Back in the old days when you wanted to know what Liz and Richard, or Charles and Diana, were up to, you had to hope for a crowd at the supermarket check-out line. There, furtively, you could get your fill of the tawdry, bizarre and prurient while waiting to pay for your groceries. Today, the agonies and ecstasies of JLo/Brad/Jennifer/Paris as often as not rate page one of your local paper or the highlights of the evening news.
“The hunger for celebrity gossip, particularly scandal, has become more insatiable than ever with the viral proliferation of media covering it, from ’60 Minutes’ to Internet bloggers to every cellphone camera owner on the street,” reports today’s Los Angeles Times.
This obsession with celebrities is taking its toll — on more than just serious news junkies. The stars just can’t stand the heat, writes the Times’ Gina Piccalo, who seems to take this whole problem seriously. “In today’s vicious news cycle every story has an abbreviated life span, accelerating the demand for more news,” she writes. “Ultimately, this adds up to exaggerated expectations of celebrities. If they can’t maintain their public persona, they’re devoured for our entertainment instead.”
The celebrity breakdown has become so common a phenomenon that an industry has emerged to support and exploit it. High-paid crisis management teams that carefully script a star’s downfall and subsequent redemption have replaced the “fix-it men” of decades past, who bribed and strong-armed sources into stifling any hint of scandal. Publicists, agents and managers often drive the gossip, feeding information to reporters to sculpt a client’s image or magnify their own role in it.
As much as Piccalo would like us to believe the media is creating a living hell for the likes of comedian Dave Chappelle, subject of a recent feeding frenzy and Time magazine interview, and that Hollywood is losing the fight to keep its dirty laundry hidden, we’re a little skeptical. (No, make that a lot skeptical.)
The powers-that-be in Hollywood still seem to subscribe to that old line, “It doesn’t matter what you say about me, just spell my name correctly.”
What’s really news — and bad news, at that — is that the same attitude seems to be rubbing off on the folks who decide what is news.
–Susan Q. Stranahan
Susan Q. Stranahan wrote for CJR.