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6. Truth or Trash? Understanding Tabloid Journalism and Lived Experience The changing media landscape and the shifts taking place in post-apartheid South African society only partly explain the popularity of the new tabloid papers . These macro-shifts in industry and society provide us with a political, economic , and sociological explanation of why tabloid newspapers emerged during a given period in the history of post-apartheid South Africa; the niche that they filled in the newspaper market; and how they challenged the dominant norms and practices of the journalistic fraternity or “profession” in the country. What these approaches do not tell us is what role these tabloids play in the lives of their millions of loyal readers. Newspaper readers are not only—or perhaps not even in the first place—a “market segment” or “niche,” nor can they be thought of as passive receivers of messages selected for them by a professional group of people and against whose exploitation they have to be protected. Even if the media they consume are the terrain upon which a larger contestation among historical, political , and societal forces is taking place, they are not mere pawns in this game. Newspapers form part of people’s everyday routines and habits, providing entertainment and diversion at the same time as they contribute to the way readers view the world, forge their relationships with others, and fill their places as citizens in society. While a critical perspective on tabloid media should certainly include the very important larger structural factors of markets, political shifts, and professional/industry norms, a full picture of tabloid newspapers as a social phenomenon can only emerge when the relationship between the tabloids and their readers is understood. Tabloid media content obtains its full meaning as it is consumed. In much of the debate around tabloid newspapers, critics have condemned them after judging only what they saw on the page in front of them—assuming that meaning is either intrinsic in the textual representation or over-determined by journalists and editors located in big exploitative conglomerates, with readers as passive recipients or even victims of tabloid messages. A critical reading of tabloid content and genre is no doubt important, as is an interrogation of the political economy within which these papers are located. But the cultural dimension of tabloid journalism, the “web of meanings, rituals, conventions and symbol systems” (Zelizer 2008, 88), is often lost from sight in these analyses. The role of media in culture cannot be isolated, precisely because the media establishment itself is Truth or Trash? 119 “firmly anchored” in culture (Bird 2003, 3). Understanding tabloid journalism in this cultural sense would require a closer examination of the interrelationship among tabloid readers, tabloid media, and tabloid journalists. After having discussed the political and economic context, the tabloid genre and content, and the professional response to tabloid media in the preceding chapters, the focus now shifts to this interrelationship. In this chapter, tabloid media will be approached from the perspective of their readers, and in the next chapter the views of tabloid journalists and editors will be discussed. The aim of this study of reader responses is to explore how tabloids are related to shifting political, social, and cultural identities and to the lived experience of readers as active audiences rather than passive consumers. Approaching Tabloids from the Perspective of Their Readers The debate about the new tabloids in South Africa has thus far focused exclusively on issues of production, such as professional standards (or the lack thereof), ethical issues (invasion of privacy, stereotyping, gendered representations ), and aspects of form and style (like melodrama, sensationalism, etc.). Critics have neglected the perspective of readers by assuming a “top-down,” onedirectional influence of tabloids on post-apartheid society. A focus on audience perceptions of tabloids could indicate how media use correlates with social stratification in post-apartheid society, and how these readers position themselves politically and culturally in terms of the mediated public sphere. Such an analysis of audience reading strategies should not, however, be understood in isolation from the structural conditions that shape audiences’ meaning-making and that limit the range of possible meanings derived from the text (Steenveld 2006, 20– 21). This relationship among experience, social position, and consumption will only become clear if tabloid audiences are (a) considered as active readers rather than passive recipients and (b) understood as diverse rather than homogenous, occupying a range of social identities within different material contexts. Because tabloid readers occupy a range of identities...

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