumble: incidents of drunkenness or violence in the celebrities life and stories of the celebrities becoming more human through their mistakes, as opposed to the exposition of monsters or degenerates. Cleaning up their act was not a profitable plan in the beginning for the
National Enquirer, but over time, it proved to be a good idea: “Anything that has even the slightest inkling of sex or gore is just nor used. Initially we lost a quarter of a million in circulation but six months later, we were back at a million, and then up”. Images of gore were still used in but only presented in a moralistic tone; though horrifying, they always carried the message of the cautionary tale, especially when dealing with consumer lessons (for example: “hair dye made me go bald for life!”). The content of the images was. however, often not of concern. As long as it was an “attack on a single emotion, the true tabloid reader would gape at any picture, whether it means anything or not”. the 1970’s brought a focus on the occult and guns sales for the National Enquirer, along with stories of cover-ups and conspiracies, again as a reflection of the dangers faced culturally by social groups.
Today, supermarket tabloids are still a powerful medium in our culture, selling 10 million copies a week, and with a readership rate of 50 million per week. This figure does not entail the millions more who read the headlines in stores, and who are subject to the passing on of stories through gossip and other oral forms. The tabloids are a defining medium for their readers; “the typical tabloid reader buys more than one tabloid at a time, and reads no other newspaper, supplementing his or her views with television only”. Today’s’ top six papers are controlled by two men; Mike Rosenbloom, editor of Globe Communication’s Globe, Sun and National Examiner, and Ian Calder, editor in chief of American Media Inc’s National Enquirer, Star and Weekly World News. With circus like grotesque analysis of our culture, tabloids provide Americans an extreme counterpoint to a conditioned reality: by consuming this counterpoint, Americans are able to play with, develop and solidify, their notions of reality as well. Clearly, tabloid papers today are offering something not found in more “legitimate” American media sources, and are targeting a specific audience who, though they do buy the paper for many different reasons, identify with a sense of alienation from aspects of the dominant culture. Part of the allure of tabloids is their irreverence, the idea that “no one is to sacred or to important to go after” in our society, and for that reason, we are able to use the papers to actively deconstruct our society and our culture. Bessie comments on the inherently populist nature of the tabloid as a medium which does not claim to be the final truth on any subject in his work of 1938 Embalmed in their arresting pictures and bold headlines are the happenings and persons which comprise the folklore of our times, more so than in the conventional newspaper because from the start the tabloid identified itself completely with the common people. It concentrated upon their interests, dramatized their heroes and villains, responded with keen sensitivity to their needs and spoke their language.
In order to understand tabloid papers as folklore in our culture, we must examine how producers incorporate readers into their production of texts, texts that then impact readers whose response is then fed back into the loop. By recycling our culture’s myths and fears in story form (in the same way as the fabliaux, broadsheets and ballads were used in earlier times), tabloids are able to “pick up on existing ideas and beliefs, restating them in narrative form, performing much the same function as the teller of an urban legend”. In fact, Cohen, in her analysis of one type of story line (that of the murdered innocent girl) suggested that both written tabloids and oral storytelling forms “tell the story from the same moral stance, express the same interaction of character, and are interested in the same details…the shared pattern consists basically of plot formulae that has an attendant company of other formula, such as stereotyped scenes, stereotyped actors and stereotyped phrases”. These rearticulated cultural myths of reincarnation, conspiracies or the inevitability of personal sorrow for the famous are then passed on to non-readers, returning to an oral form as gossip and rumor in our culture. The tabloids need not create a belief in these outlandish tales, they must only build on our social myths and explanations that have already been created for us to understand our ever-changing world. Presence and degree of belief are at all times extremely
variable and are not necessarily correlated to the effectiveness of the legend: the only mark of validity in tabloid stories is whether the legend is passed on, whether we are able to use this counterpoint to reality to redefine and create new boundaries for our own world.
Our most definably folkloric of tabloids today are the Weekly World News, the Sun, and the Examiner, with their focus on mythical figures, occult phenomena, monsters, psychic phenomenon and reincarnation. That said, oral traditions of folklore are passed on and used by all leading tabloids. Figuring prominently are the folkloric traditions of the urban legend, the social secret or gossip, the cautionary tale, and the hero legend or mythology.
