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Pop culture news comes from everywhere nowadays. It’s on paper, it’s on about every social media app on your phone and it’s what you’re reading right now.
But how do you know what tea you’re reading is real? Obviously I’m trustworthy, but what about the millions of articles, stories, ads, pages and videos about pop culture?
Let me tell you about tabloids. Tabloids write about celebrity gossip: who said what to whom, who went behind whose back, who broke up with whom and who cheated on whom. Tabloids are thriving in a multi-million dollar industry of celebrity news on almost every platform, and here’s the problem with that:
The same magazines — People, Enquirer, Star, Lifestyle, OK!, In Touch, Us and more — have been producing clickbait titles to promote their untrue content for years. The turn of the 2010s flooded all the tabloids onto social media with an exponential growth in size. Open up Snapchat right now and scroll down the discover page. There’s stories, news and ads from Beauty Insider, PopBuzz, The Dodo, MTV, WatchMojo, The Cut, BuzzFeed, Refinery 29, Teen Vogue, People, LadyLike, So Yummy, The Telegraph, Daily Mail and the list goes on.
“I hate all the clickbaity things on Snapchat, and if there’s too many ads I give up on it. Credible sources usually don’t come from Snapchat, but lots of pop culture sources elsewhere aren’t credible either,” first-year Teresa Keefer said. So how does one know what makes a tabloid a tabloid, and why should you avoid them?
Tabloid news only covers certain topics. You know, the scandals, affairs, cheaters, rumors, gossip and whatever they can stretch the truth on. Tabloids write their content in a few ways. They can purchase photos from paparazzi and lie about the context, rely on an untrustworthy inside source, use a bogus title for a subpar story or write with tons of bias to stretch the truth. The whole point of tabloids is to make money. But what about the trustworthy articles? How does anyone know what’s a rumor and what’s true?
“I’m not an expert but I think I am pretty good at determining what’s real. I rely heavily on the name of the source or URL to tell if it’s real,” sophomore Makenna Piper said.
So why do people read tabloids? Piper said she knows most pop culture stories are fake.
“I read them every once in awhile out of morbid curiosity, and I just read it critically without believing what it says,” Piper said.
Junior Lizzie Zonarich said she knows who to trust and who to avoid.
“The news sources are merely giving you the facts, or so you think,” Zonarich said. “A lot of the news articles I read are fact-checked and updated as time goes by with more information.” More and more tabloid sources take from the source, like a celebrity’s Instagram story, and stretch the truth. But Keefer found a way around tabloids news.
“I only trust it coming straight from the person’s mouth and take it with a grain of salt,” Keefer said.
So what’s the best way to avoid fake tabloid stories? Should you give in to clickbait titles and just be wary of believing the story, only stick to a few reliable sources or stay away from news altogether and just listen to the celebrities themselves?
Keefer reminded me of the time BBC, a trustworthy news source, lied about the context of YouTuber Pewdiepie’s controversy in 2017; I know of huge sources, like Buzzfeed or Huffington Post, that write both credible articles and untrustworthy gossip. But then who’s to say that sticking to the source itself won’t be just as biased as the news sources taking from them? A celebrity caught in a scandal isn’t going to tell the truth.
“I think you have to pick and choose what you believe at the end of the day and formulate your own opinion. It’s really important that people pay attention to worldly news as well as reading about something interesting and light-hearted,” Zonarich said.
A general rule of thumb for readers attempting to get to the real story is to listen to everything from every side of the argument, but don’t believe anything just because it comes in a pretty package.
