Most people, if you dig down deep, go to the supermarket for tabloids, and not just the glossy celebrity magazines that have multiplied like gremlins in the last ten years. I mean real, honest-to-badness tabloids, the newspapers for which truth and responsibility and even reality are other people's hang-ups.
And now, the world is poorer, thanks to the news this week that American Media will cease publication of one of the great pieces of trash this country has ever produced: the Weekly World News. (Read more about it here and here.)
Published since 1979, the WWN has staunchly refused, for the most part, to tell us about Lindsay or Paris or Britney, instead opting for stories about aliens, Satan, giant pigs rampaging through the Georgia woods, Nostradamus-like prophets, time travel, and, of course, Bat Boy. In an increasingly frightening world, the Weekly World News provided regular -- you might even say weekly -- respite in the form of pedal-to-the-metal stupidity. It's too bad that WWN didn't break the story of its own demise, because then we would know that it wasn't true.
[Ben Greenman's acclaimed new book of fiction, A Circle is a Balloon and Compass Both, is now available. Order it here.]
Reader Comments ( Page 3 of 12)
31. What with "creative" writers sneeking into the mainstream media -- such as Janet Cooke at the Washington Post* back in the '80s and that guy from the New York Times just a few years ago -- I hope those now unemployed from WWN will not try to get jobs with legitimate news organizations. I like to be able to DEPEND on what I read, watch or hear is as close to the truth as possible. Beware, news editors; these people may come at you like mosquitoes. (*The Washington Post had to embarrassingly return a Pulitzer Prize that Cooke's fraudulant reporting won. That is unacceptable.)
Tom S. at 2:42PM on Jul 24th 2007
32. How sad! I always got a good laugh out of their headlines. Weekly World News was so funny! THIS is the paper more suited for Rupert Murdoch to be trying to buy. It's only slightly more outrageous than FOX "News".
Todd at 2:41PM on Jul 24th 2007
33. Can we forget J.F.K. visits his own grave?
essleyr at 2:56PM on Jul 24th 2007
34. This is a conspiracy. WWN has always reported the truth and the government is not interested in having its dirty laundry aired in public so they bought the magazine and closed it down. I know this because Bat Boy told me.
cfernos at 3:02PM on Jul 24th 2007
35. My favorite was Vegetarian Mom Gives Birth to Green Baby.
Ann at 2:43PM on Jul 24th 2007
36. The best Cover was: My Cat is posessed by Satan & is beginning to look like Hitler!!!!
Todd at 2:42PM on Jul 24th 2007
37. STATUE OF ELVIS FOUND ON MARS. What more do I have to say?
Bucky at 2:46PM on Jul 24th 2007
38. My favorites were Bigfoot Stole My Wife and Skull Hundreds of Years Old Sings and Chants. Priceless. Also all the pictures of various presidents with the Aliens. Great fun. RIP
Terry Smith at 2:45PM on Jul 24th 2007
39. When my daughter and I would go to the grocery store, we would laugh at the ridiculous stories.
Later when she went away to college and was homesick, I sent her the Batboy Found story. It was taped to the side of her desk in the dorm for her first two years of college. We still laugh over how it could brighten her day.
KathyO at 2:46PM on Jul 24th 2007
40. My mom used to get these for us when we were kids and going on long car rides. I remember when the "World's Fattest Man" (who was over 4,000 lbs) had married the world's fattest woman, and then in a subsequent issue when he was missing, and they were supposedly worried that cannibals had gotten him. And Ed Anger!!! He made me so mad when I was a kid!!
shana at 2:48PM on Jul 24th 2007
41. My devotion to WWN started the summer I graduated from high school when I was standing at the Kroger buying M&M's and a coke. On the cover was the headline "64 members of Congress are aliens!" And then it showed the thumbnail pics of all. That hung on my friend's mom's fridge for years (she was a bitter and disillusioned ex-hippy who laughingly said, pre MIB, "that sure explains a lot, doesn't it?")
Tammy at 8:40PM on Jul 24th 2007
42. The Weekly World News was just so much fun.
My favorite headline:
"Woman Gives Birth to Bavarian Yak"
certainly much more fun than the gossip on stars/or so called famous personalities that nobody gives a darn about it in the first place.
RIP Weekly World News.. you will be missed.
CeeC at 2:55PM on Jul 24th 2007
43. I will miss the crossword puzzle most of all. It was actually one of the best ones out there. Not easy - but not too hard. I used to explain to the cashier, every week, that I was only buying the paper for the crosswords. I don't see anything wrong with an escape from reality every once in a while. Helps to forget who's running the country :)
dmpsmiley at 2:50PM on Jul 24th 2007
44. You failed to mention the marvelous headline "Human Head Transplant" which was apparently performed in China. What can beat that?
Melanie O'Brien at 2:55PM on Jul 24th 2007
45. Seriously, the WWN had funnier headlines than The Onion
Rich Knight at 2:53PM on Jul 24th 2007