Tabloid Wars: True Tales from the Beat
Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, my household newspaper was the New York Daily News. Then my family relocated to Queens, and our preferred source of daily print news became New York Newsday. Before the free week-daily Metro made its much welcomed appearance several years ago, whenever I ventured to the train station for my overly long commute into Manhattan, I would always grab the cheapest thing I saw on the newsstand as I hurried by, which usually meant the New York Post. And if I ever felt particularly aristocratic or brainy on the weekend, or simply happened to be in the campus or job library where it was free, I would spread my arms wide for the oversized New York Times. This is just to mention the more familiar newspapers in Gotham.
Given this lengthy and broad history, how excited was I when I learned about last Monday’s debut of Bravo’s new six-episode reality series Tabloid Wars? Not very, because one mass market newspaper pretty much covers the same news events as the next one, with variable differences in tone, style, quality, and target audience, of course. When it comes to discussing tabloids in the sense of traditional sensationalism, however, the New York Times and New York Newsday become less relevant since neither caters to those readers who like their news loud, bright, compact, fast, and preferably accompanied by large embarrassing photographs.
It’s therefore fitting that Tabloid Wars brings viewers the questionable art of yellow journalism as it’s practiced by the staff of the New York Daily News, which, interestingly, was not the original tabloid the producers of the show wanted to feature. That honor went to Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, the allegedly partisan and credibility-challenged daily that has made the bland term Page Six a hot catchphrase. But the Post declined.
Consequently, viewers are left with the second-choice Daily News to provide a firsthand glimpse of how tabloids not only pursue, but simultaneously shape the news we receive. As various frontline staff members chaperone us during their race to surpass rival newspapers at routine endeavors acquiring leads from sources and pursuing witnesses to verify and clarify events—always with the nightly 10:30 deadline hovering malevolently above—the facts of this hustle to prepare each new “breaking” story for publication reinforce just how banal tabloid work is when compared to the exaggerated final product.
Does anyone doubt that tabloid employees spend substantial time standing around contemplating how they can best spin the day’s frequently mundane events into the biggest headlines to boost sales and undermine the competition, all while not overtly stepping over the lines of “journalistic integrity” (whatever that means in tabloid land)? Of course not. And shouldn’t we be secretly thrilled to find that the folks who dish out all that inane yet glamorous celebrity gossip are not necessarily elegant creatures enjoying the perks of the high life themselves as they go about their reporting duties, but are instead just as average and aesthetically boring as the next middle-aged person? You betcha.
The fun in watching Tabloid Wars is not learning the intricacies of how newspaper production works, although attentive viewers will likely pick up a thing or two in that regard. It’s more about observing a process that reveals why much of the news that’s reported nowadays, in whichever medium, seems alternatively inadequate, irrelevant, biased, or overblown.
The Verdict: B
Tabloid Wars currently airs Mondays at 9pm EST on Bravo
Tabloid Wars photo/logo courtesy of Bravo
