Slate: National TV sites are “Web tabloids”
Don Day February 1st, 2008
Slate’s Jack Shafer takes MSNBC.com, CNN.com and FoxNews.com to task for their penchant to feature fluffy headlines on the cover. He found these gems (and more) in just 48 hours:
British Teen Films Herself Trying To Kill Parents
Granny Locks Boy in Cage, Says He Poisoned Her
Baby’s body, car seat found on roadside
Girls gang-raped, forced to be sex slaves
Students expelled for making out on bus
Nuns-and-nude ad upsets Catholics
Haiti’s poor resort to eating dirt
Watch that hot drink! Airline offers naked flights
Shafer has scores of examples - and calls the sites “Web tabloids.” He notes that while there’s lots of stuff about politics and the economy - he says the reliance on tabloid stories is “explicitly designed to momentarily rouse and titillate the Web audience, says worlds about how the site thinks of us. Life is a freak show, the Web sites instruct, and we viewers just another bunch of freaks.”
5 Comments Add your own
1. Anonymous | February 1st, 2008 at 8:30 pm
They don’t think lowly of web users, they just see the clicks the headlines generate.
2. Amanda E. | February 2nd, 2008 at 2:47 am
Lets see, what do I see on the Slate front-page today? OMG, its tabloid-like headlines!
3. nate | February 2nd, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Most of these are definitely tabloidish, but the AP article on Haiti’s poor resorting to eating dirt wafers (because there’s no real food) is hardly “freak show” material. That’s the kind of news that the rest of the world should stop ignoring! I’m surprised Shafer included it.
4. oakling | February 2nd, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Hm. While their argument makes a lot of sense to me, my hope when I see headlines like that (online or off) is that they will lead me to cutting-edge investigative journalism about, say, the abuse behind the events they describe, and the effects on and connections to the rest of the world that these events have . Even though that is raaaarely the case in PRINT media.
(Nudity-related ones excepted, I mean. Those are pretty clearly fluff.)
5. John | February 4th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
News sites are nowadays less about news, and more about not only Britney’s latest meltdown, but also the “cool” methods and gadgets editors use to tell the “stories.”
When was the last time your news group was on a conference call to brainstorm about words, sentences, paragraphs, stories and headlines? Managers care far less about content than they do content delivery.
Leave the “cool” to the fifth graders smoking in the bathroom between classes. Just tell the freaking stories.
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