Tabloid

Kidnap Attempt Killed Diana & Dodi. Diana: Shocking New Evidence About Her Death. Princess Di Believed in Reincarnation. The golden princess is dead but not forgotten. Not in the bizarro world of the supermarket tabloids, where toad-licking mom-slayers and doomsday comets can't compete with conspiracy theories and glamour photographs of the Princess of Wales, whose soap-opera life and death made compulsively readable grist for the celebrity mill. She was Liz and Jackie O rolled into one - with the mystery-shrouded death of a JFK. A golden goose whose flawed life sounded the perfect notes for late 20th-century fame: She was royalty and Hollywood, rock-and-roll and fashion, aerobics and eating disorders.

I've been grappling with this for weeks, ever since I read some shots in the media against "Schlock TV," the movement away from rational local news coverage to the tabloid trauma that we hear and see night and day. My problem with these reports is that, by and large, they're absolutely right. Local stations have crossed the line from truth to tabloid in the hopes of boosting ratings. The term breaking news, for example, has become a joke in Philadelphia television. News has to be breaking at that moment to really be breaking, but stations call almost any news "breaking" to hook the audience - some of whom are getting wise to the scam.

Michael Jackson has tentatively agreed to pay his 14-year-old accuser more than $40 million to forget his civil suit, a British tabloid reports. The newspaper Today quoted what it called a highly placed legal source involved in the case as saying the hush money offered is between $40.5 million and $49.5 million and would be dished out - like the lottery - in payments over 10 years. The source said the settlement could fall through if all parties didn't agree to all terms. Jackson's civil trial involving sex abuse charges is set for March 21. The source added that the boy's lawyer, Larry Feldman, rejected an offer of $10.5 million three weeks ago. Feldman didn't return phone calls.

For lack of $40, actor Hugh Grant's life is a shambles, according to a Hollywood hooker's graphic account of their sexual encounter. The prostitute, Divine Brown, said in a London tabloid interview published yesterday that for $100 she would have taken the British heartthrob back to her room to have sex. But the movie star had only $60. "I said, 'Honey that ain't enough for you to have sex; all you can have is oral,' " Brown recalled....

Moments after meeting their soon-to-be new boss last night, staffers at the beleaguered Philadelphia Daily News reacted with: We win! The city's tell-it-like-it-is tabloid ain't gonna close! A gust of relief whooshed through the first-floor newsroom after public relations executive Brian P. Tierney - the Daily News' and The Inquirer's soon-to-be CEO - spoke to employees of both papers at the North Broad Street building. "A lot of people have been able to exhale," Michael Days, editor of the Daily News, said as about 35 people in the newsroom celebrated with pizza last night while working diligently to put out the next day's edition.

We are shocked indeed to learn that a celebrity rag would print a fabricated and libelous story. "Yet again, a tabloid has been caught lying," said Ken Sunshine, spokesman for singer Justin Timberlake. The British tabloid News of the World ran a story in July 2004 saying Timberlake cheated on sweetheart Cameron Diaz by having an affair with British model Lucy Clarkson. Clarkson, who sold the story to the News, now admits it was a lie and promises to refund her fee. The News admitted its wrongdoing yesterday, apologized in court, pledged to run a prominent public apology in its paper, and agreed to pay "substantial" but undisclosed damages.

LONDON - Britain's biggest-selling newspaper was fighting to contain the damage after five employees at The Sun tabloid were arrested Saturday in an inquiry into the alleged payment of bribes to police and other officials. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which owns the newspaper, said police had searched their homes and the group's London offices, potentially deepening the scandal over British tabloid wrongdoing. The Sun's deputy editor Geoff Webster, picture editor John Edwards, chief reporter John Kay, chief foreign correspondent Nick Parker and reporter John Sturgis were those arrested, News International CEO Tom Mockridge said in a message emailed to staff.

She's paid to get the goods on celebrities, and she'll do almost anything to find them. Snooping through trash at the Chateau Marmont . . . posing as a waitress, or a wedding guest . . . booking a seat on a transatlantic flight next to a madam, in hopes that she'll tell all. Nora Wilde, paparazza-turned-reporter, played by Tea Leoni on the NBC sitcom The Naked Truth, has no shame. But how, in the wake of Princess Diana's death, after stars like Rosie O'Donnell, George Clooney and Fran Drescher have called for us all to suck it up and boycott the tabloids, can audiences sit back and feel good about a character who works for one?

A federal judge yesterday refused to grant a restraining order requested by three newspaper companies, including the publisher of The Inquirer and Daily News, that would have prevented SEPTA from distributing its new free newspaper in any area off-limits to other publications. The two-sentence order by U.S. District Judge Robert F. Kelly came the day the tabloid-size Metro was introduced, handed free to thousands of morning commuters using SEPTA's regional transit system. Although Kelly did not file an opinion explaining his ruling, the order said the three companies - Philadelphia Newspapers Inc., The New York Times Co. and Gannett Satellite Information Network Inc., whose papers include USA Today, The Reporter of Lansdale and South Jersey's Courier Post - had failed to show that Metro's distribution plans would cause them "immediate and irreparable harm.

