Famed Psychic's Head Explodes:
James Carey on the Technology of Journalism
by Carolyn Marvin
-7-
In its various forms--talk shows, celebrity magazines, scandal
sheets--the despised tabloid press is one of the oldest and most
subversive. Tabloids possess a distinctive ideological content. The high
are brought low, the gloriously irrational succeeds against the most
determined rationalist explanations, and the world is turned upside down
in the time-honored fashion of fait-de-divers stories. The tabloid world
embraces conservative social values at the same time it lifts up the
forgotten and downtrodden. It regards the rich and famous with
ambivalence. It sees them as ordinary folks in disguise and as selfish
miscreants. No less a press of personality and motive than the
respectable press, it describes a redeemable world in which miracles
happen. It is the return of the repressed, from which it constructs the
world. Its stories are richly detailed. It endlessly recaps and amends
its most affecting tales until they are perfectly familiar. It offers a
highly moral, or at least moralistic, view of the world.
Tabloids devote considerable attention to how and why, the
questions that make sense of who, what, when, and where. The low regard
in which they are held by respectable journalists and media critics is
therefore of some interest. Tabloid explanations address moral
dimensions that are surely real, if incomplete, in the vast universe of
the human condition. But it is not incompleteness alone, a quality it
shares with the prestige press, that makes it anathema. Its
stigmatization has more to do with its preferred subject matter.
Tabloids are preoccupied with the relationship of social boundaries and
taboos to the physical body. In the tabloid world, the physical body is
the social body in its most elementary and unvarnished form. Of special
interest is bodily transformation through the social processes of death
and reproduction. Tabloid staples consist of the body distorted,
confined, maimed, restored (occasionally resurrected!), or otherwise
altered by a variety of agents that speak symbolically about what social
boundaries do. The most charged of all social boundaries are those that
touch the body. Consider gender, age, and race relations. Consider
abortion. Consider war. The annihilation of social distance by
technology is not the only destabilizing thing we have to worry about.
Social interaction in its closest, most intimate forms also challenges
the cohesion of communities. This, at least, is what the tabloids tell
us.
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