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I Watched a Wild Hog Eat My Baby: A Colorful History of Tabloids and Their Cultural Impact

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"Enquiring Minds" who want the true inside scoop on the supermarket tabloids and the strange people who publish them can find it all in Bill Sloan's "I Watched A Wild Hog Eat My Baby".

There have been perhaps a half dozen books and any number of articles claiming to reveal the inner workings of the tabs. All, however, have been written by writers from the outside looking in, writers with little actual experience at the tabs trying to cash in for a quick buck, or writers with axes to grind - in most instances, all three.

Sloan, however, has prowled the inner sanctums of all the tabs. He has been the editor of the Globe and the National Tattler, top writer with the National Enquirer and close friends of editors, writers and reporters at the Star, Weekly World News, the National Examiner and the Sun. His connection with the tabloids goes back more than 30 years.

What's more, Sloan himself is a writer of national reputation, with dozens of mainstream books and articles, both fiction and non-fiction. As a professional journalist, he was a Pulitzer Prize nominee while an investigative reporter with the Dallas Times Herald.

Despite its rather bizarre title, Sloan's book is the definitive history of the supermarket tabloids over the last 30 years. He does not concentrate on the weird stories the tabs are famous for, but on the people who produced what is, arguably, a major phenomena of American journalism.

The book is briming with anecdotes, first person quotes and insights into the thinking of the sometimes eccentric Gene Pope, the godfather of the supermarket tabs, Mike Rosenblum, his most successful imitator, and Ian Calder, who largely responsible for the tabs' shift to celebrity-hounding after 1975.

If there is any criticism of Sloan's coverage of the early history of the Enquirer and supermarket tabloids, it's his failure to give more ateention to Dino Gallo, Nat Chrzan, Mel Snyder, Ted Mutch and Carl Grothmann, who all played major roles in Pope's shift from carnage to an almost respectable, near conventional format between 1969 to 1975. Curiously, this was the era during which the Enquirer enjoyed a soaring circulation, going from less than a million to five million.

In the final chapter, Sloan speculates on the future of the tabloids, beleaguered by falling circulation, televisions shows, some of which have gone where even tabs fear to go, and the new Barons of Baloney, the bean counters who would be Pope.

Unequivocally YES! And that is why you MUST read this book!! After all, who knew that the National Enquirer was originally owned by a Pope? And financed by a Mafia kingpin? Hey, Bill Sloan knows and YOU will too, after reading this book.

If research were gold, this book would be Ft. Knox! There is more research here than you can shake a stick at--but who'd want to? You'll be too busy reading! After all, you simply must know what happened when 95 million tons of oatmeal exploded in Omaha. (It was NOT a pretty site!) Or when a wild hog actually did eat a....but that's going TOO far.

"Well written" is putting it mildly. "Couldn't put it down" is an understatement. "The best bathroom book since Peyton Place" doesn't give it enough credit. "Juicy" is only slightly correct. So what do you do if you own the biggest collection of supermarket tabloids on the planet? BILL SLOAN KNEW!!

If you love those "I SLEPT WITH A SPACE ALIEN AND GOT RICH TELLING ABOUT IT" or "BIGFOOT WAS MY NANNY" kinds of articles, you'll love this book. Heck, you'll love it even if you DON'T like `em because it's so full of interesting stories and characters!!

If you read only one book this year...you'll have a very slow year. But why not make it "I WATCHED A WILD HOG EAT MY BABY"?

This extensively-researched history of American tabloids was released in 2001, the only post-1999 tabloid book so far. That's relevant, because since 1999 all major tabloids (Enquirer, Star, Globe, Examiner, Mira, Sun, Weekly World News) have been under single ownership. Some tabloid critics lament that this has undermined the tabloids' traditional competitiveness, and significantly altered their editorial policies and news coverage.

Anything written about tabs a decade earlier would be woefully out-of-date. As Sloan comments, the 1990s have seen the "tabloidization" of mainstream media. The major media have usurped the tabs' turf, creating what Sloan calls an "identity crisis" among tabloid editors and reporters, who must now compete directly against major media in search of scandalous type celebrity news, whereas in the past the major media shunned such stories.

