Facts, Fallacies, and Fears of TABLOIDIZATION

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Nov, 1999 by Linn Jr. Washington

Political campaign coverage, tot instance, places more emphasis on poll results and reporting candidates' fax pas than on probing campaign claims by candidates. The intimacies of celebrity lifestyles receive wider coverage than the intricacies of public and corporate policies that affect quality-of-life issues.

Curiously the American media historically has reveled in stories which involve sex, crime, and human sensationalism --generally considered the character traits of contemporary tabloid journalism. For example, the 19th-century penny press had a feeding frenzy with the 1836 are murder of prostitute Helen Jewett by Richard Robinson, printing lurid details and fictionalized accounts.

Decades before the media orgies in the Simpson and Dr. Sam Sheppard trials, New York City newspapers went wild with the trial of Harry Thaw for the 1906 love triangle murder of wealthy architect Stanford White. The lurid coverage of this "trial of the century" outraged Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, who attempted unsuccessfully to have the post of rice stop the mailings of newspapers filled with "such loathsome" coverage.

Another important historical aspect missing from this debate is the media legacy--mainstream and tabloid--of inaccurate, inadequate coverage of issues related to minorities, particularly blacks. Minorities constantly feel maligned by the "white" media.

The initial editorial in America's first black-owned newspaper, Freedom's Journal, stated in March, 1827, that blacks "have suffered much by being incorrectly represented" in the press. The criticism in the 1968 Kerner Commission report that the media fails to "report adequately" on race relations remains true today.

Confirmation of the criticisms contained in the Freedom's Journal editorial and Kerner Commission report are abundant in even a cursory examination of major news events of the 1990s. Most media approached the brutal March, 1991, beating of Rodney King as a horrific aberration and not another incident of systemic Los Angeles Police Department brutality. Yet, in the years before the King beating, racially stained police brutality controversies involving misuse of fatal chokeholds and police attack dogs swirled around the LAPD, producing class-action lawsuits.

The Simpson trials sparked many latent biases in the media. Time's digitally darkening and adding ape-like features to Simpson, creating a menacing cover picture during the criminal trial phase, angered many.

Media reporting on both Simpson trials emphasized anything incriminating, while slighting exculpatory evidence. For instance, reporters downplayed favorable bloodstain evidence during the criminal trial and ignored Judge Hiroshi Fujisaki's record of biased rulings against blacks in race discrimination cases during the civil trial. This one-sided coverage by predominately white reporters resulted from race bias, according to Dennis Schatzman, the only African-American reporter to provide gavel-to-gavel coverage of both trials. "Blacks appear to not be entitled to equal and fair treatment by the news media ... even if they're rich," stated Schatzman, a former judge and co-author of The Simpson Trial in Black and White, during a January, 1977, address to newspaper publishers.