Hey, in today’s alienated lifestyle, I can sorta see the impetus toward celebrity gossip. You mostly can’t get the poop over the back fence about so and so down the block anymore. So it becomes a packaged industrial product, like food.
Isn’t anyone thinking of the celebrity puppies?
For my part, I couldn’t get enough of the story about Kanye West taking the microphone from Taylor Swift to talk about Beyonce Knowles (if I got all those spellings right) at the awards ceremony.
I don’t know who Swift and Knowles are, or what the awards ceremony was about, and I gather West is famous because some guy who was an announcer for a cable show about plastic surgery killed his mother. Still, a story about good and evil is a breath of fresh air, anymore…
So you say you’re in favour of a local, more organic gossip. Is that what you’re saying? Hippie!
Isn’t anyone thinking of the poor, hungry coyotes? Where’s the love for the coyotes?
The coyotes do very well off Mexican immigrants, thank you very much.
Don’t worry about them, they have their paws full dealing with all the shoddy ACME products they’ve ordered over the years…
the return/exchange process is expected to take decades…
I read celebrity gossip. I read real news too. It’s not like one can’t exist if the other does.
Celebrity gossip is an entertaining diversion. Like video games, or television, or WOW, or posting on the SDMB. Just because I like it (in moderation) doesn’t make me shallow or uninterested in actual news. Just because you don’t doesn’t make you more intelligent or more informed. If you like to think you’re superior because you don’t partake, well, whatever floats your boat, I guess.
Once upon a time many years ago, celeb fluff pieces occupied the last few minutes of the nightly news. They were like a couple of bon-bons after a substantial meal. They didn’t dominate.
I don’t mind a little fluff, but doggone, between “Breaking News” about a celeb DUI arrest or the recent, never-ending Michael Jackson coverage, I’m sick of it all. I weep for the stupiding of the news.
I’m one of those losers that kind of likes celebrity gossip. I don’t know why I like it, but I do. Like kathmandu said, I read real news too. One does not exist at the exclusion of the other.
Now, moderation is key. I would begin to wonder about my attachment to it if I needed it every day, but every once in a while, I likes me some smut rag. I don’t think it’s more important than the big international news stuff like G8’s and all that, but I find it more entertaining. It’s the difference between hanging out here and doing my chemistry homework.
Don’t call me stupid.
OK, I just spilt my beer, thank you! 
It’s become a commodity. Maybe in that sense it’s not so different from all the other entertainment-as-news we get. Except that it does promote people who are the properties of large media conglomerates, which bears fruit twice over - once when we consume the news, and again when we consume the product it promotes.
I’m with the original poster. And no, it is certainly not confined to the USA. Trouble is in Australia we not only get the American nonsense but everything about anyone who is famous (or semi) locally.
But what really irks me is the corner the dedicate to the daily papers called “Queensland Confidential” (or whatever state you live in), where the focus is on eminently forgettable non entities and seemingly dedicated to their banal lives.
Martini Enfield- when you own these papers- please do away with that!
Celebrity news saved my best friend’s family vacation (I went with her, as did a few ‘outsiders’ e.g. her sister’s boyfriend). Instead of being at each other’s throats all the time, they were reading and laughing over Grazia, which, I have to add, is at the wittier end of the celeb ‘news’ spectrum. I think this works for lots of people – gossiping about some star they don’t know personally is, all things considered, probably better than raking someone from their social circle over the coals.
That being said, I do weep a little when CNN or the BBC covers celeb news that isn’t a death (and even then, if it leads the program).
Really? Because when I pointed out to Wife the dozen North-American “monkeys” in the park across the street, I was talking about Tree Rats, AKA squirrels. In the past the coyotes followed the Chicago Great Western right of way at the end of the block, and they still follow it because where people are, food is too. We have loads of immigrants, but before they pushed for the last 100 miles to Madison they said, “Screw it,” and stayed down here. I mean, what advantage could Madison POSSIBLY present that trumped Chicago? I didn’t think so.
The last time we had an overpopulation of squirrels it was eliminated by red foxes, one of whom followed Wife to a sanctuary, though not voluntarily. The time before attracted coyotes, and Wife didn’t believe me when I described, on the phone, the failed attempt of Animal Control and the park police to capture it. Following both cases we had WAY fewer squirrels.
A very interesting post, supergoose. You’ve given me a new way of looking at the situation.
I agree with you, Cicero, but the point (as far as I can tell) of [State] Confidential is not so much that the general readership can be amused by the “Which lawyer said what to which accountant at some cafe no-one can afford to patronise with their own money” thing, but so various City types can try and smugly one-up each other. It does get tiresome after a while.
My plan- should I ever become Editor of a sizeable publication- is to put up a sign in the reporter’s room asking
HAS YOUR GRANDMOTHER HEARD OF THE “CELEBRITY” OR “LOCAL PERSONALITY” THAT YOU’RE WRITING ABOUT? IF NOT, THEY AREN’T AUTOMATICALLY NEWSWORTHY.
The whole “trying to make unremarkable nobodies into media personalities” thing is a pet hate of mine and I’d dearly love to see more space devoted to news and “backgrounders” and less to “Celebutante Seen At Hot New Club With Different Guy Than Last Week!” type stuff. That can stay in the gossip magazines at the supermarket, where it (sort of) belongs, IMHO.
Pretty much, yeah. For quite a few people, Jessica Simpson is in their monkeysphere; Russians and Poles and Senate finance panel members aren’t.
How dare it be fucking news worthy!!!