With headlines like “Sex Secrets of a Russian Spy,” “Extraterrestrials Follow the Teachings of Oprah Winfrey,” and “Al Qaeda Breeding Killer Mosquitoes,” supermarket tabloids push the limits of both decency and credibility. Although they are published on newsprint, the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which checks newspaper and magazine circulation figures to determine advertising rates, counts weekly tabloids as magazines. Tabloid history can be traced to newspapers’ use of graphics and pictorial layouts in the 1860s and 1870s, but the modern U.S. tabloid began with the founding of the National Enquirer by William Randolph Hearst in 1926. The Enquirer struggled until it was purchased in 1952 by Generoso Pope, who originally intended to use it to “fight for the rights of man” and “human decency and dignity.”⁹ In the interest of profit, though, Pope settled on the “gore formula” to transform the paper’s anemic weekly circulation of seven thousand: “I noticed how auto accidents drew crowds and I decided that if it was blood that interested people, I’d give it to them.”¹⁰

By the mid-1960s, the Enquirer’s circulation had jumped to over one million through the publication of bizarre human-interest stories, gruesome murder tales, violent accident accounts, unexplained phenomena stories, and malicious celebrity gossip. By 1974, the magazine’s weekly circulation topped four million. Its popularity inspired other tabloids like Globe (founded in 1954) and Star, founded by News Corp. in 1974, and the adoption of a tabloid style by general-interest magazines such as People and Us Weekly. Today, tabloid magazine sales are down from their peak in the 1980s, but they continue to be popular. American Media in Boca Raton, Florida, owns several magazines, including two key supermarket tabloids: Star and National Enquirer.