The Tabloid Decade & the Long Island Lolita | 1
History of the 90s
Kathy Kenzora
4.7 • 610 Ratings
🗓️ 16 July 2019
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode Host Kathy Kenzora is looking back at how tabloid media had a feeding frenzy on the Long Island Lolita.
In May 1992, a high school senior on Long Island, New York, went to the home of her much older ex-lover and shot his wife in the face.
17 year old Amy Fisher had been having an affair with 37 year old Joey Buttafuco for 18 months and was angry that he wanted to end the relationship.
Within days, Amy was dubbed “The Long Island Lolita” and the story exploded in the media around the country. Amy and the Buttafuco’s became household names overnight and tabloid newspapers and TV shows scrambled to dig up dirt on anyone involved with the story.
This type of down and dirty pseudo-journalism was extremely common in the 90s, just think Lorena Bobbitt, Tanya Harding, Heidi Fleiss, Hugh Grant, George Michael and Peewee Herman.
David Kamp, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair Magazine, wrote about the phenomenon in 1999 and dubbed the 90s the Tabloid Decade.
Kamp, explains in this episode that the coverage of tabloid stories in the 90s was weirdly out of proportion thanks in part to the popularity of tabloid TV shows like A Current Affair, Hard Copy and Inside Edition.
Show Contact:
Instagram: @that90spodcast
Email: 1995podcast@gmail.com
Guest info:
David Kamp
Twitter: @MrKamp
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey there, it's Kathy. I just wanted to let you know that you can listen to History of the 90s early and ad-free on Amazon music included with Prime. |
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| 0:58.3 | Tabloid TV was born and raised in the 90s. |
| 1:01.7 | And if shows like hard copy, a current affair, an inside edition, |
| 1:06.1 | chose to shine the spotlight on you, |
| 1:08.2 | it didn't matter whether you were guilty or innocent. Your life was on display |
| 1:13.2 | and the court of public opinion could seal your fate. It was a down and dirty style of pseudo-journalism, |
| 1:20.6 | the likes of which we'd never seen, and in every case, nearly the exact same sequence of events. |
| 1:30.8 | A crime was committed, news vans would show up, |
| 1:36.0 | camp out for days in front of a courthouse or the front lawn of anyone connected to the case. |
| 1:42.1 | They would incessantly hound and chase the main characters, pay cash for tapes and diaries, |
... |
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