Media Matters brings our attention to the recent story on the Globe on the alleged "break-up" of the President's marriage. I have no idea if this story has any truth, nor do I care. However, I have long had an interest in the American tabloid as a social phenemonon and as a vehicle for right-wing propaganda.Media Matters correctly asks why the mainstream newspapers routinely took their cues from the tabs during the Clinton era, yet have opted not to echo the current Globe story. Newspapers should have the same attitude toward the tabs regardless of the party in power.
More than that. The tabloids are all owned by the same Florida company, American Media. This firm has long functioned as an adjunct to the Republican party. Every single tabloid serves as a means of conveying an ultra-conservative outlook to the gullible and the quasi-literate. Even those stories which do not involve politicians tend to have political overtones: Celebrity exposes exist to create antipathy toward Hollywood liberals, while tales of the supernatural entice the impressionable into fundamentalist churches.
In tab-land, the political temperature always remains carefully controlled.
Make no mistake: The decision to headline an article embarrassing to Bush was not driven by sales. The Globe chose to do this article for deeper reasons. So what they hell is going on? Can we really be living in a world where the tabloids attack a Republican president while the NYT still focuses on the Clintons?
5 comments:
Bizarre is all I can say or the rightwing media is finally waking up to where Bushco will take this country: The US will become a true police state and they will become at risk themselves if this comes to pass.
That is why of all corporate media newspapers, USA Today broke the major story on the NSA having expanded its spying on private citizens to phone call monitoring and Bush included criticism of USA Today's coverage for the very first time ever.
I thought there was something funny about a tabloid like the "national enquirer" that would so be focused on kennedy follies but when I called and spoke with a reporter who focused on Kennedy stories, they had no interest whatsoever in providing any coverage or researching a story about the possibility that perhaps JFK Jr.'s plane crash wasn't caused by pilot error but was in fact cold blooded murder by essentially parties that backed Bushco.
Ah, so it's still not just me. For more than one year now, I've been feeling as if I, and sometimes this blog, were the only entities in the world having an extreme WTF? reaction to the tabloids of all groups denigrating Bush. For a while, I took it as a hopeful sign that the most right-leaning of the far right had bailed on Bush, and was just trying to let his handlers know it. But if that's the explanation...why would he still be around? At all? The truth is, I've got nothing. Well, unless it's the hope that I had for a while last fall, shortly before the first Fitzmas, I think, when that story about Bush's "mental breakdown" was making me laugh at in the check-out lines--it's just the far right's way of gently signaling to the most pliable of their minions that Bush is on his way out. After all, it's not like the hoards can be expected to get any info about this admittedly still tragically remote possibility from the web. (And yes, I go back and forth about whether or not we're done for, but haven't yet discounted the chance that we will see the removal of Bush. So sue me.) I await further theories from The Master.
with a twenty something approval rating, Bushie needs a little sympathy
sofla said:
Remember Genoroso Pope's background in spookdom (WW II OSS, maybe another intel front propaganda outfit like Radio Free Europe) prior to his key role in these celebrity tabloids. Recall the first anthrax attack was on an America Media building in Lantana, some claim over their possession of a picture of Bush in a compromising position.
I remember a tabloid front page-blurbed story in early to mid-'01, iirc, headlined something like 'Gay scandal in Bush White House.' The story had no followup elsewhere that I saw, so I discounted it, only to see the Gannon/Guckert matter pop up a few years later.
Gannet, USA Today's owner, also publishes the armed services papers (Army Times, etc.), and an improbable two dozen or so of its reporters were the majority of key alleged eye witnesses describing the Pentagon airliner attack.
So, I'd interpret the tabloids' and Gannet's stories as leaks from the intel/military communities to their media assets, and part of their covert war against the Bush administration.
Thanks, Anon 1:08. That's...kinda what I was trying to post only much more coherent and incisive.
I must now take this opportunity to plug one of my favorite books of all time, "Grossed Out Surgeon Vomits Inside Patient: An Insider's Look At Supermarker Tabloids," (by Jim Hogshire). If I recall correctly, Hogshire actually does come right out and declare the tabs to be directly connected to the intelligence community and to have been used primarily as a propaganda vehicle throughout the years. Good stuff, especially if you just want some light background material on all this (it's just over 100 pages, I think).
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