Word: tabloidal
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...life is to turn the commonplaces of family dysfunction into worst-case scenarios. Everyone at some time or another imagines comfortable domesticity going radically wrong. Ruben gives this uneasy feeling -- that we all may be no more than a mischance or two away from reading our names in a tabloid headline -- grabby if sometimes almost comically simple life on the screen. In Ruben's The Stepfather, that eponymous figure turns out to be -- his stepchildren guess it! -- a serial killer. In Sleeping with the Enemy, Julia Roberts' character fakes her own death trying to escape the husband from hell...
Murdoch, who built his News Corp. empire on sensation-mongering tabloids, still loves to exert leverage and shake things up. In Britain earlier this month, critics charged that his cuts in the newsstand price of the staid London Times and the tabloid Sun were predatory moves to drive rivals out of business, which he denies. In New York City, angry employees threatened to shut down the bankrupt Post, which Murdoch owned from 1976 to 1988 and began running again last April in preparation for repurchasing it and rescuing it from collapse. The employee threat was prompted by management demands...
...movie nears its debut this weekend, the uproar has settled into a generally respectful buzz. Shilts' prodigiously researched 600-page book has been boiled down to a fact-filled, dramatically coherent, occasionally moving 2 hours and 20 minutes. At a time when most made-for-TV movies have gone tabloid crazy, here is a rare one that tackles a big subject, raises the right issues, fights the good fight. That is both its strength and its weakness...
...part of every scandal. No sexual crime is so disturbing, no career blackmail so heinous, that it cannot be turned into career opportunities and comic mulch. Jackson had not been charged with so much as laying a glove on the boy, yet respected network news divisions were vying with tabloid TV to get the hot skinny. On CBS, This Morning co-anchor Paula Zahn interviewed a "reporter" for the sleaze show Hard Copy. In Britain the rumor rags were resplendent: sicko jacko, cried Thursday's Daily Star ("The Newspaper That Cares"); wacko jacko screamed...
...that happens to appear on ABC? Only Fox, the scrappy fourth network, has established a brand-name distinctiveness. The network's executives like to refer to it as the "Fox edge" or the "Fox attitude." It encompasses everything from the brassy bad taste of Married with Children to the tabloid grittiness of Cops. Fox has been willing to take chances on ideas too dumb to believe (Woops!, a sitcom about the survivors of nuclear holocaust) and others almost too good to be true (The Simpsons). If the young audience hooked on Fox signature hits like Beverly Hills...