Tabloids

5 Pages 1336 Words

When standing in the checkout line at the grocery store we have all caught ourselves reading tabloid headlines such as “Elvis is Alive”, “Batboy Born”, or “Abdominal Snowman Rapes Girl”. We sometimes even find ourselves picking one up and thumbing through the pages as we wait. Since their creation long, long ago society has stereotyped tabloids, their readers, and their writers. They all have held a very negative image. Picture what comes to mind when you think of someone who reads the tabloids on a regular basis, or how about the writers. Well, I am sure you probably get the same mental picture as most of America. I would like to go over these stereotypes of tabloid readers and writers, and dismiss some of them.
Society has stereotyped tabloid readers to be unintelligent, low-income, silly people. According to S. Bird ”For Enquirering Minds”, “An element in the stereotype of tabloid readers is that they are lonely misfits, shut-ins, or other people who lead sad lives.” (141) People don’t think that “normal people” read or believe in the tabloids, but that must not be the case. According to statistics compiled by Bird the combined weekly circulation of the six major supermarket tabloids during their peak in the 80’s rounded around ten million issues, with an estimated readership of fifty million. Fifty million Americans who were reading the tabloids cannot all be misfits or shut-ins. Obviously, tabloids are offering readers something they want. Despite this tabloids are still defined as the epitome of trash reading.
Studies were done by two groups of men, Salwen and Anderson (1984) and Lehnert and Perpich (1982) to try to uncover who tabloid readers actually are and why they enjoy reading the tabloids. Salwen and Anderson found that the “typical buyer” of the tabloids were mostly white, predominately female, middle-aged to older people. The majority reported a career in skilled or
cleri...