The next time laments are heard and verdicts rendered about the media’s lack of attention to religion, will someone please remember Weekly World News?
As everyone whose life experience has not been limited to upscale food stores or buying groceries online knows, Weekly World News was the supermarket tabloid printed only in black and white but carrying articles as colorful as the most fevered imaginations could produce.
When those articles did not feature a resurrected Elvis, the love life of Bigfoot or space aliens meeting secretly with leading politicians, they often dealt with religion: “Baby Born With Angel Wings” (accompanied by photo). “Quick Test Tells If You’re Going to Heaven or Hell!” “Adam & Eve’s Skeletons Found ”” in Colorado!”
Now Weekly World News is closing shop, although it will maintain an online presence. Circulation has dropped from what the paper claimed was almost a million in the late 1980s to under 100,000. In newspapers like this one, the flamboyant tabloid’s demise has been duly noted, with nostalgic tributes to its fondness for swamp monsters and its high moments of creativity (“Florida Man Screams From the Grave, My Brain Is Missing!”).
In The Washington Post on Aug. 7, Peter Carlson provided an unusually full and amusing account of the tabloid’s rise and fall, the cast of characters on its staff and its “unique philosophy of journalism: Don’t fact-check your way out of a good story.”
My favorite WWN front page, which I showed my students, had the following: WILDCATTERS DRILL DOWN TO HELL! The page-filling photo showed drillers running away from an exploding well, with a huge cloud and an image of the Devil, grinning, in the middle. (We were reading “The Inferno” at the time.) I remember two other headlines on the same page. One was MISSING LINK FOUND IN OUTER MONGOLIA! The link to us humans, of course. The other was TOMB OF PHARAOH’S DAUGHTER WHO RESCUED BABY MOSES FOUND!”
Back in my oil trading days, we faxed a WWN article to serveral companies “proving” that the government was hording heating oil and therefore bringing doom to the freezing northeast. Funny thing, no one thought it was a credible news source. Nonetheless, we kept our long in heating oil, . . . You can trust Big Oil but you can’t trust The Man, so says WWN.
Whaaat??? You mean there might not have been a swamp monster or a baby born with angel wings??? Oh, ye of little faith.
Where I used to work several of the guys I worked with would make copies of the WWN headlines and especially outrageous articles. Then they pasted the face of another worker over any photos and plastered the photos all over his office wall. Eveywhere you looked you saw his face. Be it of Woman has 60 pound baby, Man grows turnip in the shape of James Madison or Scientists discover Alligator boy in Florida springs. I think he may even have been Devil Baby. I remember some horns and pitchfork.
Awwww, I’m rather bummed they’re calling it quits. Whenever I needed a good belly laugh, I’d pick up the WWN at the supermarket. I never thought about how many articles they had pertaining to religion but, yeah, in retrospect it was a substantial number. But even with spoofs as the catalyst, thoughtful discussions about beliefs can emerge.
Take heart. There’s still the ENS.