Sloan analyzes how such 1990s news stories as OJ, the death of Princess Di, and "Bill and Monica" affected news coverage by the tabloids and their mainstream competition.

There are some other good tabloid books, several written by "insiders" like Sloan, but this is the only tabloid history that's up-to-date, and relevant to today and the near future.

Author Bill Sloan was an editor at the Globe and Enquirer, and a Pulitzer-nominated reporter for the Dallas Times-Herald.

I liked this book a lot. It's not for most readers of the tabloids--it's for intelligent readers who want to know just how the tabs got started, and how they've influenced our entire culture. The book lives up to its subtitle--it's a colorful and fascinating story, what with the Mafia and Rupert Murdoch involved, and all the celebrities like Liz and Jackie and OJ who have been featured frequently over the years. But for me the most fascinating character was Generoso Pope, the original publisher of the Enquirer. He had Mafia connections and was also a former CIA agent. A character right out of a movie. The chapters on him were worth the price of the book, at least to me. Mr. Sloan was a writer and editor for some of the tabs, and he knows the inside story. He's also a very good writer.

And yes, the book does tell you how they come up with those crazy headlines.

"I Watched a Wild Hog EAT My Baby!!!" by Bill Sloan, reviewed by Tim
Cridland

I just speed read the new tabloid book published by Prometheus Press. I
checked it out from the LA Public Library and read most of it in one day.

The name of the book is I Watched a Wild Hog EAT My Baby!!! and it is
written by Bill Sloan, who apparently worked for a few of the tabloids in
the 70s.

There a few things that are in this book that I haven't seen elsewhere. One
is a thorough background of Generoso Pope Sr., showing his strong ties to
both the Mafia and support of Mussolini and Fascism.

In case you don't know, Pope Sr. is the father of Gene Pope Jr., founder or
the National Enquirer and inventor of the supermarket tabloid.

Sloan also verifies beyond all doubt that the National Enquirer was started
with money given or loaned by long time Pope family associate and mobster
Frank Costello.

Sloan also verifies that the Mafia influence of the National Enquirer
continued well into the 70s

Sloan doesn't give any new insight into the Pope Jr.'s CIA background. He
also seems to know little of Midnight publisher Joe Azaria's Mafia
connections, other than saying that there were reports that he had casual
contact with the Montreal Mob. In fact, there is an article from the
Montreal Gazette about Azaria where he openly admits his mob connections,
and claims to be working on a book about it. I have this article in my
files.

Sloan gives a huge amount of information about the group of tabloids that
were published in the Chicago area, of which the National Tattler is the
most remembered. Strangely, there were no connections to the Mafia or CIA
here.

on page 106 Midnight editor John Vader describes how he faked a photo for
the Midnight issue with the headline: JFK IS ALIVE ON SKORPOIS! I mention
this because the Gemstone File claims that this is actually a photo of the
kidnapped Howard Hughes. John Vader says it is staff writer on top of Monte
Royal in Montreal at sunset.

One strange thing is that Sloan makes no reference to James Randi. Randi
used to work for Midnight when he was working as a phony psychic in Montreal
nightclubs. Randi wrote and astrology column and apparently designed the
masthead for Midnight. His name is clearly seen as the artists signature on
the earliest edition of Midnight that I could find at the Quebec Library.
When I E-mailed Randi about his tabloid days, he E-mailed back saying that
it was so long ago that he hardly remembered anything. However, in an
interview with Randi in Skeptic Magazine, he was able to vividly remember
his teenage years, a time presumably before he worked at Midnight.
Prometheus Books, Sloan's publisher, also publishes several books by Randi,
making Randi's omission all the stranger.

All and all, it is a good book with lots of hard to find info and well worth
checking out from a public library.

http://(...)

Nothing is more tempting than a good headline on one of the supermarket tabloids, yet nothing existed until "I Watched a Wild Hog Eat My Baby" that explained what's behind those tempting headlines. Bill Sloan has therefore provided a true service---and a damn well written one at that---for everyone who has ever passed by the supermarket newsracks and wondered "how can they say that" in one of the eye-popping headlines. Sloan has also provided a great service to the journalistic world, most of the members of which look down their noses at tabloids journalism while trying to pull off the same type of journalism in the "credible" journalistic world. Sloan's book is top rate! If only the mainstream journalists could be half a honest about what goes into the dailies and on TV.

