Anyone who knows my blog probably could guess I loved reading the Weekly World News in the supermarket checkout line (admittedly I’m too cheap to buy it). (See here and here on the late WWN editor Leskie Pinson, whose widow emailed me afterwards her appreciation).
With the announced closing of it later this month, mainstream newspapers are writing about the demise of it with a blindspot more obvious than Bigfoot riding atop a UFO piloted by Elvis Presley.
From the Washington Post:
“12 U.S. SENATORS ARE SPACE ALIENS!”
In 1999, somebody taped that WWN story to a wall in the Senate press gallery, where it amused the press corps, although some scribes griped that the paper had underestimated the number of aliens in the Senate by at least three or four. Reporters loved the Weekly World News. Many fantasized about working for it and casting aside the tired old conventions of journalism, such as printing facts.
Hahaha. Peter Carlson can write that without tongue in cheek in the same newspaper where Fred Hiatt is the editorial page editor?!? Talk about irony!
The Hartford Courant publishes an appreciation of the Weekly World News.
Like every newspaper, the WWN has been covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As usual, it has had some exclusives, such as “VAMPIRES ATTACK U.S. TROOPS: Army of undead taking over mountains of Afghanistan!” and “SATAN CAPTURED BY GIs IN IRAQ!”
Where will we get stories like these after the WWN is gone?
Oh I don’t know. Many editorial pages such as The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, the National Review and the New York Times regularly publish accounts of the certainty of WMDs in Iraq and now upbeat accounts from there so while more deadly and less entertaining, fictional stories in newspapers and cable news will continue long after the Weekly World News is gone.