True Journalist Loves Tabloid Hot Headlines!

Some of the most respectable, responsible, serious and sober journalists I know have a secret appetite for the tabloids.

They’re outlandish. They’re naughty. They’re irresistible.

SOURCES REVEAL!!!! Most of my colleagues have at least one tab headline memorized.

“OK, I’ll give you one of my favorites: ‘Big Foot Stole My Wife,’ ” said a Times financial writer and sometime devotee of the Weekly World News. “It’s a story that the big papers missed.”

“I love to read them in the checkout stand,” said a sportswriter, who remembers lurid headlines like so many baseball stats. “My favorite recent one had a picture of a chunky bald-headed woman, and it said, ‘Strange Disease Makes Women Look like Kojak.’

“The best one is, how’d it go? . . . Oh yeah: ‘Man With Two Tongues Speaks Two Languages at the Same Time.”

He picked up the phone and dialed a friend for a quick fact check.

“ ‘Man’s Eyes Stolen in Sleep.’ Yup, that’s a good one,” he said.

Even my editor is an addict. This is his current favorite: “HITLER CAPTURED! Nazi madman trapped on way to Iraq to help Saddam Hussein.”

EXCLUSIVE!!!!! Sometimes the tabs even print genuine news stories--from their own inimitable angle.

Murder, for example. It’s usually gory and always in bad taste. But respectable newspapers are not supposed to make their readers gag at breakfast. Our tabloid antiheroes are under no such constraints. First prize goes to the New York Post: “Headless Body in Topless Bar.”

I never noticed the tabloids until I became a reporter. I got hooked in my very first newsroom. It was New York City, and after deadline, the reporters would sit around trying to predict the Post headline for the next day. We never came close. My favorite was when Mayor Ed Koch caught a mugger red-handed. The Post titled its picture of the gleeful mayor: “Kotcha!”

Once in a while, the tabloids cover a story with a zest and flair that more buttoned-down publications can only envy. An editorial page editor remembers New York City grinding to a halt the day a mountain climber scaled the World Trade Center.

“This was an incredible story. The whole city literally stopped,” he said. “And the Daily News ran a huge picture on Page One with a huge headline, ‘HUMAN FLY!’

“It was really like right out of the Daily Planet.”

Serious newspapers are supposed to be objective. But the tabs can do political commentary on Page One--as long as it’s funny. Remember the headline when President Ford refused to help New York out of bankruptcy? “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”

Not much has changed since then. This September, Air Force Gen. Michael J. Dugan was fired for telling reporters details of U.S. contingency plans for a surgical strike against Saddam Hussein. The Chicago Sun-Times weighed in with a headline that was, well, open to misinterpretation: “Air Head Fired.”

UNBELIEVABLE . . . BUT TRUE!!!! Some people deny ever plunking down a quarter for the junk food of journalism.

“I don’t read them. I truly don’t read them. Honestly, I don’t,” said a 25-year hard-news veteran, who admits only to an occasional bout with People magazine. “But I do look at them while I’m standing in line.”

I have no shame. My favorite Sunday mornings are spent lazing over the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Weekly World News for comic relief.

Maybe I like the tabs because some days the reality I write about is so depressing--or so messy--that I wish I could just make up a simpler version. As the sportswriter put it, the tabs are a primer in “how to condense and distort reality in 10 words or less.”

Maybe it’s the thrill of seeing wrongdoing go unpunished. I mean, how do they get away with it?

Or maybe it’s nostalgia for the grubby romance of the old newspaper days, when hard-drinking men could stamp out their cigarettes on the newsroom floor. That was long before my time, and they didn’t let women join the fun. Nowadays, we have carpeted newsrooms, drug testing and female bylines on Page One. But I imagine those tabloid reporters still get to wear fedoras.

“I think people read them more than they admit to,” said a Times copy editor. She is a meticulous person who hates sloppy grammar and half-baked facts. But she has a huge tabloid photo of a 167-pound baby taped up behind her computer.

“I don’t like to tell people I bought the Enquirer, but sometimes you just have to.”