Reliable sources - why the tabloid press is sometimes more honest and balanced in its reporting - Special Section: The Decline of American Journalism

National Review, June 21, 1993 by Peter Shaw

WHOEVER goes to work each day in the downtowns of America's cities is obliged to endure the advances or step over the bodies of innumerable derelicts. But when the editors and reporters of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times step inside their offices to report, let us say, the day's murder by a deranged drifter, they will do so with the most exquisite sensibility. The killer is a "Mr." Jones, unfairly forced out of his lodgings several years ago, and since then repeatedly denied employment by indifferent, rapacious capitalists. In other words, we must suffer not only all the outrages accompanying our society's catastrophic decline of civility, but also the systematic distortion of our sufferings by ideologically inspired euphemism and misrepresentation.

It is hardly necessary to detail where reality is going to continue being misrepresented. In the newspapers, perpetrators will continue to appear as victims of disadvantaged upbringings. From television news we will continue to be instructed that rioting thugs are reacting to the middle class's indifference to their plight. In television dramas, the outstanding threat to public order will remain racist Southern sheriffs and their redneck supporters.

In the movies one of the most pressing problems of the age--after Wall Street greed--will go on being the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s. It seems that screenwriters and actors suffered more in that period than the masses enslaved behind the Iron Curtain.

In a politically correct world, in short, the search for reasonably persuasive representations of reality is going to remain a discouraging one. Yet such representations can be ferreted out. What follows is a guide for those who would like, every once in a while, to have their sense of reality at least partly confirmed.

For an objective presentation and assessment of individuals unrelated to race, ethnicity, or supposed social disadvantages, there is nothing like sports. As a player, one always knows the score about oneself. One is a 16handicap golfer or else an 18-handicap golfer who can drive the ball 160 yards or 150 yards; one's tennis serve can or cannot regularly be returned by the lady on the other side of the net in mixed doubles; one knows one's best possible time for swimming the quarter-mile. It is of course nice to have a good attitude, team spirit, be a good loser and winner. But none of these changes the final score, which one always wants to have straight.

To a great extent the score is still the primary thing in professional spectator sports as well. Therefore when enlightened dinner companions complain about inflated salaries paid to star athletes, remember that the rising attendance driving ticket prices upward is a product of social need, not a mere desire for diversion. The population is increasingly obliged to turn to sports for displays of unapologetic superiority and outcomes not subject to civil-rights litigation. The objective atmosphere reaches as far as television and newspaper reporting and even commentary on sports. Unlike their colleagues on the news side, at least some sports writers dispense praise and blame as it is deserved.

THE SHARP split between the objective representation found in the sports pages and the subjective slant in the news pages prestige newspapers is less pronounced in the tabloid press. The blaring headlines of its front pages share the vivid directness-and the accuracy-of the sports headlines on the back page. From the tabloid press's stories of mayhem, rape, and murder one receives a clear accounting of exactly who did what to whom. Which is to say that one is witness to the very chronicle of society that the prestige press attempts to hide or disguise with its pieties.

The tabloids also carry the valuable reporting of gossip columnists, who almost alone among members of the media understand the decisive roles played in society and government by sexual passion, ambition, vanity, and the other eternal human failings. Needless to say, the most sneered at tabloid headline in history exactly illustrates the shortcomings of the newspapers of record. "Headless Body in Topless Bar," the New York Post informed its readers on April 15, 1983. "Such vulgarity! Such cheap sensationalism and pandering to low tastes!" exclaimed the tasteful classes. But the headline was accurate, and there was at least as much social significance in this story as in anything the New York Times informed its readers about on the same day.

The headline writer, in fact, challenged in the most effective way imaginable the received opinion of the age about topless bars and related phenomena. Sexual license, it is widely accepted, releases bottled up aggression, thereby acting as a safety valve for the violent passions. Not so, implied the Post headline, with far greater realism and insight. Your topless bar is the sort of place, along with whorehouses, redlight districts, dirty-movie houses, and pornographic book shops, from which violence is likely to go forth and in which violence is likely to occur.