Planet Tabloid

The tabloids have won. And who would deny it? We now live in a world of JonBenets and Ennis Cosbys, of mysterious ladies in fur coats, of hookers eavesdropping on the President, of Bruno Magli shoes.

So much fun. So many dead people, so little time. I remember one day about 15 years ago, long before the tabloids had begun to win, I picked up a copy of the National Enquirer while standing in a supermarket line.

There was the 600-pound lady lifted from her bedroom with a crane. The UFO picture. A shot of Aristotle Onassis with his eyelids taped to his eyebrows because, it was said, he had contracted a terrible muscular disease.

I remember thinking the Enquirer was an artifact of the past, a vestige. It could not last. It had nothing to do with modern newspapers that ran long stories about the copper shortage in west Africa and were fat with ads from banks.

The Enquirer’s pages were few and sprinkled with tiny ads for flatulence cures. Who, I wondered, could endure the shame of slipping the Enquirer onto the conveyor belt at Ralphs? Who read this stuff?

These days, of course, the answer is everybody. Only no one has to endure the shame of buying the Enquirer anymore. The same stuff gets delivered on the nightly news, gets tossed onto the doorstep each morning. The tabloids did not die. They took over.

“Let me give you an example,” Steve Coz says from his office in Lantana, Fla. Coz is the current editor of the Enquirer. “The other night I’m watching television and there’s Mike Wallace hosting a show called ‘20th Century’ and it’s all about the cover-up of UFOs. So here I have a ’60 Minutes’ correspondent telling me about visitors from outer space.

“The next morning I’m listening to an ad on the radio and it’s saying, ‘Tonight! On the Discovery Channel! The Curse of the Cocaine Mummies!’

“And then I open our local newspaper and there’s a story on Page 2, underneath all the celebrity news, that says, ‘Lobster Boy Dies.’

“It’s so close to our stuff, I can’t believe it.”

Coz believes the cause is all economic. Years ago, he says, the newspapers and the networks were richer than Croesus. Now they’re struggling, maybe because they kept running all those stories on copper shortages, and suddenly they need sales. Just like the Enquirer.

A friend of mine works for one of the networks. She has covered presidential campaigns and the Olympics. For the last two weeks she’s been parked in Boulder, Colo., picking at the JonBenet story, listening to residents yell “Vulture!” at her from their cars.

The problem, she says, comes from the sheer number of television crews that now pursue stories like JonBenet. Used to be, television was limited to network news and local outlets. Now, she says, you got those plus the TV tabs like “Inside Edition,” the TV mags like “20/20,” CNN, MSNBC, all the other cable stations, and foreign TV.

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It adds up to hundreds of crews producing and reproducing the same images, filling the ether with shots of JonBenet strutting her 6-year-old stuff on stage, hour after hour. We end up seeing JonBenet in our sleep.

And then you get the Internet. You can spin your O.J. theories or Cosby theories or JonBenet theories 24 hours a day on alt.true-crime. Or a dozen other sites.

During O.J., each of the lawyers had a discussion group dedicated to them individually. After the JonBenet murder, the family put up their own Web site. Over a five-day period, it got 14,000 hits.

In the news business, we whine about our tabloidization all the time. I know reporters who have prayed for O.J. to finally lose his traction on the public soul and slip away into obscurity. But O.J. kept going even after the verdict, like the Energizer bunny, and then picked up speed again with the second trial.

Now the bigger truth has emerged: When O.J. finally departs the scene, he will be replaced by others. Our need for an O.J. has grown too strong to give up. In fact, you can read the frenzy over Cosby and JonBenet, in part, as a search for an O.J. replacement.

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And nowhere does the frenzy play so hard as here in Los Angeles. We are, after all, the eternal headquarters for O.J. After the Cosby murder, the demands on the LAPD for murder tidbits grew so great that Chief Willie Williams was forced to hold a press conference.

Basically, Williams had nothing to say. So he pleaded with the shouting mob of journalists to be mindful that another murder had been committed on the same day, that murder being the shooting of Corie Williams on a bus in south Los Angeles.

The next day, Corie Williams’ death was duly acknowledged and then dropped. Her murder, like her life, did not have the tabloid elements of fame or riches or tantalizing mystery. But Ennis Cosby’s death has it all.

So, churned to a frenzy, we lurch towards the post-O.J. era. Truth be told, we sorta hate it, and we sorta like it. It keeps us amused here on Planet Tabloid.

The other day, in the mail, I got a dead-serious announcement from one of our great universities saying their medical department had initiated a major study of flatulence. The announcement noted that spouses of flatulence sufferers had been found to suffer a higher incidence of certain cancers.

I kid you not. So here’s my advice to the university: Don’t waste your research money. Just call the Enquirer. They’ve had the answer for a long time, and it’ll only cost you a buck twenty-five.

’ The other night I’m watching television and there’s Mike Wallace hosting a show called “20th Century” and it’s all about the cover-up of UFOs. So here I have a “60 Minutes” correspondent telling me about visitors from outer space.’

STEVE COZ

Editor, National Enquirer