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At the risk of tempting fate or even history, we suggest that there is a spectre
stalking the global mediasphere. This spectre is the tabloid. Like any good spectre,
it is hard to pin down. Critical neglect has played a part in this. It is a tendency we
aim to correct. For a time in the 1990s, discussions of the tabloid or the broader
process of tabloidization were lively and used to centre on the changing formats of
newspapers. They did not, however, generate enough substance on the possibility
that the tabloid had evolved not as a format or even a style of journalism but more
as a communicative flow, despite the fact that historical accounts of popular con-
tent in print periodicals had illustrated as much. The tabloid even avant la lettre has
been a spectre haunting journalism’s past as well as its present since before its
obvious modern-day manifestations, and we can see trends associated with it such
as sensationalism, trivialization, exaggeration, and sexualization established within
popular print culture well before the emergence of the daily tabloid press proper in
the early twentieth century. Still further back in time, some of the earliest printed
publications in Europe combined many of the elements associated with the later
tabloid newspaper. Indeed, historically, we might see the triumph of the daily,
predominantly political, commercial, and respectable newspapers of the bourgeois
public sphere as deviations from the long-term successful trajectory of the tabloid.
This success can be contrasted with most assessments of the tabloid and its asso-
ciated phenomena which are negative and read like a miasma of bourgeois anxi-
eties concerning taste, gender, class, politics, and sex. Allan claims it can amount to
a “stigmatised label” (Allan, 2010: xxxix). Yet the wide variety of substance and
tone we see in these examples renders simplified categories of the ‘tabloid’ or
‘tabloidized’ content problematic. These raise multiple questions about definitions
of these terms that need to first be resolved if we are to be able to disentangle the
conflicting accounts of tabloids’ journalistic value, or the critique of the same. |
