Sex Murder Revenge Marriage!

 

Hey all. The calendar claims that November is here. Where does the time go? I swear, I'll blink and it'll be Christmas. Chin up. Another week, another post. Here we go! Where do we go exactly? To boingboing.net.

Boingboing is a website that I've been intermittently following for about a decade now. According to its wikipedia entry, it began life as a zine back in 1988 before turning into a website and blog in the '90s. Currently, it operates mainly as a kind of aggregator for weird and wacky news from around the internet. The editors and staff genuinely seem to have quite a knack for finding entertaining content ranging from cute and goofy to the occasional instance of something absolutely bizarre.

I'd like to use this opportunity to highlight a recurring weekly segment called "dubious tabloids" written by contributor Peter Sheridan. Each week, he scours through a selection of the most eye-catching and scandal-infused offerings of the big-league tabloids, such as the National Enquirer, Globe, Us Weekly and People.

Week in and week out, Sheridan methodically debunks, dismisses and derides the outlandish stories, insinuations and wild claims that the 'rags' - as he quite directly refers to them - endlessly keep supplying.

Although the stories change over time, the 'main cast' seems to be a rather narrow choice selection of  the usual suspects: royalty, celebs, superstars, tech billionaires and politicians. Also, the thrust of Sheridan's column is invariably always the same: None of the stories are ever backed up by anything whatsoever resembling journalistic due diligence. Even the flimsiest and tentative link to an actual source or verifiable claim is an oddity here. They are literally making this shit up, non-stop.

For myself, the experience of gazing upon the front pages of these tabloids elicits a kind of confused giddiness as I imagine that I'm peering into an alternate reality where these stories are true. A morbid curiosity takes hold: What are these people on? How does this even exist? And, of course, there's big one: 

Who reads this stuff?

Logically, plenty of people must, right? The tabloid press is quite evidently still a financially viable branch of media. They are the original clickbait, and the bait still attracts the fish just fine. Digital media is here for sure, but the old dogs aren't ready to give up just yet.

I feel as though a portion of the tabloid press has successfully gone through a process of rebranding itself in such a way as to embrace the bad reputation that the 'rags' have traditionally been ascribed and turned this infamy and ill repute into a badge of honour and an actual selling point. 

You know you want it. This is your guilty pleasure. We'll tell you all the saucy secrets and titillating tales that the other press are too afraid to disclose!

It's all spectacle, all the time. You'll suspend disbelief reading tabloids the same way you do watching shows on the telly. It's a written and illustrated reality show based loosely on a sexed up and dramatically enhanced version of actual reality.

Looking at the cover is enough of a head-trip for me. I don't think I'll dare look inside for myself. I don't want to catch the mind-virus encoded in these pages. I'll let Peter Sheridan take the plunge and I'll read his accounts of this strange world at some later date.