Informative Speech on Tabloids

Tabloid Magazines

Although very few of us would actually admit to it a lot of us must actually be reading the tabloid press because publications like "The National Inquirer" sell hundreds of thousands of copies each day. This is true despite the fact that the average tabloid is full of articles that can in no way be considered to be news. Elaborate stories of alien kidnapping. Elvis everyone. Stories about Princess Diana, who will remain tabloid fodder for decades, one guesses.

But the proper way to consider the role that tabloids serve in our daily cultural life. They do not exist to tell us about the workings of senate subcommittees. Rather, tabloids exist to provide us insights into important cultural issues. We turn to tabloids to read about Princess Diana not because we are expecting statistics about the class structure of England. Rather, we read about her because we want to come to a better understanding of what it means to be beautiful, of how fate and destiny touch our lives, of what it means to have birth mean more than accomplishment.

Tabloids tell us, at least to some extent, what it is that we are concerned about as a culture. We fear aliens because part of the human psyche is designed to fear that which is different - and aliens are about as different as you can get. We long for stories about the visitations of angels because we desperately would like to believe that there are creatures watching over us.

Tabloids have in many ways taken over the story-telling role of our culture - a role once held by tale-spinners sitting around campfires. These story are not meant to be believed, or at least not on the level of surface details. But they are meant to be truthful in some deeper sense. They illuminate what Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called archetypes.

Jung was fascinated by the ways in which the unconscious mind could provide links beyond the individual, and in his 1912 Psychology of the Unconscious, Jung explored the connections between the stories of living people and ancient myths. Jung argued that our stories provide a way in which we could recapture the common experiences of all of humanity and so gain from the experiences of all of humanity.

Jung constantly looked to non-Western and past cultures in an attempt to discover what ideas we hold in common with all other humans, and found that we do indeed share a great deal. This knowledge that our dreams connect us to the rest of humanity should make us feel a sense of power, because they are a reminder that we are not in fact alone in the world and that whatever problems we may be facing in our lives have been faced - and surmounted - by others before us.

Jung believed that all creation stories were created from these archetypes. He spent years studying different tribes in Africa. In his study he was careful to choose tribes that had never been in contact with each other. What Jung found is that all the tribes had creation stories and religions that they believed in. After examining the creation stories from each of the tribes, he discovered that all of these stories followed the same plot line.

We see this same similarity of plot lines in tabloid story from one week to the next.

What Jung found in his analysis of the stories told around the world was that stories with very different characters and surface details were fundamentally similar in terms of the psychological purposes that they served.

Characters such as the hero, God, the demon, the sun and the moon were present in all of these stories. The only differences he found were that the names of these characters were different.... He believed that we use our personal unconscious (memories that only the individual has) and the collective unconscious (archetypes that we all share) to overcome these problems.

Tabloids serve in many ways as a repository of the collective unconsciousness. We wish to believe that death does not mean an ending - for Elvis or Diana or John Lennon, or us. We read tabloids because they tell us stories - fantastical as myths, and just as true.

But even as we peek into tabloids as we are waiting in line to try to understand - even if from very oblique angles - central questions for our culture, we still want our fantastical stories to have some basis in reality. The best are those that might be true. Which is why tabloids use some of the trappings of broadsheet newspapers. American tabloids have over the last several years been creating a new mix in which the fantastical, mythical, archetypical elements of tabloid stories have been diluted to some greater extent by facts about the some arenas - education, politics, economics - that mainstream newspapers cover.

It could be the most shocking tabloid story in America - and one that they can't print. Splashed across newspaper delivery lorries making their rounds in the northeastern states of America are the words, "No Elvis. No Aliens. No UFOs." It's not, of course, that aliens have stopped abducting, or that Elvis no longer eats at Burger King, it's just that the new management at American Media, publisher of the National Enquirer, the Globe and the Star, has decreed that readers will no longer be hearing of it.