Inquiring Minds

Inquiring Minds...(they just want to know everything!)

A tabloid magazine called National Enquirer ran commercial after commercial saying, “inquiring minds want to know.” The suggestion of course is that reading their tabloid would satisfy the average person’s quest for knowledge--or at least their curiosity. And people are fascinated by these tantalizing little known facts the tabloids advertise about television personalities, crimes or “news” of strange and unusual occurrences in the world, after all tabloid businesses sell a lot of papers and their readers keep buying them too. Apparently readers do not discern, or maybe do not even care if what they hear or are told is true or even real, they just want to know and hear something that has obviously tickled their ears.

Upon closer investigation much of what is written in the tabloid type of magazine is humanly contrived, proven to be purely speculative and sometimes discovered to be downright false. Miraculously though, people read it, mostly out of curiosity or because reading about the failings of others, especially important well known people, makes them feel good or maybe only a little bit better about themselves.

It seems that what inquiring minds want to know is not always the truth of the matter. They are happy to be amused and entertained with sensationalism and scandal, even when it's proven to be mere fiction, composography or outright lying gossip. The tabloids know and know well that people just want to hear the latest and greatest gossip or simply hear things that they want to hear,gossip, even if it is not true.

Just check out the latest tabloid still available after all these years at the grocery checkout counter. It's been at least a hundred years such things have been sold in America and people with inquiring minds still buy and read the tabloids.