DEAD TABLOID SIGHTING IN SOCIOLOGY BLOG

August 10, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

PLANE MISSING SINCE 1939 LANDS WITH SKELETON AT THE CONTROLS

The Weekly World News is going under. Not devoured by space aliens or dinosaurs but killed by its parent company because of low circulation (PARENTS KILL; BLAME FAILING PAPER ROUTE!).

Supermarket tabloids nowadays are all celebrity gossip. But back in the day (the day being the 1950s and 60s), that prince of tabloids, the National Enquirer, specialized in stories of the weird, especially blood and gore. I CUT OUT HER HEART AND STOMPED ON IT! is one of its more famous headlines.

In late 1979, the Enquirer’s publisher, Generoso Pope switched it to color. (Legit newspapers didn’t go color until USA Today came along in 1982 and started cutting into tabloid circulation.) With color came the almost exclusive focus on celebrities, diets, and other more timid stories. But Pope apparently had a soft spot in his heart for the old black-and-white presses and the stories of the bizarre, so he created Weekly World News (POPE GIVES BIRTH TO BLACK AND WHITE OFFSPRING – WITHOUT SEX!) to continue the tradition.

In the early days of the Enquirer and even the Weekly World News, the stories had to have at least some basis in reality. Some of them were actually true. Reporters at local newspapers who came upon an incident that was just too gory or gross for their own paper to run would, for a fee, send it on the National Enquirer. Later, the tabloids would require only that someone claimed to have seen or done something. If someone said that he’d seen Elvis in the Dairy Queen or that Bigfoot ran off with his wife, that was good enough. The editor’s motto was “Don't fact-check your way out of a good story.”

Writers embellished stories, adding facts, quotes, and sources, and over time the connection with reality became more and more tenuous and eventually disappeared. Photoshop probably also helped, though faked photographs had long been a staple of the tabloids. By the 1990s, stories were born via parthenogenesis, springing fully-formed directly from the heads of the journalists in the office. As the Washington Post’s obit for Weekly World News, puts it

First, somebody would yell out an idea for a headline, then everybody else would yell out better ideas. The yelling was exceeded only by the laughing. “There were days when I would leave work,” Lind says, “with my stomach and my face hurting from laughing all day at the ideas being kicked around.”

(Lind, by the way, is Bob Lind, for all those of you unfortunate enough to remember his 1966 hit “Elusive Butterfly.”)

SOCIOLOGY LINKED TO WEIRD NEWS!

What does any of this have to do with sociology and thus merit inclusion in a sociology blog? For one thing, we might ask why Weekly World News’s circulation tanked. The Washington Post article blames it on a change in staff. With the news writers acting more like a team of comedy writers, management figured it would do even better by replacing them with real comedy writers. But as one of the ex-writers said, “It’s not just comedy. It’s a different skill set.” (I wonder if he said “skill set” with a straight face.)

On the data analysis front, Weekly World News stories are a data set crying out for content analysis. I recall a contest in New York Magazine long ago (like the Washington Post’s Sunday Style Invitational) that asked for parody tabloid headlines. The winner was BABY BORN WITH WINNING LOTTO TICKET! which gets at two hugely popular themes in tabloid stories – birth anomalies and luck. (HUMAN JELLYFISH BRINGS GOOD FORTUNE AND BIG BUCKS TO OUR READERS: These lucky readers rubbed his belly and won—and so can you!) That’s an actual headline from September 1993. I know because Chip Rowe, among the many funny and inventive things in his career, collected and catalogued a year’s worth of Weekly World News headlines. Space aliens, miracle cures, medical anomalies, marriage, sex, and dieting. A really good story combines at least two of these (GAL WAS SO SHOCKED BY PROPOSAL OF MARRIAGE —HER HAIR FELL OUT!).

We know how these stories got produced. But who was consuming them, and why? What did they get from them? As Kevin Walker, in one sociological article found online put it, “The pleasure from reading any text comes from the interaction of the reader and the text, situated in social and historic context.” Which means that if we are to do this correctly, we have to identify the readers and their social and historical context. Or as the Weekly World News might have put it SOCIOLOGISTS TAKE FUN OUT OF READING TABLOIDS!
(Superfluous note: in this post, italicized sans-serif headlines are my own invention. The others are actual World Weekly News headlines, not that it matters, at least not by tabloid criteria.)

Bourdieu Tube

August 8, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) was certainly one of the biggest names in sociology in the last 25 years. He was even the subject of a documentary film “La Sociologie est un Sport de Combat” that was something of a hit in France.

He was also politically engagé as well as thoughtful. Now Tina Guenther, a sociologist who blogs from Germany (Bamberg, I think) in both English and German, has posted a recently released video of a brief interview with Bourdieu about politics. The interviewer, Gabi Reich, is obviously German; the producer-director is Pierre Carles, who also did the Combat Sport film.

Bourdieu says, among other things that there’s nothing worse than a failed revolution, and points to the return in force of extreme conservatives after the demise of leftist movements at Berkeley and Columbia. (I wasn't there. Is he accurate in this?)

