Truth or Trash? - Tabloids hotly debated in South Africa

Understanding Tabloid Journalism and Lived Experience

Th e changing media landscape and the shift s taking place in post- apartheid South African society only partly explain the popularity of the new tabloid papers. Th ese macro- shift s in industry and society provide us with a po liti cal, economic, and so cio log i cal explanation of why tabloid newspapers emerged during a given period in the history of post- apartheid South Africa; the niche that they fi lled 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 fi rst 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, po- liti cal, 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 enter- tainment and diversion at the same time as they contribute to the way readers view the world, forge their relationships with others, and fi ll their places as citi- zens in society. While a critical perspective on tabloid media should certainly include the very important larger structural factors of markets, po liti cal shift s, 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 aft er judg- ing only what they saw on the page in front of them— assuming that meaning is either intrinsic in the textual repre sen ta tion 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 po liti cal 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 oft en lost from sight in these analyses. Th e role of media in culture cannot be isolated, precisely because the media establishment itself is

“fi rmly 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. Aft er having discussed the po liti cal and economic context, the tabloid genre and content, and the professional response to tabloid media in the preceding chapters, the focus now shift s 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. Th e aim of this study of reader re- sponses is to explore how tabloids are related to shift ing po liti cal, social, and cultural identities and to the lived experience of readers as active audiences rather than passive consumers.

Approaching Tabloids from the Perspective of Th eir Readers

Th e 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 repre sen tations), and aspects of form and style (like melodrama, sensationalism, etc.). Crit- ics have neglected the perspective of readers by assuming a “top- down,” one- directional infl uence of tabloids on post- apartheid society. A focus on audience perceptions of tabloids could indicate how media use correlates with social strat- ifi cation in post- apartheid society, and how these readers position themselves po liti cally 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). Th is 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 diff erent material contexts. Because tabloid readers occupy a range of identities in their daily lives, and reading tabloids is one activity among many and one articulation of identity among others (Bird 1992, 110), contradictory and complex meanings could emerge from such an analysis. Even though a study of tabloid audiences might start by identifying them in terms of pre- conceived market segments or categories (which in the South African case, due to the per sis tence of historical labels, correlate largely with racial and ethnic signifi ers), the researcher should remain attentive to the diff erences, tensions, and divergences between the perspectives of tabloid readers and the “fl uid, shift ing nature of ‘audience’ ” (ibid., 111). In the study of tabloid readers’ interactions with these newspapers, it should therefore not be assumed that the audience is already “out there,” ready to be found or already defi ned in terms of existing demographic categories. While the continued relevance of racial categories in post- apartheid South Africa and their correlation with class (and therefore “market segments”) suggests taking existing demographics as a

starting point for analysis, the researcher should also remain attentive to the transgression or blurring of boundaries in the pro cess of social interaction between readers and tabloids and among readers themselves. Care should be taken not to homogenize “tabloid readers” as a group, but to be aware of the diff erences among readerships of diff erent tabloids and even within the readership of one tabloid. Th e very notion of audience has become problematic because the media do not have uniform “eff ects” on masses of people, as was assumed in early mass- communication research. People are active, selective, and unpredictable makers of meaning in the pro cess of interacting with media (Bird 2003, 3).

Although neglected in the South African debate thus far, several international studies have examined tabloid content and meaning from the reader’s perspective. Attention to audience interpretations of media texts has formed part of various scholarly approaches since the 1940s, when the earlier media- eff ects model, which assumed a direct causal link between media stimulus and audience response, was challenged by an observation of the more complex ways that social interactions infl uence audience reception of information. Th is observation has led to the emergence of early theoretical models of social interaction among an active audience, such as Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet’s (1944) two- step fl ow model and the uses- and- gratifi cations model (Biressi and Nunn 2008, 282).

International studies of tabloid audiences have largely fl owed from the so- called “cultural turn” in audience studies that parted ways with earlier mass- communication audience studies in favor of a socio- cultural analysis that examined audiences in relation to broader networks of power. Areas of specifi c interest within this approach, associated with the Birmingham School of Cultural Stud- ies under the leadership of Stuart Hall, were media’s mode of address and the way that media audiences could identify with, oppose, or negotiate the dominant meaning of media texts (ibid., 283). Hall’s infl uential encoding/decoding model (1970) off ered a way of understanding the production of meaning in media texts as a dynamic pro cess of negotiation in which producers and audiences are mutually implicated. David Morley’s seminal Nationwide study (1980) related audience interpretation of media texts to social and class position, thereby locating view- ing practices within a “politicized cultural map” (Nunn and Biressi, 2008, 283).

