Journalism--Objectivity

Theresa Marie Schiavo died March 31, 2005. The 41-year-old's human and
communicative faculties were so deficient that a feeding tube was necessary to
nourish her and she had been silent for 15 years. In her final month, Ms. Schiavo's
health, the dispute between her husband and parents concerning the removal of her
feeding tube, and her subsequent death were covered extensively by American
broadcast, online and print media. As she lay silent in a Florida hospice, the U.S.
Congress, the president and the courts intervened, and those who spoke about her
matter and the news media propelled her human tragedy toward the top of the public
agenda. News stories, reports and analyses of the case from Time, Newsweek, The
New York Times, The Washington Post and St. Petersburg Times are analyzed using a
critical-qualitative approach to framing.

Tabloids, often defined by the half-broadsheet size of regular newspapers, feature titillating, sensationalized stories of crime and/or scandal offered in a piquant manner. The exploratory study asks how the tabloid style was manifested in the coverage of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal of 1998 and related news, thereby fostering a hegemony in which the citizenry was distracted from more important political issues and events. The study also assesses how a critique of such tabloidization developed among journalists and scholars during the scandal. The print media analyzed are the tabloids Star magazine, The National Enquirer, and Globe , and mainstream media The New York Times and Newsweek. This study demonstrates that even the mainstream, "objective" reporting reflected sensationalism, the use of piquant and highly cliched language, and a lust for scandal, rendering it nearly indistinguishable from stories in the reviled tabloids. The related critique, led by journalists and extending to scholars who provided greater insight, precision, and elaboration, focused on the influence of the Internet and an increasingly competitive 24-hour media environment in fueling tabloidesque coverage of the scandal. The escalation of tabloid-style reporting in mainstream publications proved to be a troubling symptom of an industry already struggling under public distrust.