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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
January 9, 2005
Resolution
The reason to read tabloids or let's just say the reason I read tabloids including especially the blogs that are the "amateur" web versions of tabloid journalism is that they are often more interesting than the "professional" mainstream serious media trying to "retain" a little "intellectual credibility". Forgive all the "tong-quotes" as I call them: for I'm writing broadsheet journalism where we flag the words we use without conviction. I have learned over 51 years including 35 of writing for money to distrust "professionals" (and especially "experts") even more than I distrust "amateurs". And my tong-quotes will help explain why. For in my experience intellectual credibility has little to do with getting facts straight and rather more with plausibility -- with feeding or assuaging the prejudices of what are assumed to be like-minded readers. It is a kind of politeness or politesse. You don't tell people what they don't want to hear. You tell them rather what they expected to hear after of course granting a little surprise to get their attention -- or risk losing your hard-earned "credibility". At any given moment the Zeitgeist (no tong-quotes from me) supplies a whole range of ready-made assumptions that can be slipped by almost any reader who considers himself to be "educated". ("The Right: selfish racist stupid. The Left: altruistic tolerant smart.") You just take these assumptions out of the freezer and bung them in the oven; no preparation required. At any given moment there are many professionally-packaged self-evident propositions available off the shelves in our intellectual supermarkets absolutely loaded with the spiritual equivalent to cholesterol. They supply the hearty diet of the urban intelligentsia. Or the analogy might be to the traffic directions in any densely-populated environment. The mainstream in our society it goes without saying drives on the left -- and as it were against the stream of oncoming history crashing by to the right. Just trying to avoid collision with it requires all one's wits; and helps to explain our peculiar custom of also passing on the left. But tabloids are written not for the people who think themselves exceptionally intelligent and well-informed but for the merely curious. A good tabloid editor must therefore reach a little deeper into the human psyche to get his reader's attention. His subject matter will seldom be the current front-burner issues in the news but rather the stuff of great literature: passion violence the horrible discovery loyalty and infidelity sin and redemption the inexplicable the sacred -- that sort of thing. Now as a snob I find tabloids garish and wish they could be packaged in grey broadsheet with fewer embarrassing pictures of low-class ill-clad women (although none would be too few). But while I may like headlines small I do like them vivid and outrageously juxtaposed. Like life. Or like a good joke which is usually tasteless. Our most respectable newspapers gave us more than a week of climbing death tolls from a natural disaster. It is how they think: in numbers. But how many people do you know who were killed or even nearly killed by the walls of water? The answer for most of us is one: Petra Nemcova the Czech supermodel. Not killed just badly smashed up and her boyfriend swept away to sea from Phuket Thailand. So why shouldn't the reporters be lined up by her hospital door? The slower-brained normally curious reader wants to know the death toll. But he also wants to know more: What happened exactly and in what order? What did it look and feel like to be there? And what can I do to help? Whom can I trust to send my money? And then: what about the animals? Wildlife officials in Sri Lanka would seem to have confirmed there were no animal casualties in Yala National Park after the tsunami swept into it. They found more than 200 human corpses and plenty of uprooted trees. But of the park's many wild animals not one dead elephant crocodile wild boar water buffalo deer or grey langur monkey. Not so far as I'm able to learn even a drowned rat. Perhaps the animals could "feel" the tsunami approaching and fled to high ground. We don't know. Finding out would mean going beyond tabloid journalism. But "tab" is the way every inquiry starts and has always started since long before tabloids. My resolution as a hack journalist in the new year is to remember this. Learning comes from being open to surprise. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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