More recently, scholars such as Nick Couldry have sought to approach media from within a broad network of everyday social practices. Couldry (2004, 115) describes this approach as one that

understands media not as texts or structures of production, but as practice . . . [T]his paradigm aims to move beyond old debates of media eff ects and the relative impor- tance of po liti cal economy and audience interpretation, at the same time as moving beyond a narrow concentration on audience practices, to study the whole range of practices that are oriented towards media and the role of media in ordering other practices in the social world.

Couldry (ibid., 116) also distinguishes between an anthropological approach to media practices and the critical audience research done by scholars such as Hall, David Morley, and Ien Ang while further setting these two approaches apart from

earlier traditions such as those set in experimental social sciences (studying “ef- fects” from a behavioralist perspective), the critical Marxist approach of po liti cal economy, and semiotic analyses associated with post– World War II Eu ro pe an structuralism and post- structuralism. Instead of siding with one of these approaches, which have oft en been pitted against each other in “internecine dis- putes” about what the appropriate theoretical approach to a study of audiences would be, Couldry proposes a new paradigm for the general study of media in social life. Th is paradigm would approach media more loosely and broadly within a broader social context of “action and knowledge” (ibid., 117). Couldry relates this paradigm to Bird’s work, in which she does not attempt to isolate the role of media in culture, but rather views media as enmeshed within culture itself. Th is approach to media as cultural practice can be summarized as: “what types of things do people do in relation to media? And what types of things do people say in relation to media?” (ibid., 121). Such an approach sees media not as central to society (and then studies how people interpret or interact with media), but as part of a wide range of social practices and experiences. Instead of being the central focus of people’s interactions, media occurs within people’s relationships, experiences, and habits. Media texts are therefore only one facet of the overall social practice which is oriented toward media (ibid., 126). Spitulnik (1993) has also ar- gued for an approach to media studies that moves beyond a consideration of media from a primarily textual point of view to one that sees the meaning of media as not only to be found in media messages, but also in media’s cultural, social, and economic roles and in the everyday practices of consumption. From the media- anthropological perspective that Spitulnik proposes, a textual analysis of media will be “incomplete” without an analysis of “the culture of media production, the po liti cal economy and social history of media institutions and the various practices of media consumption that exist in any given society” (ibid., 295). As the cultural studies tradition (for instance Hall’s encoding/decoding model and Mor- ley’s later adaptation thereof) has already shown, interpretations of media texts should be understood within the social and class positions of their readers, since these positions may infl uence the meaning derived from media texts. Because the range of social and class positions of media audiences diff er, a variety of interpretations of media texts are possible. From this point of view, the criticism that tabloid content might adversely aff ect audience behavior (“the impact this type of pulp journalism has on society,” as suggested by Rabe 2007, 29– 30),¹ becomes dif- fi cult to sustain, based as it is on a prediction of a certain “media eff ect” by a media text on an audience conceived of as a monolithic entity. Media anthropologists suggest that a view of audiences as active interpreters of media is taken even further, to a “post- content” or “post- text” position where the production– consumption dichotomy itself is rethought (Spitulnik 1993, 298).²

Taking such a holistic media- anthropological approach would mean understanding the use of tabloid newspapers within a broader social context, not only as texts or messages but as points of reference in people’s everyday lives. Such an approach would mean taking media seriously in terms of its important position within contemporary social life, without exaggerating that position as being

necessarily central to people’s experience (so as to avoid perpetuating what Couldry [2005] called the “myth of the mediated centre”).

In the context of this book, such an approach would (partly, alongside a larger ethnographic study of readers’ social interaction with tabloids, which falls out- side the scope of this book) mean taking tabloid newspapers and their audiences seriously (as seriously as the elite press has been taken as a mea sure of the post- apartheid public sphere), instead of dismissing the papers out of hand as inferior journalistic products or the audiences as somehow misguided or victimized by exploitative media. Tabloids are oft en defi ned by elite journalists and readers as

“the epitome of ‘trash’ reading,” and accordingly its readers are oft en ste reo typed or dismissed: “[i]f tabloids are trash, so are their readers” (Bird 1992, 107). Th is dismissal extends to the producers of tabloids, who are looked down upon by elite journalists as having betrayed their profession or sold their souls to com- mercial interests. South African tabloid editors and journalists, for instance, have been described as “brainless,” as they “barely use ce re bral matter to con- template these matters (the perpetuation of gender ste reo types)” (Rabe 2007, 29).

