Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 6, 1993 TAG: 9301060085
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LORAINE O'CONNELL KNIGHT-RIDDER TRIBUNE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
TABLOID CULTURE
"WORLD'S strongest baby lifts own mom!""Vanna's starving herself to death."
Each week, at supermarket checkout counters all over the nation, tabloid headlines shriek the latest in ludicrous stories and juicy gossip.
And each week, millions of shoppers snap up the tabs.
Some buy the gossipy ones - the National Enquirer and the Star; others savor outlandish stories of the ubiquitous Elvis and the half-human, half-critter creatures featured in the Weekly World News and the Sun; still others seek a smattering of both rumor and ridiculousness, opting for the National Examiner and the Globe.
Meanwhile, millions of tabloid non-readers wonder: Who reads that schlock, and why?
The answers can be found in Elizabeth Bird's "For Enquiring Minds: A Cultural Study of Supermarket Tabloids."
According to Bird's research, tabloid readers:
Are very selective about the stories they read - and believe.
Are typically middle-aged, white females from a working- class background.
Are likely to have at least a high school education.
Are likely to feel powerless and to distrust mainstream media, government, big business and science.
Are likely to be conservative in their social and political views.
Bird, an associate professor of humanities and anthropology at the University of Minnesota, became fascinated with America's weekly tabloids years ago.
"I hadn't seen anything quite like them before," said Bird, an Englishwoman who moved to the United States in 1979. "British tabs are really daily papers which cover real news in a very sensationalistic way."
Standing in U.S. checkout lines, Bird couldn't help but notice the garish headlines and goofy photos. Being the scholar she is, she couldn't help but notice a strong link between the tabloid themes and ancient folklore.
"Folk medicines like garlic and vinegar curing everything; legends about creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster; psychic beliefs - these are all very much part of folk culture," she said in a phone interview.
In her book, which reads like a doctoral thesis because it's loaded with references to other research, she expounds on this link between folklore and tabloids. She notes, for instance, the constant recycling of ancient themes, including the dead mythic hero just waiting to make a comeback.
"Among the notables who have refused to die are Hitler, James Dean, and, of course, Elvis Presley," Bird writes.
Although her book covers tabloid culture from several standpoints, including the writers and the subjects, the heart of her work is tabloid readership.
And Bird's conclusions will gladden the hearts of sheepish tab fans who regard their pastime as a guilty pleasure.
"The stereotypical reader was kind of stupid and uneducated, rather slow," said Bird. "That really isn't true."
(Cries of "Nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh" will be heard right about now.)
"A lot of them read a lot of tabs each week," Bird said. "If they read that much, they enjoy reading. They're obviously functionally literate and use reading as a form of enjoyment.
"They're not the elite, upper classes; they're sort of normal, average people. They're not weird."
True, but many of them know perfectly well that their fellow citizens will think they're weird. Let's face it: Tabloids are frowned upon by society in general.
"I don't like to take them with me on an airplane," said a 64-year-old woman who, predictably, didn't want her name used.
"There's a connotation of someone who's not real smart. Society thinks it's trash, but I don't mind reading trash."
She especially doesn't mind now that she's retired from her office manager job and has time to indulge in meaningless amusement.
Like many tab fans, this woman rarely buys her own copies. Instead, friends pass along theirs.
"I didn't have time to read them when I was working," she said. "But if my friends didn't give them to me now, I'd probably buy them. I'm hooked on them."
In fact, the pass-along rates for tabloids play a big role in their estimated circulation, said Mike Irish, editor of the National Examiner. He estimates that, while the Examiner typically sells about 800,000 copies a week, "about five people "read or at least flip through each copy" - for a total of 4 million readers weekly.
But that's not 4 million dunderheads.
Typical of what Bird found in her research on tabloid readers, the 64-year-old woman is very selective. The 50-pound newborns and living dinosaurs of the Sun and the Weekly World News aren't her cup of tea. A movie buff from way back, she prefers the Enquirer and the Star - "I like all the gossip."
Even when it comes to the clearly preposterous material, Bird found people to be selective.
"There's almost nobody who picks up the Weekly World News and believes the whole thing," she said. "The tabs seem to reinforce people's existing beliefs. I'd find people who believed in UFO stories but when it came to ghosts or psychics, they'd say, `That's a load of nonsense."'
Bird's research was non-scientific because it was based on a self-selected sample - readers who responded to an announcement in the National Examiner.
Nevertheless, the responses she got - 114 letters in all - echo the findings by the tabloids themselves: a readership that is mostly white, female, married and middle-aged or older.
"They're not well-educated in the sense of being degree-holders or professionals," Bird said. "They're working class, respectable people."
And while women are the primary buyers of tabs, Bird said, their husbands and families read them as well, a practice that holds true even among the people who say they read the tabloids for pure, unadulterated fun. These are the folks Bird labels "self-conscious."
"The `self-conscious' reading accepts the view that tabloids are `sleazy' and `vulgar,' but reading them is an enjoyable kind of `slumming,"' Bird writes.
Of course, very few people believe everything they read in the tabs, as Bird discovered.
However, there is a downside to tabloid reading that has more to do with attitude than with belief in the occult or the outlandish.
In many cases, Bird found, the hard core of tabloid readers - those who aren't reading them strictly to poke fun - are characterized by distrust of and alienation from the establishment and a feeling of powerlessness.
"My research suggests that an important element in their readings is a form of resistance to dominant values - an awareness, for example, that they `should' be reading about news and current affairs but find these boring and irrelevant," Bird writes.
"The perception that tabloids offer `untold stories' about anything from government waste to a movie star's romance is important to them because it suggests some sense of knowing and control over things that are really out of control."
Hard-core tabloid fans suspect that government, the media, big business and scientists are keeping secrets from them, Bird writes. And they seek escape - and reassurance that their choices are the correct ones - in the tabs.
For example, the gossipy tabs - the Enquirer and the Star - appeal to readers' decidedly conservative beliefs. Each week they recycle certain themes, Bird said - "the star who desperately wants a baby, the search of all celebrities for a perfect marriage" and the ever-popular "TV queen" whose life is falling apart because of her success.
"Celebrity stories do the same thing as old folk stories and fairy tales used to do," Bird said. "They provide you with a fantasy life and introduce you to the lives of the rich and famous.
"But they also tell you, `These are really unhappy people. You're probably much happier than they are because you're married and have a family and they don't."'
Throughout the book and in her conversation, Bird takes pains to be non-judgmental about the tabs and their readers, although she clearly finds the whole phenomenon curious.
"We all have outlets for fantasy," she said. "It may be classic novels, highbrow films - but we're still doing it [escaping from reality]. To say tabloid readers' form of escapism is cheap, low and nasty - and mine is somehow better - is a real value judgment."