What also struck me is the location of the interview – an ordinary café in Paris. You can hear the clank of plates and glasses, the buzz of motos outside on the street. I can’t help thinking that if this were an American video done by Americans, it would have been set in the professor’s office, and in front of the great man would have been a gleaming wooden desk, not a café table and an empty beer glass, and behind him, the bookshelves full of books of all colors and sizes, not a street scene with buses and pedestrians and a video game store across the street.
Despite Starbucks, we still don’t have the hang of this café thing – the public private space – in the way that Europeans have had for a couple of hundred years.

Durkheim With a Rim Shot

August 7, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

In his comment on yesterday’s blog post here, Jeremy Freese mentioned Robert Frank’s new book Falling Behind and its consideration of the general economic importance of relative deprivation. The Times reviewed that book Sunday along with another book by Frank, The Economic Naturalist.

This second book is the outcome of an assignment Frank gives his students: “pose and answer an interesting question about some pattern of events or behavior that you personally have observed.” The reviewer (Daniel Gross) provides a couple of examples.

Frank’s students, with a writing assist from their professor, explain why a $20,000 car rents for $40 a day but a $500 tuxedo rents for $90 a day. (Among other things, it has to do with the need for tuxedo shops to maintain a large inventory of different sizes.) Or why fast-food restaurants promise a free meal if customers don’t get a receipt. (It’s to deter theft by cashiers.)

The review doesn’t say which classes was Frank using. Was it freshman econ? Or was it the graduate seminar?

But I wonder if something similar might work in sociology. I wouldn’t even require that students provide answers. I just want them to step back and stop taking the world for granted. In fact, it’s always seemed to me that some of the best sociologists are like stand-up comedians – the “observational” comics who point out some not-quite-rational fact that we’ve all seen but haven’t really noticed. “What were they doing with a car on the moon? . . . There is no more male idea in the history of the universe than ‘Why don’t we fly up to the moon and drive around.’” That’s Seinfeld. But there are other examples.

And this thing with the number of suicides staying pretty much the same year in year out, what’s up with that? I mean, it can’t be the same thirty thousand Americans killing themselves each year.

Or did you ever notice that with some of these real tight-ass religious types? They work so damn hard, they gotta wind up making some money, and then they don’t know how to kick back and enjoy it. What’s that all about? You’ve got the money. Spend it. Of course, in Italy it’s just the opposite. You work a little extra there, they make you feel guilty. They’re like, “Uh-oh, here comes the Protestant.”

But seriously folks... The above are macro-level phenomena not so visible in everyday life. I expect that students will choose more micro-level puzzles not based on differences in rates. But what specific questions would we get with this assignment. Only one way to find out.

I guess it’s time to revise the syllabus.

Another $10 Million Nobody

August 6, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston
Gary Kremen is the founder of Match.com. He’s 43 years old and worth about $10 million. If it were you, you might think you’d slack off, take it easy, and enjoy the life your money can buy. But Kremen, according to a story in Sunday’s New York Times, “logs 60- to 80-hour workweeks because, he said, he does not think he has nearly enough money to ease up.” That’s the way it is in Silicon Valley. 

“You’re nobody here at $10 million,” Mr. Kremen said earnestly over a glass of pinot noir at an upscale wine bar here.

Kremen is typical of millionaires in the area and probably elsewhere. They are not the richest of the rich – they are merely “single-digit millionaires” – and they put it long hours in order to get richer. “Working class millionaires,” the Times calls them.
It seems as though no amount is ever enough. The article quotes another 70-hours-a-week millionaire: “Here, the top 1 percent chases the top one-tenth of 1 percent, and the top one-tenth of 1 percent chases the top one-one-hundredth of 1 percent.” It’s “a marathon with no finish line.” But why do they keep running?
Nearly forty years ago, Samuel Stouffer coined the term “relative deprivation” to account for those who objectively had more than most others yet felt dissatisfied. (Stouffer was looking not at income but at promotions in the military, but the same principle was at work.) No matter how much you have, if you compare yourself with others who have more, you’re going to feel deprived. It’s just one more way in which people are not rational about money.
But it’s nothing new, at least not in America. Here’s deTocqueville, writing in 1836:

In America I saw the freest and most enlightened men placed in the happiest circumstances that the world affords, it seemed to me as if a cloud habitually hung upon their brow, and I thought them serious and almost sad, even in their pleasures. . . .there is something surprising in this strange unrest of so many happy men, restless in the midst of abundance.

Who were the 1830s was counterparts of the dot.com millionaire, and what were the counterparts of the expensive cars, houses, planes, etc. they want more of? Whatever they might have been, deTocqueville saw the endless marathon:

Besides the good things that he possesses, he every instant fancies a thousand others that death will prevent him from trying if he does not try them soon. This thought fills him with anxiety, fear, and regret and keeps his mind in ceaseless trepidation, which leads him perpetually to change his plans and his abode.