A Treasure Trove of Tabloid Tales   

“I Watched a Wild Hog Eat My Baby!”— A Colorful History of Tabloids and Their Cultural Impact

By Bill Sloan
Prometheus Books
255 pages; $25

Almost as fast as you can say O.J. or JonBenet, the supermarket tabloids are tanking, finding themselves out-tabloided and out-sleazed, at least as they see it, by the mainstream press they once sneered at.

When oral sex can dominate the national news for a year and cable channels can go all-celebrity all-the-time, what's left to lure us at the checkout counter? The tabloids' only consolation, as they are backlashed by a sensationalistic media culture they helped breed, may be a morbid pride in what a great headline it makes: TABS REEL, HUMBLED BY THEIR OWN LOVE CHILDREN.

A former tabloid editor and mainstream reporter, Bill Sloan traces the rise, crest and current slump of the tabs in this part-serious, part-comic book that is both useful history and tall-tale treasury.

To be honest, Sloan delivers more successfully on the tabs' "colorful history," as his subtitle promises, than on their "cultural impact."

On the latter point, he flings some bold top-of-the-head assertions, such as labeling the "Age of the Supermarket Tabs" as "the strongest influence of the past hundred years on the overall direction and philosophy of America's mass media."

Maybe, maybe not, but Sloan doesn't slow down for evidence and he doesn't cite a lot of sources. You will have to pardon numerous phrases such as "many observers agree," "according to disgruntled industry veterans" or "insiders."

Still, Sloan creditably sets up the tabs as a prominent cultural force, runs through their glory years, and ends with their consolidation under one media giant and their struggle to regain market share in an infotainment-saturated age (see "Taming the Tabloids," September).

It's a good story, dotted with eccentric characters, shadowy mob tie-ins, ruthless competition, a rich sense of the absurd and, naturally, those incomparable headlines:

SEVEN-HOUR ENEMA TURNS BLACK GIRL WHITE!

SHE'LL MARRY THE MAN WHO CUT HER THROAT

NECROPHILIAC PLAYS BASKETBALL WITH DEAD GIRL'S HEAD

BE A B.O. SNIFFER -- FOR $1,000 A WEEK!

MOM CLEANS KIDS BY PUTTING THEM INTO CLOTHES WASHER

PEE WEE HERMAN'S FACE FOUND ON PLANET MARS

The tabloids began as such marginal operations that, Sloan says, nobody even knows when the first issue of the National Enquirer appeared. What is known is that "the father of the modern supermarket tabloid" was Generoso Paul Pope Jr., an MIT grad and ex-CIA operative with "glaringly obvious ties to the underworld."

Pope bought the little-known New York Enquirer for some $75,000 in 1952. Subsidized by Frank Costello, "the most notorious mobster of the era," the paper broke through to profitability with 250,000 circulation by 1958, and then went national. The precise date of the first national edition isn't known and few if any copies exist, Sloan says. But by 1960, the paper was barreling forward.

At first, it traded mainly in gossip, guts and gore (but few outright sexual themes, which Pope preferred to avoid). Circulation built to a million by the mid-'60s.

Then came Pope's two masterstrokes. First, shrewdly recognizing that traditional newsstands were disappearing, he hired one of the country's top supermarket executives and deputized him to worm the Enquirer into every checkout stand in the country. Second, knowing that sleaze-and-gore would ultimately offend both the supermarkets and the middle-age women shoppers he was targeting, he remade the Enquirer formula to feature uplifting, inspiring, star-studded, gee-whiz copy. When a 1969 cover story on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis unexpectedly boosted circulation by 300,000 copies, the age of the modern tabloid erupted.

By 1982, circulation had passed 5 million (a 1978 Elvis issue topped 6 million) and annual revenue was $140 million, Sloan writes. Pope had also launched the Weekly World News, a downscale shock tab that also became a million-seller.

Competition also arrived, of course, on three fronts. Globe Communications published the National Examiner and the Sun. "Papa Joe" Sorrentino's Allied News Co. offered the National Insider, National Tattler and National News Extra (America's "first 'lunatic-fringe' tabloid," Sloan says). And in 1974 latecomer Rupert Murdoch leapt in with the National Star, which five years later was selling three million copies and turning a $5 million profit.

Many of the smaller publications reveled in unapologetic fakery and invention, but Sloan maintains that the dominant tabs stressed accuracy, hired top-flight reporters at mouthwatering salaries, lost amazingly few court cases and often out-reported mainstream media on such stories as the Oklahoma City bombing, the Clinton sex scandals and the Branch Davidian siege at Waco.

For all that success, though, times changed. As the mainstream press and TV bigfooted their way into the infotainment game, the tabs' circulation tailed into a "downward drift." By mid-2000, Sloan reports, the Enquirer was selling less than 2 million papers, 40 percent of its glory-years total. Closings and consolidation ensued, until one company, American Media, had swallowed up every remaining supermarket tabloid.

Sloan stops short of predicting tabloid doom, but he seems pessimistic. Still, he cheerfully assures us, even if the tabs fade, sensationalism will live on, "whether its medium of the moment is newsprint or cyberspace." We humans lust too much for that "shadowy underside of journalism, where fact and fantasy mingle and mate, where nothing is forbidden."