The urban legends presented in tabloids allow us better understand our unscientific feelings of distrust of
government and technology and our reliance on stereotyped views of gender and various ethnic groups, and so long as the lesson taught in the legend is relevant, the tabloids will continue to re-use and circulate it. For example, we employ urban legends of conspiracies and alien landings to decode and negotiate our mistrust of the government and of science or social control. Folkloric traditions of gossip also figure prominently in the tabloids, enabling us to decode our issues of social control, fear of death and sex and anxiety in regards to hidden cultural knowledge, or knowledge monopolies. Folklore constitutes the content of the modern tabloid perhaps most clearly in the form of cautionary tales, with stories of “the grisly fate of ordinary men and women who fall victim to the blood curdling terrors of diabolical household appliances, malevolent plumbing fixtures and fiendish convenience food”. The cautionary tale, also a staple of the ballad, fabliaux and broadside, is formed as an apocryphal tale of moral warnings, warnings by example of innocent victims of the fears of the day. Finally, tabloids pass on folklore through stories of the people’s heroes, told in their own language, often created as “migratory anecdotes” with details of specific accounts merged and combined with other gossip documented at other times to come up with a more convincing, or news worthy hero/celebrity tale. Whether or not something actually happened is never the focus of a tabloid, it is simply addressing that something could happen, and through folkloric traditions the tabloids enable the reader to address their social fears and to understand their social boundaries.
Tabloids as a medium are fundamentally premised on the story telling styles of a pre-literate society, and maintain a high level of residual orality. Through the use of anonymous authorship, ubiquitous sources and non-individualized story styles or routines, tabloids demonstrate the intertextuality of oral and mediated communication on a weekly basis. To better understand the links between oral and written modes of folklore, Ong’s theories of orality and literacy can be applied to the tabloid form. Ong states that characteristics of an oral culture include: additive storytelling style, aggregative descriptions, redundant phrasing, conservative patterns of thought, antagonistically toned styles or motifs, participatory and non-objective involvement by the story teller as well as the audience, homeostatic editing practices, situational story settings and content that is close to the human life world. In this way, an oral culture can have sustained communication and storytelling that is as formulaic as any written process, as well as sustained thought in a world tied to an unsustainable medium of speech. Though Ong applies his work to oral cultures with no developed written systems at all, these descriptions can also be used to better understand the folkloric, residually oral, qualities of the tabloids of the 20th century.
Stylistically, tabloids are dependant on an additive storytelling style, not only in regards to the grammar used in the stories themselves, but also in the continuation of stories and of motifs through consecutive issues of a paper. In order to build up readers, tabloids cover sagas as opposed to individual news events (though this is also a function of their inability to cover current news as they are created weeks in advance of sell date). Tabloids are also stylistically additive as opposed to analytic, with their use of previously mentioned formulas or motifs to describe the world in which we live: the use of additive descriptions or motifs in the stories simply ensures that the legends presented will easily enter our collective consciousness. In fact, even when a true and verifiable story is reported in tabloid form, it is often modified to fit within the language of formulaic descriptors in order to ensure its cultural transmission. Not surprisingly, tabloids also depend upon redundancy to sell a story, with copious use of back looping and repetition to naturalize an often-bizarre myth. Without this use of repetition (in the form of headlines, as well as returns to descriptors and scene analysis), our attention would soon be lost, and the story may appear incredulous. In order to preserve the essence of the story over several additive sessions, or while repeating the story to refresh it in the minds of the reader at a later time, writers remove unimportant details through time, maintaining what Ong characterized as a homeostasis of information, through a process of structural amnesia. Though a tabloid may have previously run a story citing the discovery of JFK’s body, or headless body, this can easily be integrated into a story about his reincarnation or psychic visitation in the next issue of the paper without raising questions of
continuity: the new version would simply reflect and reiterate more current views of society and its needs.
In regards to the participatory nature that characterizes an oral society, tabloids often involve not only the author in the story telling (with references to friends of friends that the myth happened to, or by rendering invisible the author himself so as to facilitate reader identification with the narrative), but the reader is often directly involved in the process of the paper itself. With invocations to write in with story ideas, contest invitations and the use of readers as fact spotters (or ‘stringers’), participation has become a defining factor of credibility in tabloid enjoyment for millions of Americans enculturated into the myth of fairness and truth within a democratic system.