It was the summer of 1977, and, except for the fortunes of the Yankees, New York seemed to teeter on the edge of doom. The country's largest metropolis was still pulling back from the brink of bankruptcy, a serial killer armed with a .44-caliber Bulldog revolver was on the loose and a relentless heat wave led to a blackout that unleashed an orgy of looting and arson in poor neighborhoods. Disco was the rage and punk rock was moving in. "Sex, drugs and rock-and-roll" was more than an expression in this pre-AIDS era. Now, 22 years later, director Spike Lee is using that grim season as the tension-building backdrop to his movie Summer of Sam, a study of paranoia and betrayal in an Italian American neighborhood in the Bronx.

Officer gets jail in hacking case LONDON - A senior police officer received a 15-month term in prison Friday, the first person sentenced in the wide-ranging phone-hacking inquiry in Britain. Detective Chief Inspector April Casburn was convicted last month of illegally attempting to sell information to a tabloid journalist in 2010. Judge Adrian Fulford called her actions "a corrupt attempt to make money out of sensitive and potentially very damaging information," according to a BBC report.

ROME - The British royal family faced a multinational battle to contain the spread of topless photos of Prince William's wife, Kate, as an Irish tabloid published them Saturday and an Italian gossip magazine planned to do the same despite the threat of legal action. The royal couple's St. James's Palace office condemned the moves as unjustifiable and evidence of pure greed, and said it was considering "all proportionate responses. " The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge sued French magazine Closer on Friday after it ran the photos, taken while Kate and William were on vacation at a relative's private estate in southern France last month.

LONDON - Britain's biggest-selling newspaper was fighting to contain the damage after five employees at The Sun tabloid were arrested Saturday in an inquiry into the alleged payment of bribes to police and other officials. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which owns the newspaper, said police had searched their homes and the group's London offices, potentially deepening the scandal over British tabloid wrongdoing. The Sun's deputy editor Geoff Webster, picture editor John Edwards, chief reporter John Kay, chief foreign correspondent Nick Parker and reporter John Sturgis were those arrested, News International CEO Tom Mockridge said in a message emailed to staff.

LONDON - The criminal investigation into British tabloid skullduggery turned full force on a second Rupert Murdoch publication Saturday, with the arrest of four current and former journalists from The Sun on suspicion of bribing police. A serving police officer was also held, and authorities searched the newspaper's offices as part an investigation into illegal payments for information. The arrests spread the scandal over tabloid wrongdoing - which has already shut down one Murdoch paper, the News of the World - to Britain's best-selling newspaper.

LONDON - Rupert Murdoch's media empire apologized and agreed to cash payouts Thursday to 37 people - including a movie star, a soccer player, a top British politician, and the son of a serial killer - who were harassed and phone-hacked by his tabloid press. The four - Jude Law, Ashley Cole, John Prescott, and Chris Shipman - were among three dozen victims who received financial damages from Murdoch's British newspaper company for illegal eavesdropping and other intrusions, including e-mail snooping.

HUGH GRANT starred in a London courtroom yesterday, testifying in a judge-led media-ethics inquiry regarding Britain's deservedly beleaguered press. Earlier testimony came from the parents of a murdered schoolgirl whose phone was targeted by reporters from the now-defunct tabloid News of the World . You know, the scandal in which the reporters all got fired but their editor walked away with a few million pounds. Grant, however, said he believes his phone was hacked by Britain's Mail on Sunday tabloid - the first time he has implicated a newspaper not owned by Rupert Murdoch . Grant said he could not think of any other way than eavesdropping on his voice mails that the Mail could have obtained the story alleging that his romance with Jemima Khan was on the rocks due to his conversations with a "plummy voiced" woman identified as a film-studio executive.

LONDON - They couldn't be more different - the handsome, world-famous actor and the quiet parents who endured unspeakable tragedy. But together they've become the most public faces of Britain's phone-hacking scandal, and Monday they testified about their run-ins with this country's ferociously competitive tabloid press. For Hugh Grant, it was the paparazzi who wouldn't stop harassing the mother of his child for photos and the gossip rag that allegedly accessed his phone messages and wrongly concluded that he was cheating on his girlfriend.

She hosted the opening festivities for L.A.'s Fashion's Night Out in September and sat in the front row at the Louis Vuitton runway show in Paris last month. Come February, she'll be in our living rooms every week, as a mentor on NBC's new Fashion Star designer competition series. Is tabloid sensation-turned-designer Nicole Richie poised to become the next big celebrity fashion brand? Following in the footsteps of Jessica Simpson and Rachel Zoe, Richie, 30 - whose adoptive father is Lionel Richie - launched her House of Harlow 1960 jewelry line in late 2007, adding shoes in 2009 and bags in June 2011.

WE RARELY forget we're a gritty big-city tabloid, so we're aware of the incongruity of promoting something called "Peace Day," a United Nations-sponsored global tribute to peace celebrated with concerts, rallies and other events. This year, Philadelphia is participating for the first time, and if there was ever a city that needed peace, it's us. There is a full list of events (find them at www.una-gp.org/peacdayphilly2011.htm ). The great thing about this day is that it takes very little to commit to peace.