Content area
Full Text
Kevin Glynn, Tabloid Culture: Trash Taste, Popular Power, and the Transformation of American Television (Durham: Duke UP, 2000), x + 324 pp., $59.95 (cloth), $19.95 (paper).
After showing video clips of U.S. tabloid television to my class on popular culture at Sofia University, the students were bursting with questions: Who watches these programs? Do viewers accept and believe what they are seeing? Are Americans really so naive? Tabloid television-in the manner of The Jerry Springer Show, America's Most Wanted, and A Current Affair-has yet to reach Bulgaria, though with the arrival in mid-2000 of Rupert Murdoch's BTV (the first private nationwide television station in the country) it may only be a matter of time. In the meantime, however, students from Bulgaria (and elsewhere) may find some answers to their questions in Tabloid Culture.
Kevin Glynn (currently teaching American Studies in New...