Four lines, nineteen words, and a whole theory of how we consume information. Dave Bonta's "Tabloidal" says that the news is something that spreads without intelligence, and that the people who take it in may be no smarter than the thing itself.
The title does a lot of the work. "Tabloid" is a familiar noun for a certain kind of newspaper, loud and quick to sensationalize. Bonta stretches it into an adjective with the ending "-al," which makes it sound like a condition or a quality that can seep into things. It also faintly echoes "tidal," so before the first line begins we already have a sense of something rising and washing over us. The coinage turns the tabloid from an object you can put down into an atmosphere you live in.
Then the poem opens with an everyday phrase: "in the papers." People say it casually, as in "it was in the papers," and it carries a borrowed authority. The second line punctures that authority at once: "news is a plague." There is no "like" and no hedging, just a flat equation. A plague is contagious, indiscriminate and hard to stop, and it lands on everyone whether they want it or not. Anyone reading now will probably think of things "going viral," but the poem doesn't need the modern vocabulary. The image of contagion is already complete.
The third line, "growing and not thinking," is where the poem gets strange. Grammatically, the thing that grows without thinking is the plague, and that makes sense, since a plague multiplies by its own blind momentum. But the line also reads as a description of the news itself, which swells to fill every page and every hour without reflecting on what it says. The two present participles, "growing" and "thinking," rhyme in their endings, and that echo makes the pairing feel almost mechanical, like a process that just keeps running. Notice too that "not thinking" is the only negative in the poem. It names what is missing, which is judgment.
The last line turns on a simile: "like an ignorant ear." After the confident metaphor of line two, this comparison is oddly sideways. An ear is a part of the body, not a mind. It receives and does not evaluate. To call it "ignorant" is a little paradoxical, because ears are not supposed to know anything, and that is the point. The word sits close to "ignore," so the ear is both uninformed and willfully inattentive. The poem seems to move the blame: the news is mindless, but so is the audience that takes it in. There is another reading too. If you hear "ear" as an ear of corn, the plague becomes a crop, growing thoughtlessly in a field. The poem doesn't force a choice, and the double picture of body part and plant suits a poem about unreflective growth.
Formally, the poem is tightly built. Counting syllables, the lines run four, four, six, six, a small symmetry that widens at the midpoint. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, and everything is in lowercase. Without a full stop, the last line doesn't close the thought, and the poem ends on "ear" as if the listening goes on. The sounds do some quiet work as well. The hard "p" of "papers" and "plague" ties the setting to the threat, and the short, blunt syllables of "news is a plague" land like a verdict.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so little space. It resembles an epigram, a short, pointed saying, more than a descriptive lyric, and it works by compression, much as a tabloid headline does. The difference is that a headline shouts, while this poem is dry and almost deadpan. It borrows the tabloid's brevity and uses it to criticize the tabloid. The poem also leaves us with an uncomfortable question. If the news is a plague, a reader who passively absorbs it has become part of how it spreads. The poem doesn't answer that, but it makes us notice our own ears.