I Watched a Wild Hog Eat My Baby: A Colorful History of Tabloids and Their Cultural Impact
by Bill Sloan
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Book Summary Information
Author: Bill SloanEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2001-03
ISBN: 1573929026
Number of pages: 251
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Book Reviews of I Watched a Wild Hog Eat My Baby: A Colorful History of Tabloids and Their Cultural Impact
Book Review: Inside View Of Tabloid Journalism
Summary: 2 Stars
"I Watched A Wild Hog Eat My Baby" is an inside account of the rise of the supermarket tabloids in American culture, written by a veteran of tab editorial staffs. No doubt because of that, it suffers from the same flaws, full of innuendo and rumor-mongering, giving you a juicy if never solid story.
At the heart of Bill Sloan's book, published in 2001, is Generoso Pope Jr. In 1952 he bought a nearly-defunct Hearst paper called the New York Enquirer. Remaking it into a scandal sheet called the National Enquirer, he made a mint by printing stories no respectable newspaper publisher would want and paying reporters and editors well above the market norm to ease any pangs of conscience they might have.
Pope was a mysterious guy with reputed connections to the CIA and Mafia. What precisely those connections were, or what they might have meant, is one of many things Sloan leaves unexplored. In many cases, as when he discusses Pope's involvement with the attempted assassination of Mob boss Frank Costello, Sloan raises the question only to firmly assert: "No one will know for sure, of course."
Sloan does this a lot in the book. He also quotes numerous unnamed sources when discussing the most salacious details of his story, something he no doubt picked up from his years writing for the Enquirer and wanna-bes like Midnight (now the Globe). He allows himself the unusual device of quoting people like Pope not from interviews or even memories of past conversations with them, but conversations he was told about by third parties, now dead. Once a tabloid writer, always a tabloid writer.
Most of Sloan's quotes seem to be pulled from articles published in mainstream newspapers and magazines, making it a bit of a clip job when its not pulling quotes out of thin air. Only 12 people are listed by name as being interviewed, though Sloan assures us this is because American Media Inc., the publisher of all supermarket tabloids today, will not allow anyone in their employ to talk to him on the record.
The only thing that kept me from giving this book one star is a hilarious middle chapter, which describes how a series of drunken story meetings at one tab facing the scrap heap and deciding what the hell led directly to the most outr? element of supermarket tabloids, what became the UFO, Bigfoot, and Elvis subculture cornered today by Weekly World News and referenced in this book's title. That part shows Sloan had a better book in him if he only worked harder at it.
The stories contained here are more icky than fun. Whatever insight offered on the tabs' dominating focus on celebrities, and how that focus trickled up to mainstream media, isn't anything you can't see for yourself watching Entertainment Tonight or clicking on The Drudge Report. For the most part, Sloan is content to tell you everything you already know, and nothing else he bothers to pin down with any authority.
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