In other words, audiences and tabloid producers are both assumed to lack good taste and judgement, and share culpability for displaying symptoms of a “major cultural failing” (Langer cited in Biressi and Nunn 2008, 283).

In contrast, research infl uenced by the “cultural turn” in audience studies has focused on how audiences use meanings created by active readings in their everyday lives, and how such (oft en subversive or irreverent) readings can be used to engage with or challenge hegemonic cultural, social or po liti cal discourses (Biressi and Nunn 2008, 283). Tabloids have been reviled for their preference for the emotional, sensational and dramatic rather than the rational debate of the idealized public sphere (ibid., 284), but exactly this preference for pop u lar knowledge and experience can serve to subvert elite epistemologies linked to class hier- archies. Th e extent of this subversion should not be overstated, since tabloid readers are themselves constructed within patterns of consumption controlled by huge conglomerates. But although tabloids are oft en criticized for being apo- liti cal, the avoidance of politics- as- usual ought to be read in terms of the discon- nect between mainstream politics and certain sections of the public (Bird 1992, 130). As such, tabloid news has been seen as a way to make news relevant to a sec- tion of society that would otherwise reject or ignore it (Sparks 2000, 9). At the same time, tabloid readers have been known to engage in what Hall (1970) would refer to as an “oppositional” or “negotiated” reading by knowingly choosing what tabloid stories to believe in. Stories were considered true only when they fi t a reader’s frame of reference (Bird 1992, 121).

If one agrees that tabloid readers actively engage with tabloid content rather than passively receive these media “messages,” and if this engagement is studied from a holistic perspective (as off ered by the cultural studies or media- anthropology approaches), there are two implications: First, the causal link between tabloid content and audience behavior or attitudes, suggested by some of tabloid media’s critics, becomes untenable. For instance, the fact that tabloids publish pictures of semi- nude women on page three cannot automatically be

taken as an indication that this will lead to increases of domestic violence, rape, or similar “social ills” (Rabe 2007, 29– 30). Similarly, a fantastical story about a supernatural occurrence being published in a tabloid newspaper does not necessarily mean that this story will be taken as the literal truth by its readers in the same way as, for instance, a factual account of an accident, using conventions like the “inverted pyramid” of news reports. Th is means that the journalistic–

ethical value of “truth” should not only be understood in terms of its correspon- dence with an assumed objective reality, but as part of the complex social and cultural framework through which people navigate their daily lives. In order to be in a position to better assess the value (or lack thereof) of tabloid content, an attempt should be made to understand the diff erent interpretations of tabloid stories, infl uenced by a range of circumstances including the type of story, the par tic u lar tabloid in which it was published (because there are diff erent types of tabloids and they should not be treated as a monolithic group), and the social or class position of the reader.

Second, the consumption of tabloid media will be seen as part of people’s daily lives in contemporary society, not merely as texts but as points of reference within the dense texture of their lived experiences. Understanding what tabloids mean in post- apartheid South African society is therefore not identical to understanding what tabloid texts mean in this society. To be sure, the reading of tabloid texts forms part of audience interaction with these media, but these newspapers also play other roles in people’s lives— they facilitate social interaction, serve as markers of class or ethnic identities, feature in daily social rituals and routines, and so forth. Audience preference for tabloids might not even have any- thing to do with their content, but with their role as objects signifying a certain social position or as markers of taste (this could explain why South African tabloids are also consumed by people who cannot read). Th ese distinctions of taste (Bourdieu 1984; see also Glenn and Knaggs 2008) in terms of media style and genre and related expectations of the role and functions of journalism in post- apartheid South African society are linked to socio- economic, cultural, and po- liti cal power. In the context of the South African media, the class positions to which these value judgements and preferences are linked also largely map onto the racial and ethnic categories inherited from apartheid that continue to shape South African society in the second decade of democracy.³

To understand South African tabloid media in this holistic way is to understand pop u lar media as a “locus of contestation,” where the choice of media in itself can represent an act of re sis tance against dominant discourses and practices (West and Fair 1993, 105). In the sense that tabloids are enjoyed by a mass popula- tion, they form part of pop u lar culture that is “majoritarian in a way that elite culture is not” (Glynn 2000, 8). In the South African context, an examination of how readers engage with tabloids can therefore also be seen as a study of the po- tential and limitations of pop u lar democracy mediated through pop u lar texts.

It has been said at the outset of this study that in order to understand tabloids more fully as part of the social, cultural, and po liti cal life in contemporary South Africa, they should be studied as a social phenomenon which demands a

Dalam dokumen Tabloids hotly debated in South Africa (Halaman 137-170)