I read the tabloids standing in line at the grocery store. One of them keeps talking about W and Laura having marriage problems and giving details like Laura spending a night at a hotel, giving W divorce papers, W going to Camp David to get a way from her, etc. I never see anything like this in the main stream media. Any chance this is true? I’m not above a little schadenfreud.
Reread your own post. Think about in a way that a true Doper would and then reply back to yourself using your newly gained analytical skills. You already gave much of the necessary information in your OP yet you somehow, mysteriously, failed to make any judgement either to the source or to the context.
How would you dissect a statement such as this if you looked at it as a rational person?
There’s your answer.
The “reporters” for those thing went to the Sylvia Browne school of journalism: sit back, make up something out of whole cloth, and vomit it out. Even if parts of it turned out to be true it’s much more likely to be a lucky guess smothered in coincidence than any actual inside knowledge. I noted one recently that headlined Hillary Clinton selecting Bigfoot to be her running mate and while that scores a lot lower on the plausibility meter it gets about the same score for credibility.
It is virtually impossible for a public personality to take libel action against a tabloid. The story has to be knowingly false, not just false because they printed what somebody else said. And it has to cause actual damage to the person’s reputation.
Even if the tabloid knew that the rumor that the Bushes were divorcing was totally made up maliciously, there’s no way that the Bushes could argue that their reputation has been in any way damaged by the story. After all, nobody in the world believes it. (I mean, really, you don’t believe it, not even a little bit, do you? Really?)
So if your real question was, How can they get away with it? That’s the answer. There are no real consequences to their doing so.
The tabloids were all over the Clinton divorce story back in the late 90’s.
IIRC, those two lovebirds are still hitched.
Oh no!! You mean the stuff about W and Condi was made up? Say it ain’t so …
Paul McCartney has been dead for over 35 years:
‘Is Paul McCartney dead?
Was he killed in a car crash and then replaced by a look-a-like?
Did the Beatles then plant small, subtle clues within their album covers and lyrics to ‘break the news gently’ to their fans?
These questions have been asked since the break of the 1969 conspiracy that is known as ‘Paul is Dead’. During the last 30 years people have tried to answer these questions, but have only been able to do so through speculation and legend…’
http://homepages.tesco.net/harbfamily/opd/index.html
And there’s loads of evidence!
‘Later, it also transpired that identifying the Paul using dental records would be impossible since all of his teeth were knocked out during the crash’
'During this time, the police had run a number-plate check on the car and discovered who the driver was. Shocked, they immediately contacted Brian Epstein with the news so that he could handle the situation and decide what to do next. Frightened that a newspaper may have discovered who was in the crash and subsequently write a story about it, Brian phoned up all the local newspaper printers to see what the main headline was to be. When he found the newspaper that was to print the story, he bribed them into stopping the press and to destroy the copies that had already been printed. ’
Can’t you just picture this last bit :smack:
“Hello, London Evening Standard.”
“Right, hi. Have you heard the story that a Beatle has been killed in a car crash?”
“No - but hold on - GET THE EDITOR! HOLD THE FRONT PAGE!!!”
“Oh, there’s nothing to it. That’s why I’m ringing you. Bye.”
“Hello, London Evening News.”
“Right, hi. Have you heard the story that a Beatle has been killed in a car crash?”
“Who are you please?”
“Brian Epstein. I’m their manager.”
“Brian, thank you so much for calling. We’re so sorry to hear the news. Err, hang on … GET THE EDITOR! HOLD THE FRONT PAGE!!! Brian, could you give me the details. Obviously we’d like to run a tribute to one of the most famous and talented people in Britain.”
“Actually I’d like you to forget all about this story.”
“Of course Brian. Bye.”
It’s true. And the 700 foot tall Jesus is going to proclaim why just as soon as he eradicates those grasshoppers the size of a Septa bus and Batboy, too. Oy!
Laura’s been cheating on him with Batboy?
FWIW, the Google ad at the bottom reads “Democrats Suck - They take our money, and rob our morality. What do you think? www.democratssuck.com”
Appropriate for a discussion of tabloid journalism, innit?
C’mon. Condi has a lot more class than that. (I mean, sure, she’ll shill her soul for the power jobs he gives her, but actually having a romance with it. . . ?)
From glee’s link
“There is one thing that every single member of that audience (bar the Beatles themselves) has in common, and that’s death. Every person there had, at the time, either died, had a near-death experience or had portrayed death. For example, Edgar Allen Poe died a tragic death, Marilyn Monroe was a suicide victim, Laurence of Olivia was fatally wounded in a motorcycle crash”
Laurence of Olivia?
:dubious:
If you were around in the sixties and have some time to waste, I suggest you check Glee’s link.
Out of curiousity, has a supermarket tabloid ever broken a real story before the more traditional and less made-up media outlets? I seem to recall someone telling me once that some of the larger tabloids have one or two real investigative journalists on staff along with all the folks that just spin celebrity gossip and “Jesus found on Mars” type stories.
Yes. The National Enquirer scooped everyone else on Anthony Perkins’ AIDS status in 1990. At the time, Perkins claimed that they bribed someone for his blood test results and knew about the virus before he did, although his IMDB page says he knew several years before.
I’d say that the tabloids are Johnny-on-the-spot for outing gay and dying celebs, though not with 100% accuracy.
Here are some stories. If you can’t be bothered to read it the highlights:
Pushing the Gennifer Flowers story (maybe they didn’t “scoop” the world - it was out there - but they stayed with it until the MSM had to notice).
Dick Morris and the Hooker was all them, as was Jesse Jackson’s out of Wedlock Child. *Rush Limbaugh drug addict * stories first appeared in the Tabliods. As did the John Kerry-Patti Davis Relationship.
Didn’t Gary Hart’s monkey business get outed by one of them?
Doesn’t make them much more credible. They seem to have a habit of reporting relationship trouble for everyone in the news, and Hollywood’s record of marriages is bad enough that they get lucky.
Regards,
Shodan
Some years ago, I was standing in check-out at the supermarket, idly readint the headlines of tabloids and mags, when the Enquirer featured the headline that Michael Jackson was going to marry Lisa Marie Presley. I thought "Jeez, they’ll make up anything, won’t they?? :eek:
People don’t seem to realize there’s a distinction between the National Enquirer and the Weekly World News. The Enquirer is actually reasonably accurate in its celebrity gossip. The reason this sort of stuff isn’t covered in the “real media” is that it’s considered sort of beneath them. But it’s by no means rare for a story to first appear in the Enquirer, and then get into the standard media in the form of, “People everywhere are talking about…” I’d bet anything that the Enquirer is right that the Bushes are having marital troubles. Whether it’ll come to divorce, I couldn’t say.
You’re absolutely right about this. After the whole Michael Jackson/Lisa Marie thing, I’ve kind of kept an eye on the track record of their headlines (I never buy the paper myself), and they are pretty accurate. I don’t like their methods of obtaining information, but that’s a whole 'nother story.
Meanwhile, the guy who owns WWN seems to think the whole thing is kind of a hoot and freely admits he’ll put anything in his paper that people call to report.