Tabloid Journalism: Is It Really Important?

Maria DeVito
md781510@ohio.edu

In Steve Knowlton and Bill Reader’s "Moral Reasoning for Journalists," they talk about many different topics relating to journalism ethics and the current state of the news media. They give four reasons “for the sorry state of the news business”: money, spinmeisters, tabloid journalism and political bias.

Of the four, tabloid journalism fascinates me the most. It is the lighter side of news, the stories that focus on celebrity gossip and the entertainment industry. I have enjoyed tabloid journalism and consumed it daily for nearly a decade. I also understand that in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter. I am able to read it and move on to other more important stories about events happening in the world. However, I sometimes feel that I am in the minority. Some people only read tabloid journalism. They might not be able to tell you what’s happening in Syria (the use of chemical weapons on civilians), but they can tell you who Jennifer Lopez is dating (Casper Smart, one of her dancers).

An example of tabloid journalism in recent days would be the coverage of Miley Cyrus’s performance at the MTV Video Music Awards on Aug. 25. The next morning it was one of the top stories on the morning news programs. News organizations such as NBC’s Today Show continued to talk about days after it happened. CNN had a new story about Miley Cyrus breaking her silence on the performance Sept. 3.

From http://www.contactmusic.com/opinion/mtv-vmas-2013-miley-cyrus-disturbing-performance_3837174 

One could argue that the day after the VMAs, the Miley Cyrus story was relevant. After all, she is a young woman who still carries a fan base of young girls after her Disney Channel days. The performance was graphic and upsetting to young fans and parents, but does that still make it newsworthy nine days later? 

Knowlton and Reader say that maybe journalists are passing over the serious news stories in favor of entertainment stories because those are the stories that receive the most ratings and page views— and that is absolutely true. The culture we live in now wants more stories such as the Miley Cyrus one; it is why news organizations are including more tabloid journalism in their broadcasts and on their websites. To be cliché, they are giving the people what they want.

We are all consumers of news in some way or another. We can all work to correct this imbalance in the news media. As news consumers, we need to demand better content from news organizations, let them know hard news stories are still important to report and there is an audience out there for them. As future journalists, we need to learn how to produce better content for our viewers, to present the hard news stories in a way that makes them just as interesting, entertaining and click-worthy to the viewers as the entertainment pieces. If we can collectively figure out a way to accomplish those two things, the state of the news media will be in much better shape.