As we can see in an analysis of story content, tabloids (to varying degrees) are reliant on mythologies and legends that deal with the human life world, an essential characteristic of an oral style as outlined by Ong. Though the content of tabloid papers may be bizarre or incredible, this content is still reflective of our everyday reality through links with and plays upon our cultural fears and boundaries. Some may argue that the stories of Batboy are not the stuff of our life world at all. However, I would say that Batboy, while he may not reflect our perception of human animal mating possibilities, he does reflect our social fears of deformity and apparent difference, which constitutes a large part of our life world indeed. In this way, even the most surreal and unbelievable of tabloid stories are situational, and are created as such. David Sloan states that “the contents of these papers are updated, unmistakable American variants of narrative motifs well known throughout the world”: clearly the stories of the tabloid papers (as they are reconstructions of international mythologies) are tailored to the situation at hand, specifically that of the American culture. The content of tabloids (again, to varying degrees dependant on the tabloid in question) can also be understood as being antagonistic, though not as clearly as Ong’s examples of the dozens, or other forms of vocal besting. With an emphasis on competition between papers, and competition between the papers and the conspiracies at hand (in the fight to reveal the truth, be it about a celebrity or a government), the antagonistic
tones of “See it here first!” or “Shocking World Exclusive!” are defining elements of the shotgun, bold headlines used on covers to sell papers.
But even with the antagonistically toned content, and the situational reinterpretation of storytelling, tabloids are essentially a conservative culture, and this conservative culture is reflected in their content choice. As Ong defines it, conservative oral cultures are traditionalist, inhibit expression and experimentation and focus on repetition and enculturation of accepted wisdom. In the same fashion as served the fabliaux and the ballad singers of medieval times, tabloids served to create a consensus reality, a place of “comfort and titillation…readers go there to be assured that the world outside is worse than they can imagine and that, in the end, a humdrum life doesn’t mean they’re a failure”. Though they may take on shocking and unbelievable themes and legends, it is very rare for the content of a tabloid paper to counter the hegemony of society in general, especially when that hegemony deals with governmental elements, sexuality, definitions of gender or roles of families and women. Clear consequences are laid out for refusal to participate in the dominant culture world view: when asked what would have happened if The Globe, a notoriously edgy tabloid, had opposed the gulf war, editorial director Phil Burton answered “we would
have lost money hand over fist”. Clearly, not only the reading materials of the past, but also its politics have remained the same through the centuries. By maintaining a presence as a conservative medium, tabloids are able to bend notions of decency, intellectual property and privacy while escaping government control or censorship, and are then free to explore our cultural taboos and legends in ever escalating new intrusive forms.
Tabloids papers are undisputably a written form of communication, and are dependent on their printable state. And yet, they are also clearly a medium high in residual orality, rich in oral folkloric traditions, and a part of the chain of oral communication in our society. Through the tabloids we are able to better understand and negotiate our sense of un-reality and our social fears and limitations, negotiations that are then passed on orally to others along with the urban legends, cautionary tales and gossip of the papers each week. Based on their alterations of typical newspaper form (such as new allowances for decoding though image or through orally based reading patterns), the tabloid serves as a bridge between sections of society still reliant on oral storytelling as a primary information source, and the mainstream or commercial press: by reading the tabloids, those who do not identify with more legitimized news sources are still able to participate in cultural negotiation and are able to recognize themselves in the intended audience. Whether or not the tabloids will continue to serve this function of social recognition and regulation in this more digital age is uncertain, but like Elvis and the UFO’s that they depict, the tabloids will always be waiting for their triumphant return.
Works Cited
Barrick, Mac E, “The Migratory Anecdote and the Folk Concept of Fame” Mid-South Folklore::4 (1976)
Bessie, Simon Michael, Jazz Journalism: The Story of the Tabloid Newspapers, New York: E.P Dutton,1938.
Bird, S. Elizabeth, For Enquiring Minds. A study of Supermarket Tabloids, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992.
Cohen, Anne B, Poor Pearl, Poor Girl: The Murdered Girl Stereotype in Ballad and Newspaper. Austin Texas: Publications of American Folklore Society Memoir Series, no 58,1973.
Emery, Edwin, The Press and America: An Interpretive History of The Mass Media. Englewood Cliffs N.J: Prentice Hall,1972.
Horgsire, Jim, Grossed Out Surgeon Vomits Inside Patient: an Insider’s Look at Supermarket Tabloids. Venice California: Feral House, 1997.
Lord, Albert,The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971.
Ong, Walter, “Some Psychodynamics of Orality” Perspectives on Literacy. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988.
Schechter, Harold, The Bosom Serpent: Folklore and Popular Art. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988.
Sloan, David., Parcell, Lisa Mullikin eds, American Journalism, History, Principles and Practises. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2002.
Stephens, Mitchell, A History Of News: From Drum to Satellite (New York: Viking, 1988)
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