ABSTRACT
For journalists and critics alike, tabloidization has long represented something of a shapeshifter bugaboo; it means many things all at once and seems to threaten from equally many angles. It seduces through flashy fashion and vapid content: bold-faced names, red-carpet parties, socialite misadventure and the photogenic news design used to cover these tales. It springs up on street corners in the form of wafer-thin, suspiciously “advertorial” free dailies. We seem to sense it in the splashy infographics of USA Today and the vaudevillian bluster of cable news. It feels cheap; and, for practitioners and press observers, that somehow feels wrong. Above all, in each of its kaleidoscopic instantiations, it seems to give us
pause. Something has gone mournfully wrong with the journalistic project – and, in that, it has a built-in nostalgia mechanism. As S. Elizabeth Bird points out, it’s like obscenity in that we know it when we see it but can’t quite conjure a comfortably clear definition. But, I would add, it shares with obscenity a second, substantive sense: tabloidization as an indecent, unrepressed, wanton form of journalism. We seem to recognize it as much by what it is not. It is not journalism in its lofty form – that journalism with a capital J – a form as often gilded by collective memory as empirically occupying a “pre-tabloidization” Edenic past. Like the industry it plagues, tabloidization is a force with an outsized reputation. The chapters that follow in this section approach this rogue scapegoat undaunted by that reputation. And in different ways they each ask a similar question: what if tabloidization weren’t the bugaboo we have long assumed it to be? Indeed, Herbert J. Gans, Carolyn Kitch and S. Elizabeth Bird quickly dispense with that “common sense” blanket damnation to produce more insightful discoveries. While their paths lead in divergent directions, they all produce thoughtful meditations on engagement, emotion and economics in journalism – redeeming, repositioning and rethinking the very concept of tabloidization so that our final judgment of it stays as complex as our shapeshifting encounters with it. Leading off, Gans issues this provocative notion: could tabloidization actu-
ally remedy the ills of journalism today rather than be representative of them? For this, he requires a less pejorative euphemism – “popularization” – to
describe shifts in format and content that might, in fact, hold out the possibility of strengthening news and bolstering democracy rather than despoiling both. After all, other cultural products have long been adapted for the simplified palates of a lower class strata – we can think here of the academy lending a public intellect to the op-ed pages or couture fashion trickling down to suburban malls. Though elites initially balk at a less rarefied audience appropriating the popularized form, it nonetheless represents a constructive opportunity for a wider public to engage with accessible content – and this is no small matter in assuring that informed citizens participate in modern democracy. This populist turn – be it through more informal language, inviting humor, audience incentives, or niche tailoring – is not without its limits, however: for Gans rightly notes the substance of news must not deviate from the highest of standards, even as its presentation can accommodate less erudite publics. While leavening the didactic tone and stilted language of news should be encouraged, veracity has no more egalitarian incarnate. Its most stringent ideal requires journalists’ attention and aspiration, even if the Grey Lady gets a dash more of color. This favoring of pragmatism over perfection and accommodating inclusion over elitist exclusivity may well be the lemonade recipe for a news industry weaned on lemons – after all, the slow-motion death of newspapers and inexorable graying of the nightly news audience could perhaps use a little popularity here and there. Even if it requires a Faustian truce with obscenity. Carolyn Kitch turns our attention from democratic redemption to emotional
catharsis at a time when “feeling” is suspiciously upstaging “knowing” in public culture and journalistic discourse. Just as Gans repositioned tabloidization as popularization, Kitch seeks to locate this often-maligned term in its sensationalized dimension – that which shocks and provokes the audience with touchy-feely coverage of tears and trauma. Increasingly, sensation seems to be quite literally the aim: stories of collective ritual that eulogize the living in their grief so as to find a place of our own as the audience. These shrines, symbols and tributes serve as public ceremony, whereby deaths and mourning are projected as national metaphors and shared sentiments. While there may be nothing new in this communal functionality offering indices of moral identity and markers of group renewal, since September 11, our “Portraits of Grief” seem to have multiplied: we have witnessed a marked increase in feeling over fact, a premature rush to narrative closure, a saturation of performative tears. Here is where caution is warranted in the tabloid turn – where, for Kitch, it feels cheap in a different sense – for the living, rather than dead, threaten to become the lead characters and our actions the primary plot. The dependable tropes of tabloidization – shock, heroism, solidarity – may offer us useful proxies for grieving, but they represent a danger in dependency. They seduce with the notion that “feeling fixes everything” while eliding causes and details; they sacrifice context at the altar of emotion; and they perhaps narcissistically foreground catharsis as resolution in toto. Sensationalism must not fully eclipse sensibility, even if its uses gratify.
