Tabloid Culture: Trash Taste, Popular Power, and the Transformation of American Television

Console-ing Passions: Television and Cultural Power

by Kevin Glynn

During the latter half of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, television talk shows, infotainment news, and screaming supermarket headlines became ubiquitous in America as the “tabloidization” of the nation’s media took hold. In Tabloid Culture Kevin Glynn draws on diverse theoretical sources and an unprecedented range of electronic and print media in order to analyze important aspects and key debates that have emerged around this phenomenon.
Glynn begins by situating these media shifts within the context of Reaganism, which gave rise to distinctive ideological currents in society and led the socially and economically disenfranchised to access new forms of information via the exploding television industry. He then tackles specific daytime talk shows and tabloid newscasts such as Jerry Springer and A Current Affair, reality-TV programs such as Cops and America’s Most Wanted , and two different supermarket tabloids’ coverage of the O.J. Simpson case. Tabloid Culture is the first book to treat these diverse yet related media forms and events in tandem. Rejecting the elitist dismissal of sensationalist media, Glynn instead traces the cultural currents and countercurrents running through their forms and products. Locating both reactionary and oppositional meanings in these texts, he demonstrates how these particular media genres draw on and contribute to important cultural struggles over the meanings of race, sexuality, gender, class, “normality,” “truth,” and “reality.” The study ends by discussing how the growing use of the Internet provides an entirely new realm in which such material can circulate, distort, inform, and flourish.
This innovative and provocative study of contemporary mainstream media culture in the United States will be valuable to those interested in both print and television media, the cultural-political influence of the Reagan era, and American culture in general.

336 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2000

Reviews

[Steve Erickson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe it's pointless to comment about a 21-year-old book I came across by chance in a used bookstore, bought and finished reading today. But TABLOID CULTURE: TRASH TASTE, POPULAR POWER AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN TELEVISION seems like a telling symptom both of a turning point in the media and an academic sensibility. Glynn analyzes TV shows like COPS, A CURRENT AFFAIR and '90s talk shows from a perspective steeped in postmodernism and poststructuralist theory, with constant references to Bourdieu, Bakhtin, Foucault and Baudrillard, among many others. His tone becomes increasingly celebratory, as he finds leftist potential among these shows that the class-based snobbery of more traditional media critics has ignored and even denigrated. Many of his specific examples are convincing. But the book confuses populism with an inherently progressive politics. It praises the conspiracy theories around Proctor & Gamble and Satanism for trashing the company's reputation, something feminists, union activists and even the FDA could not do. However, suspicion of corporations and the government isn't necessarily leftist. Glynn has absolutely nothing positive to say about science and little positive to say about the idea that objective truth exists, seeing both as tools of domination and power. But while he praises alien abductees (a grey alien is the book's cover image) repeatedly for expressing experiences of sexual trauma and assault despite being ridiculed for it, surely it matters that these experiences either have a basis in material reality or don't. Reading this after Trumpism, the rise of Alex Jones and QAnon, it seems painfully naive about grifters stepping in to exploit sentiment against science, the mainstream media and government (however well founded that often is) for destructive, self-serving goals. The Internet barely existed as a mass medium at the time TABLOID CULTURE was published, and the book didn't foresee the effects it would have on opening up the edges of discourse to views which used to be considered extreme. A trans woman never could have become a celebrity making videos consisting of progressive/leftist political analysis 20 years ago, unlike Natalie Wynn and Abigail Thorn. However, Joe Rogan's podcast now gets a bigger audience than any cable news show, but the result hasn't exactly been liberating (especially for the trans community.)