Tabloid Television Research Articles

American Monsters: Tabloid Media and the Satanic Panic, 1970–2000

“American Monsters” analyzes the satanic panic, an episode of national hysteria that dominated the media throughout the 1980s. It involved hundreds of accusations that devil-worshipping pedophiles were operating America's white middle-class suburban daycare centers. Communities around the country became embroiled in trials against center owners, the most publicized of which was the McMartin Preschool trial in Manhattan Beach, California, still the longest and most expensive criminal trial in the nation's history. This article explores how the panic both reflected and shaped a cultural climate dominated by the overlapping worldviews of politically active conservatives. Their ideology was incorporated into the panic and reinforced through tabloid media. Infotainment expanded dramatically in the 1980s, selling conservative-defined threats as news. The panic unfolded mostly through infotainment, lending appeal to subgenres like talk shows. In the 1990s, judges overturned the life sentences of defendants in most major cases, and several prominent journalists and lawyers condemned the phenomenon as a witch hunt. They analyzed it as a powerful delusion, or what contemporary cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard termed a “hyperreality,” in which audiences confuse the media universe for real life. Integral to the development, influence, and success of tabloid television, the panic was a manifestation of the hyperreal.

Sensational Scientology!

The role of communications and information media long has been acknowledged as a key factor in religious controversy. Since the 1970s “cult wars,” new religions scholars have focused considerable attention on how the media communicate, influence and frame public perception of new religious movements. In this article, I briefly survey ways in which constant changes in communications media and consumption require scholars to reassess interaction between the media and new religious movements. Using as a test-case the Church of Scientology’s interaction with Australian “tabloid television” programs in a series of heavily publicized controversies, I outline some traditional journalistic practices and media constraints, identified by scholars, in television coverage of Scientology in Australia. I will introduce a series of additional practices and contingent factors dealing specifically with tabloid television which may assist scholars in assessing the complex relationship between the media and new religions.

Don’t miss a bloody thing: [REC] and the Spanish adaptation of found footage horror

Abstract Although found footage as aesthetic expression was common in documentary and avant-garde cinema, it was not until the end of the 1990s that it was adapted for use in the horror film. This sub-genre gave film-makers a new means of cognitive and emotional connection with the spectator. Paco Plaza and Jaume Balagueró’s films [REC] (2007) and [REC] 2 (2009) recycled the format, creating films rooted in the national while at the same time projecting a post-national image of the genre. [REC] turned the found footage film into a commentary on Spanish tabloid television, its vapid journalistic presentation and the public’s appetite for scandal. [REC] 2 adapted the form further, expanding it from a single to several cameras, and expanding the narrative to issues of political and religious ideology. The [REC] films present a directly lived representation through found footage, where the spectator has limited scope of knowledge that goes beyond mere subjectivity to the limits of visualization and knowledge the form depicts. [REC] moves beyond the use of found footage as a tool for horror, and transitions it into a commentary on filmic presentation and spectatorial engagement, re-positioning contemporary Spanish horror film into a post-national context.

Quirky Neighbors or the Cult Next-Door?

Beginning in 2005 the tiny Christian sect then known as the Exclusive Brethren suddenly underwent a media transformation from a virtually unknown or ignored group of quirky and old-fashioned Protestant sectarians to being touted as “Australia’s biggest cult” by tabloid television programs. This explosion of controversy came on the heels of media revelations about the involvement of Brethren members in providing financial donations to conservative political causes across the globe and a snowballing effect in response which brought forth a number of ex-members eager to expose their former group. This article looks at how this media transformation has been received by the wider Australian public. By studying the hitherto little utilized data contained in readers’ letters to Australia’s three mainstream broadsheet newspapers this article identifies which events or undertakings had the most impact on public perceptions of the Exclusive Brethren and which specific articles and issues struck the most responsive chord with readers. This content analysis found that Australian public opinion toward the Exclusive Brethren, while on the whole negative, was more indicative of their political involvement than their beliefs. The study also found that prior to what I call “The Brethren Controversy” the Exclusive Brethren had maintained a high degree of “sectarian tension” in Australia for almost four decades with little public outcry or media vilification.

