Sensationalism in journalism

As in drama and fiction, conflict is the chief criterion in news story selection. This drama of news is chiefly one involving individuals, causing journalists often to create instant celebrities, who must cope with the various phases of his or her public status. The involuntary celebrity presents journalists with ethical challenges embedded within the deep structures of their organizational and professional newswork. This thesis considers the case of Carol Lynn Kendall, who became famous in 1985 after her involvement in a car bombing for which her brother was convicted. This work focuses on news columns and interviews with journalists and with Kendall and on theory about newswork and the creation of fame. From this, the thesis draws an ideal type of the involuntary celebrity and shows how it is constructed and destroyed as well as how we might use it to understand the media's relationship with such individuals.

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.