Tabloid hysteria.

• Author: Saltzman, Joe
• Position: Media criticism - Column

THE NEW BUZZWORD in media criticism is "tabloid." No Tone is quite sure what the term means because., like pornography, it signifies different things to different people - but most readers and viewers swear they know it when they see it. Definitions flood the senses: sensationalism, scandal, lurid, exploitative, emotional, wildly dramatic, startling, thrilling, unscrupulous, exciting, offensive, titillating, shocking, outrageous, malicious, gossipy, shameful, corrupt, defamatory, and/or possibly libelous.

If you are someone in the public eye, tabloid is synonymous with lying and deceit. It usually means any journalist who talks to you, shoots your picture, or writes about you without your permission. If you are in the audience, tabloid means something faintly taboo, forbidden, and fascinating.

While it may be true that tabloid journalism tends to trivialize who and what we are, it always involves visceral emotions: love, hate, joy, fear. It usually involves the famous and infamous, the unusual, criminal, or bizarre. The concept of tabloid journalism and the elite who are appalled (or fascinated) with such reporting is as old as journalism itself. Nothing much has changed in more than 300 years:

* "'Tabloid' Charge Rocks Network News. Television news ... is under fire. The target is ... a creeping tabloidization.... More or less respectable news programs are succumbing to the subjects and techniques of the gossip shows ... television journalists are chasing ratings." (The New York Times, 1994)

* "Even papers which seem safely beyond the reach of tabloid competition are alarmed by their mushroom growth and tend to imitate many of their most undesirable characteristics." (New Republic, 1927)

* "Nothing so disgraceful as the behavior of two of these newspapers this week has been known in the history of American journalism. Gross misrepresentation of the facts, deliberate invention of tales calculated to excite the public, and wanton recklessness in the construction of headlines which even outdid these inventions ... it is a crying shame that men should work such mischief in order to sell more papers.... The reason why such journals lie is that it pays to lie, or, in other words, that is the very reason for which they are silly and scandalous and indecent. They supply a want of a demoralized public.... A yellow journal office is probably the nearest approach, in atmosphere, to hell, existing in any Christian state." (New York Evening Post, 1898)

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