ABSTRACT
As I understand it, tabloidization is a term for the alleged deterioration of the informational and intellectual content of the news media that accompanies their shrinkage to a smaller size and different format. The term is meant to be pejorative and is used to blame all the usual suspects for what is viewed as a decline in the news media. Since moderate and low-income people are the main consumers of tabloid news, tabloidization is a particularly handy verbal weapon used by more educated people to disparage the culture of less educated ones. I agree with S. Elizabeth Bird that the term is useless and diverts attention
from the actual problems of journalism.1 For this and other reasons, I write instead about popularization, which I understand to be a common social process that occurs in many parts of society and is not limited to the media. Although popularization can be as pejorative a term as tabloidization, it has a constructive meaning as well. That will allow me to ask whether some kind of popularization could enlarge and better inform the news media audience and thus perhaps contribute to the strengthening of the news media and democracy.
Before considering popularization, I should note my assumption that in a class-stratified society, just about everything cultural is stratified by class to some extent, including the arts, literature and entertainment as well as the news and other kinds of information. When they have a choice, the different classes consume somewhat different kinds of culture, and perhaps with the exception of news, they have a great deal of choice. The hierarchy of the cultural strata generally resembles that of the class
strata, reflecting the differential distribution of income, education and other material and nonmaterial resources. To simplify a complicated structure, in what follows I will mainly distinguish between high culture, upper middle culture and the combination of middle and low or working class culture commonly known as popular culture. I call these taste cultures.2