Author Bill Sloan takes us through the dark, mysterious world of tabloid journalism, not with a candle but a floodlight. From the old penny press to New York's yellow journals; from gory rags to the screaming celebrity headlines at today's supermarket checkout counters, it's a fascinating journey that tells us as much about ourselves as it does about the wild and wacky cast of characters who gave us those infamous "scandal sheets." Well written, funny (even hilarious) this book not only entertains but goes about the serious business of analyzing the evolution of so-called "popular journalism" and its influence on today's TV news, newspapers and magazines. Must reading for anyone involved in the news business and certainly for everyone who has ever picked up a tabloid at a checkout counter and wondered, "could this possibly be true?" Don't buy this book to read yourself to sleep. You'll be up all night.

We all let our eyes at least wander to tabloid newspaper headlines in the supermarket; but ever wonder who's behind them? Finally: here's an expose of the personalities who built the tabloids, with interviews by Bill Sloan providing insider's insights into the strange business. From roots of the tabs in soft-core smut to their current focus on celebrity sensationalism, pop culture is presented at its best - and most outrageous - in a zany story. I Watched A Wild Hog Eat My Baby: A Colorful History Of Tabloids And Their Cultural Impact is especially commended to the attention of students in Journalism, American Popular Culture, and anyone who has ever plucked one up while in a supermarket checkout counter.

I Watched a Wild Hog Eat My Baby--what a great title! It made me laugh at the bookstore, and I expected it just to be a bunch a crazy tabloid stories. But instead it's a really in-depth history of the tabloid papers. *Why* they printed scandal and gory stories, and *how* they wrote them. I've never been a reader of the tabs, but the behind the scenes stories were fascinating. Sloan did a really good job. Highly recommended!

"I Watched A Wild Hog Eat My Baby" is an inside account of the rise of the supermarket tabloids in American culture, written by a veteran of tab editorial staffs. No doubt because of that, it suffers from the same flaws, full of innuendo and rumor-mongering, giving you a juicy if never solid story.

At the heart of Bill Sloan's book, published in 2001, is Generoso Pope Jr. In 1952 he bought a nearly-defunct Hearst paper called the New York Enquirer. Remaking it into a scandal sheet called the National Enquirer, he made a mint by printing stories no respectable newspaper publisher would want and paying reporters and editors well above the market norm to ease any pangs of conscience they might have.

Pope was a mysterious guy with reputed connections to the CIA and Mafia. What precisely those connections were, or what they might have meant, is one of many things Sloan leaves unexplored. In many cases, as when he discusses Pope's involvement with the attempted assassination of Mob boss Frank Costello, Sloan raises the question only to firmly assert: "No one will know for sure, of course."

Sloan does this a lot in the book. He also quotes numerous unnamed sources when discussing the most salacious details of his story, something he no doubt picked up from his years writing for the Enquirer and wanna-bes like Midnight (now the Globe). He allows himself the unusual device of quoting people like Pope not from interviews or even memories of past conversations with them, but conversations he was told about by third parties, now dead. Once a tabloid writer, always a tabloid writer.

Most of Sloan's quotes seem to be pulled from articles published in mainstream newspapers and magazines, making it a bit of a clip job when its not pulling quotes out of thin air. Only 12 people are listed by name as being interviewed, though Sloan assures us this is because American Media Inc., the publisher of all supermarket tabloids today, will not allow anyone in their employ to talk to him on the record.

The only thing that kept me from giving this book one star is a hilarious middle chapter, which describes how a series of drunken story meetings at one tab facing the scrap heap and deciding what the hell led directly to the most outré element of supermarket tabloids, what became the UFO, Bigfoot, and Elvis subculture cornered today by Weekly World News and referenced in this book's title. That part shows Sloan had a better book in him if he only worked harder at it.

The stories contained here are more icky than fun. Whatever insight offered on the tabs' dominating focus on celebrities, and how that focus trickled up to mainstream media, isn't anything you can't see for yourself watching Entertainment Tonight or clicking on The Drudge Report. For the most part, Sloan is content to tell you everything you already know, and nothing else he bothers to pin down with any authority.