Kentucky History

They’re hard to miss at grocery stores and newsstands in America—the colorful, heavily illustrated tabloid newspapers with headlines promising shocking, unlikely, and sometimes impossible stories within. Although the papers are now ubiquitous, the supermarket tabloid’s origin can be traced to one man: Generoso Pope Jr., an eccentric, domineering chain-smoker who died of a heart attack at age sixty-one. In The Godfather of Tabloid, Jack Vitek explores the life and remarkable career of Pope and the founding of the most famous tabloid of all— the National Enquirer.

Upon graduating from MIT, Pope worked briefly for the CIA until he purchased the New York Enquirer with dubious financial help from mob boss Frank Costello. Working tirelessly and cultivating a mix of American journalists (some of whom, surprisingly, were Pulitzer prize winners) and buccaneering Brits from Fleet Street who would do anything to get a story, Pope changed the name, format, and content of the modest weekly newspaper until it resembled nothing America had ever seen before.

At its height, the National Enquirer boasted a circulation of more than five million, equivalent to the numbers of the Hearst newspaper empire. Pope measured the success of his paper by the mail it received from readers, and eventually the volume of reader feedback was such that the post office assigned the Enquirer offices their own zip code. Pope was skeptical about including too much celebrity coverage in the tabloid because he thought it wouldn’t hold people’s interest, and he shied away from political stories or stances. He wanted the paper to reflect the middlebrow tastes of America and connect with the widest possible readership.

Pope was a man of contradictions: he would fire someone for merely disagreeing with him in a meeting (once firing an one editor in the middle of his birthday party), and yet he spent upwards of a million dollars a year to bring the world’s tallest Christmas tree to the Enquirer offices in Lantana, Florida, for the enjoyment of the local citizens. Driven, tyrannical, and ruthless in his pursuit of creating an empire, Pope changed the look and content of supermarket tabloid media, and the industry still bears his stamp.

From its first appearance in 1993, The X-Files has attracted millions of viewers interested in the paranormal investigations of intuitionist and belief-driven Fox Mulder and his partner, Dana Scully, the “consummate scientist” and skeptic. Addressing questions of trust and authority that plague our information-addled society, the series acquired a large fan base of individuals interested in debating and interpreting the philosophical themes that underlie the symbiotic partnership between Mulder and Scully.

The Philosophy of The X-Files concentrates not only on the philosophical assumptions and presuppositions of the show but also on how the episodes portray the process of philosophical inquiry. Editor Dean A. Kowalski argues that both philosophy and The X-Files center around a determination to search for truth despite a frequent lack of information and proper tools. It is no surprise, then, to find the series riddled with common philosophical themes, including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, and existentialism, among others.

The first section of the book addresses the credos put forth by the series and examines the philosophical significance of its three popular slogans: “The truth is out there,” “Trust no one,” and “I want to believe.” In the second section, contributors analyze the philosophical underpinnings of the characters of Mulder, Scully, the Cigarette Smoking Man, and Assistant Director Walter Skinner. A final section is devoted to individual episodes and engages with the philosophical issues raised by “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” and “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space,’” in addition to the 1998 film The X-Files: Fight the Future. Two appendixes offer a summary of the main storyline and brief plot summaries of each television episode together with the philosophical issues it raises.

The first collection of philosophical essays devoted exclusively to the show, The Philosophy of The X-Files shows a television series successfully engaged with the philosophical quandaries of the modern world and explores how Mulder and Scully’s personalities and actions invite inquiry into patterns of human belief and behavior.