Mad about the Boy

Mad about the Boy

Exploitation Films: Teaching Sin in the Suburbs

Teaching exploitation films—those low-budget, sensational movies of various stripes that revel in sex, nudity, vice, and violence—presents some of the same difficulties as teaching any film course. Exploitation films do, however, present some unique challenges and can be classified as “difficult” films—although not for the reasons one might immediately assume. I regularly teach a course called “Cheap Thrills: The Politics and Poetics of Low Culture.” The class is essentially a survey of the history of exploitation films, beginning with racy Mutoscope movies, through white slave films and “classical” exploitation fare, to sexploitation, 1970s grindhouse standards, and cheapie directto-video releases. Along the way there are detours into other cultural realms: the sideshow and the dime museum, pulp magazines and comic books, and tabloid television. At one time teaching exploitation films was difficult simply because the material necessary to teach them was so hard to secure. Although there is not yet an overwhelming amount of historical and critical literature, the number of books and articles continues to grow. 1 And where once it was a challenge to find exploitation films for classroom use, there are now countless titles available on DVD and videotape. Those problems have been overcome. Yet today, the things that one might conceive of as being “difficult” about teaching exploitation movies—their sexual and violent content—are usually met with a jaded amusement by students. Granted, this might be different at other colleges and in other regions. But I find that students are able to nimbly negotiate nudity, sexual situations, and violence and gore, whether the fake dismemberings in dayglo red in something like Blood Feast (Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1963) or the fairly realistic carnage of Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980), with ease. The scenes that tend to cause the most visceral and vociferous reactions in my classes are those of childbirth from creaky hygiene movies such as Street Corner (Albert

Filth

filth

Annotated bibliography of works about Sir Winston S. Churchill

This concise history of the news broadcasting industry will appeal to both students and general readers. Stretching from the radio days of the 1920s and 1930s and the early era of television after World War II through to the present, the book shows how commercial interests, regulatory matters, and financial considerations have long shaped the broadcasting business. The network dominance of the 1950s ushered in the new prominence of the anchorman, a distinctly American development, and gave birth to the golden age of TV broadcasting, which featured hard-hitting news and documentaries, epitomized by the reports by CBS's Edward R. Murrow. Financial pressures and advertising concerns in the 1960s led the networks to veer away from their commitment to serve the public interest, and tabloid television -- celebrity, gossip-driven soft news-- and news magazines became increasingly widespread. In the 1980s, cable news further transformed broadcasting, igniting intense competition for viewers in the media marketplace. Focusing on both national and local news, this stimulating volume examines the evolution of broadcast journalism. It also considers how new electronic technologies will affect news delivery in the 21st century and whether television news can still serve both the public interest and maintain an audience.

American television news: the media marketplace and the public interest

Part I. Broadcasting and the Culture of News 1. Electronic Journalism in a New Era 2. Beginnings: The Ethic of Commercialism 3. The Era of Network Dominance Part II. Seismic Shifts in Television News 4. 60 Minutes and the News Magazine 5. Tabloid Television and a World of Talk 6. Hard News-Soft News 7. Prime-Time News Values 8. The Impact of CNN 9. Celebrity News Part III. Public Service in the Digital Age 10. Local News 11. Network News and the New Environment 12. Electronic Journalism and the Public Interest

Commercialization and Tabloid Television in Southern Europe: Disintegration or Democratization of the Public Sphere?

(2002). Commercialization and Tabloid Television in Southern Europe: Disintegration or Democratization of the Public Sphere? Journal of European Area Studies: Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 31-48.

Tabloid culture: trash taste, popular power, and the transformation of American television

Acknowledgements genealogy of tabloid television Cops, courts and criminal justice: Evidence of postmodernity in tabloid culture Bodies of popular knowledge: high, the low and the A Current Affair Fantastic populism: A walk on the wild side of tabloid culture Normalization and its discontents: conflictual space of daytime talk shows Conclusion: Cultural struggle, the new News and the politics of popularity in the age of Jesse The Body Ventura Appendix Notes Works cited

Popular television formats, The student-as-consumer metaphor, acculturation and critical engagement in the teaching of accounting

This paper discusses six television programme formats which were self-selected by Australian university students to facilitate their group-based presentations of accounting subject matter to fellow students in seminar and tutorial classes. This paper is a reflection upon the experiences of these formats (news and current affairs, game shows, tabloid television, soap operas, children's programmes and situation comedies) using an evaluative framework comprising the student-as-consumer metaphor, notions of ‘acculturation’ and a model of ‘critical engagement’. The television programme format appears to be beneficial in serving accounting students' psychological and emotional needs and in providing them with a shared cultural structure by which to address accounting issues. This shared structure facilitates students' critical and creative engagement with accounting.

Review: Tabloid Television: Popular Journalism and ‘Other News’

Review: Tabloid Television: Popular Journalism and ‘Other News’

Life in the tube

Douglas Rushkoff, author of Media Virus, Cyberia, and Playing the Future, explains how sensationalism in the media tends to promote our culture's natural, unexpressed agendas. This is an optimistic appraisal of the seemingly banal and exploitative fora of tabloid television, ‘Court TV’ and ‘Cops’. Such low-brow media, when approached from an evolutionary perspective, reveal themselves as the process by which closeted social issues are brought out into the cultural conversation exactly when they need to be.

Buy Our News: Tabloid Television and Commodification

Buy Our News: Tabloid Television and Commodification