A bald, bulimic Britney, a buried ex-bunny and another baby for Brangelina. Since when is this the “breaking news” that journalists strive to report?
I’ll be the first to admit that I am a sucker for celebrity gossip. I scan Perezhilton.com daily, wait patiently for People magazine to arrive in my mailbox every Friday and I stop the channel changer if I see a “breaking news” headline on Entertainment Tonight. It’s my not-so-guilty pleasure and like many Americans, I am becoming more obsessed with celebrities than ever before.and I call myself a journalist?
The sad reality is that at the end of the day when I am kicking myself for not reading the article on another suicide bomber in Iraq or President Bush’s tour of Latin America, I still have the time (time which I could be using to address the important issues) to flip through my roommate’s US Weekly and hit up the “Offbeat” news section on CNN.com.
There is so much happening in the world that it is a shame that all the research, writing, editing and reporting is going to waste over something like a suggested drug-abuse by a would-be star that had a flicker of fame once in their entire career. Who cares? Oh wait, we do.
A journalism professor of mine recently told my class that the three national events that had received the most media coverage by news organization were, in descending order, Sept. 11, the death of Anna Nicole Smith and Hurricane Katrina.
Does anyone else have that same stomach-jarring reaction I did? How can the death of one celebrity grab more attention and media coverage than the deaths of roughly 1,836 people from one of the largest hurricanes to ever hit the United States? And who is responsible? The viewer? The media?
Journalism is no longer an industry structured from values and played out by reporters who want to make a difference and give an unbiased view of the world. Today it is a business, where selling advertisement space is the main goal and supplying information, like celebrity gossip, is what gives the organizations customers. Through years of blending, the lines between commercial speech with profiting goals and informative stories have been smudged to a point where we can not identify a difference. How do we, as customers, distinguish the real news from “the stuff that sells papers”?
As clich‚ as this sounds, the world will be ours sooner than we think. What will we make of it if all that we focus on is how many facelifts Sharon Stone has had? We need to take control, listen with critical ears and watch with serious eyes to force a separation between entertainment and news. Without this, who knows where we’ll be in 20 years. I might be writing, but about what? Hopefully not a pop star’s change in hairstyle.
The thing is, the news is not going to go away. There will always be information and events around us and stories that need to be told. However, will there be people willing to report? Even more terrifying, will there be people willing to listen?
Taylor Moore is a journalism junior and Mustang Daily staff reporter.