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FOR NEW YORK TABLOIDS
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Thirst for scandals, gossip
makes for headline wars
of TheColumnists.com
To anyone interested in the newspaper game, New York is a city of delight. It has the good gray Times, and two major tabloids, The New York Post, owned by the redoubtable Rupert Murdoch, and The New York Daily News. They hate each other.
Two years ago, when I was last in the big city, one of the tabloids, I think it was The Post, was all over the other tabloid for supposedly inflating its circulation figures and dumping bundles of newspapers. There were photographs of the bundles that had been dumped out in the boondocks somewhere. (New Jersey is the boondocks in the minds of many New Yorkers.) The Post went on and on and on. You’d think someone had outlawed pastrami.
This year, The Post was shocked by Alex Rodriguez, the star third baseman for the snakebit New York Yankees. The Post’s June 1 front page was entirely occupied by a color photo of A-Rod entering a hotel with a gorgeous blonde. The Post said the gorgeous blonde was not his wife. (Who is herself a gorgeous blonde.)
Well. The Daily News--“New York’s Hometown Newspaper”--couldn’t let a story with that kind of heft get out from under. On June 2, its front page was entirely occupied by a photograph of Rodriguez at bat in Boston. In the background were Red Sox fans. The fans were wearing masks representing a blonde woman.
“Curse of the Bimbinos” said The News.
To say that the two tabloids appeal to a vastly different readership than The New York Times is to state what a two-second glance shows to be the obvious. Times readers are interested in the world. Post and News readers are interested in sports, celebrity gossip, crime, scandal and discount suits.
One thing I did not understand is all the fuss about The Post’s Page Six fixture. It is a sort of goings-on-about-town, celebrity-spotting page that has been associated with scandal in the past. There have been reports that some people paid Page Six writers to get mentioned. Why? I must confess that the impact of Page Six was lost on this bumpkin. It mentions fourth-tier celebrities seen in various restaurants. My understanding is that there exists in New York a corps of public relations people who make their living by getting their client restaurant mentioned because of a minor celebrity visit. Pathetic.
The Post is a lonely outpost of right-wing opinion in a very, very liberal city. In New York, it’s a given that you’re a political liberal, or at least it is in the minds of some advertisers. There were signs advertising a storage company that said: “Your closet is so narrow it makes Cheney look liberal.” Another one implied that your storage space was such a mess that it made George Bush’s mind look organized.
But The Post, in that same June 1 issue, had an editorial blasting Cindy Sheehan and “the so-called ‘peace movement.’” The get-out-of-Iraq movement, says The Post, is merely a political ploy “to undermine Republicans in general--and President Bush in particular.” A Post columnist, John Podhoretz, said that the Iraq war was the root of all W’s problems. Obviously he’s required reading in the State Department.
The mighty New York Times, of course, is above the sort of grubby journalism the tabloids wallow in. On the same Friday that The Post was Agog About ARod, the Times front page was talking about “Administration Rebukes Putin On His Policies” and “Bush Proposes Goal To Reduce Greenhouse Gas.” Its editorials were about the president’s stance on global warming, AIDS, witness protection and the Web and a new technology from Microsoft.
The Post and The News are fun to read, if you fancy hysteria. To a reader coming into New York from the provinces, The Times, Post and News resemble an urbane, sophisticated adult ignoring two squabbling adolescents in the back seat.
Rupert Murdoch, the proprietor of The Post, wants to buy The Wall Street Journal. To many, that’s the equivalent of a circus barker taking over the Louvre. The Times reports some Journal reporters have already started looking for other jobs. No comment so far from ARod.
©2007 by Charles M. McFadden. The McFadden caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted June 11, 2007.
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