On the subject of News Corp / NYP, one of the rivals to Rupert Murdoch’s UK tabloid carried this alleged quote from Murdoch yesterday:
“George Bush is acting very morally and correctly. The greatest thing that could come out of this war on Iraq would be$20 a barrel for oil.”
The Post is a newspaper, not a tabloid.
Of course, you may mean it in a left-wing derogatory sense (considering that it’s a right-wing newspaper), in which case “Well, yeah” should be replaced with “I think”.
Then again, this is the pit, where tact is not necessary 
—Mr Dunleavy’s ranting and raving and tears in the cemetery—
Since my own thread should die a slow death for having a terribly malformed title, I’ll rant here.
What the hell was Dunleavy even doing in this cemetery? He doesn’t even tell us what prompted his visit. It’s just Dunleavy, wandering around a cemetary for no particular reason, loudly pointing out that he was crying as he reads out a list of names that have absolutely no known specific significance to him (i.e. he never mentions that he knows any of these people, or anything about them, or why these particular people are more important than anyone else in the cemetary). In short, he’s digging up random corpses so he can flog them for his own usage. Politico-necrophilia.
—The Post is a newspaper, not a tabloid.—
The Journal is a respectable conservative newspaper.
The Post is a tabloid. A tabloid is “A newspaper of small format giving the news in condensed form, usually with illustrated, often sensational material.” Ahem?
What “newspaper” is more than half pictures, some even altered as jokes (great jokes, in the weasel case, but we’re not exactly talking photojournalism here)? What newspaper eschews big words for lots of exclaimation points, short, half-page text, and randomly bold???
“tabloid” refers to the size of the paper. Newspapers generally come in 2 sizes, “Broadsheet” and “tabloid”.
Just in case you didn’t know.
What Twisty said. With the addition that tabloids are, to my knowledge, never “serious” newspapers. Maybe it’s different in the US, but I can’t take any news source seriously when their idea of journalism is photoshopping weasel heads on to UN delegates. Furthermore, if your front page is one big headline, there’d better be some news of major importance. If you front page is one big headline every day, you’re NOT a serious newspaper. I don’t care wether they’re “left” or “right”, but from what I’ve seen of the NY Post, it’s a rag I wouldn’t even wipe my ass with. And the fact that it’s a conservative rag has nothing to do with it.
Although, now that I mention it, I have a hard time coming up with an example of a progressive tabloid. Any UK examples of those available, perhaps?
The Onion?
The Post is a tabloid in both the size and the low journalistic weight meanings (it would be wrong to say that one is calling it a tabloid just because of the size, when it’s pretty clearly in a derogatory context).
The Onion is satire, that doesn’t count. Besides, they take the piss out of both left and right. 
I think Twisty meant to say that “tabloid” just means smallsized newspaper in the literal sense. But yeah, in the OP, the term “tabloid” is used in the more evolved meaning of the word: shitrag. Both are valid.
In my neck of the woods, the majority of the daily papers are tabloid sized. The only two exceptions I can think of off the top of my head are The New York Times and USA Today.
All those weekly edutainment ones like The Enquirer and Weekly World News are tabloid sized-- when I think of tabloid I think more of content and not size.
When I think of tabloids I think more of content than size as well. I consider the Post and Daily News to be tabloid sized newspapers, while the Enquirer and Weekly World News are tabloids. Given those definitions, I think that by putting weasel heads on UN members, the Post was making itself look like the latter.
That is how I construed it being referred to as a tabloid. Out of curiosity I did a search on the Post and Daily News on Yahoo, and most times each paper was described as a tabloid, the site result featured criticism of the politics of each paper.
My criticism wasn’t so much about the Post’s politics but in the doctoring of the photo on the cover.