Tabloid Valley: Supermarket News and American Culture by Paula E. Morton, and: Tabloid, Inc.: Crimes, Newspapers, Narratives by V. Penelope Pelizzon and Nancy M. West (review)

The continuing scandal involving the British tabloids—that began last summer with revelations of illegal hacking of voice mail and payoffs to police by the News of the World—starkly illustrates the depths to which some so-called journalists will go in pursuit of a story.

The saga began with revelations that the Sunday tabloid News of the World had accessed voice mails of murdered teenager Milly Dowler and even erased some which gave family and police false hope that she was still alive, as well as messages left for family members of dead British soldiers.

The more upscale daily Guardian had been pursuing the story of illegal conduct by the tabloids since 2002. Already, an editor of the News of the World and private investigator employed by the paper had been jailed for hacking into phones used by the British Royal Family.

The earlier disclosures, for the most part, met with shrugs. “Too many of us . . . winked in amusement at the salaciousness,” wrote U.S. journalist Carl Bernstein (of Watergate fame) in Newsweek. This time, though, the public reaction on both sides of the Atlantic was different.

Some speculated that had to do with a perception of dishonoring the dead and abusing the powerless. “It ceases to be a game when it impacts on people who have no power and no money and have suffered enormous misfortune,” said Emily Bell, a professor at Columbia University’s journalism school, told The New York Times (July 9, 2011). Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, is the former director of digital content for Guardian News and Media, the British newspaper company.

The decision by News Corp., controlled by international media mogul Rupert Murdoch, ultimately to shut down the News of the World further signaled the significant difference: The paper, which brought in about a billion dollars a year in revenue, was the best-selling Sunday newspaper in Britain with a circulation of 2.7 million.

The police bribery, invasions of privacy, inordinate coziness with political figures that mark the ever-widening scandal—in the name of competitive and giving readers what they want—all seem to mark a new low in the excesses of the press in pursuit of exclusive information. Or were they simply the 21st century manifestation of long-observed phenomena? The scandal also raises such questions as: Was this an idiosyncratic and exclusively British phenomenon?

And, even more pressing, could it happen here?

Certainly it can—and has. There’s no way to quarantine such practices on the other side of the Atlantic. But at the risk of being labeled a Pollyanna by some media critics, I’d say an emphatic “no” if asked whether such practices have become widespread here.

That’s not to ignore examples of questionable—even illegal tactics by U.S. media.

The National Enquirer came under scrutiny after it published details of Farrah Fawcett’s cancer that seemed to come straight from her medical records. A hospital worker later pleaded guilty to a felony for accessing her file. It is common practice at the Enquirer to pay sources thousands of dollars, and sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, for such information.

Among the mainstream media, the Chiquita Banana case involving the Cincinnati Enquirer comes to mind. According to the American Journalism Review (September 1998), in that case the paper backed away “from a year of painstaking research because, it alleged, reporter Mike Gallagher had illegally tapped into Chiquita’s voice mail system and used information he obtained as a result in stories questioning Chiquita’s business practices in Latin America.”

And certainly too-cozy relations with police departments—to say nothing of Dumpster-diving in search of celebrity and gossip-driven journalism—continue to exist...