Word: tabloidizing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...dust jacket reproduces part of a mural by Thomas Hart Benton: City Activities with Subway. A woman stands while four men sit, ignoring her. One reads a tabloid whose back-page headline blares: BANKER'S LOVE NEST. What is wrong with this picture? The paper, of course: the last page of a tabloid always reports sports; it is the front page that broadcasts scandal. This quirky distortion of actuality echoes the work within. Ilka Weissnix is a Viennese greenhorn entering post-World War II America with a few sentences of English, an open face and beautiful legs. She soon encounters...
...malign publisher, Lambert Le Roux, is the captivating antihero of the piece. By cunning, he takes over both a populist tabloid and a stately, ultraupperbrow daily. The character has been assumed by many people in Britain to be a burlesque of Australian Press Lord Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Sun and Times of London, as well as the New York Post, Boston Herald and Chicago Sun-Times. There are conspicuous differences: Le Roux is a South African, not an Australian, and he lives in the Surrey countryside, not New York City...
Such optimistic speculation about the future of Murdoch's airwaves contrasted with the anxiety of his 1,200 employees at the New York Post. Though circulation has almost doubled since Murdoch bought the paper in 1976 (from 500,000 to 900,000), the tabloid still loses about $10 million a year. Potential buyers include the Chicago-based Tribune Co., which publishes the New York Daily News (circ. 1,391,000), and the Times Mirror Co., owner of Long Island's Newsday (circ. 542,000), which is making a strong bid to break into the New York City market. Either company...
Other potential bidders may be scared away by the thought that if Murdoch could not make the paper profitable, no one can. In his quest to put the Post in the black, Murdoch transformed a liberal if tired tabloid into a manic, grab-'em-by-the-lapels paper that jolted readers with apocalyptic headlines. If newsprint could talk, the Post would be the loudest paper in the country. A rambunctious student upsets a teacher? Read all about it in last Wednesday's edition under MOTORMOUTH MENACE MADE ME QUIT. If the Post had not been so uncharacteristically silent about...
Today Murdoch oversees a barony of more than 80 publications that stretches from the august Times of London to the brassy London Sun (with 4.1 million readers, the world's largest English-language daily), from yuppie- caressing New York magazine to the Star, a tabloid weekly once specializing in offbeat diets and visits by UFOs that is now trying to climb upscale. The prototypical Murdoch daily is flag-waving conservative, and politicians favored by its owner are featured prominently in the news columns. At a time when newspapers are increasingly concerned with attracting affluent readers, Murdoch presents himself...