Paris Whitney Hilton – Is Paris Hilton really news? – Tabloid Journalism

Just before Minehan’s first class in the New Year, I had not been into discussing on Paris Hilton at all. But during that class, I began to relate Paris Hilton to tabloid journalism, and then it gets on to me.

Apparently, the most famous name in the realm of celebrity journalism is Paris Hilton. Whatever she does, it becomes news on newspapers, magazines and television, everyday. Then, why is she such an issue? Is Paris Hilton a big deal for everyone? Is it because she is young and glamorous heiress? What makes her a worthwhile front page?

I personally think who Paris Hilton is and what she does is not a big deal. In the rest of the world, there are bunch of more extreme, interesting and exciting people’s stories that would be better news than Paris. However, my point is that, arguably, she becomes the news by the media; particularly an arena of tabloid journalism which is the most significant consequence of the relation between the media’s aspect of business and capitalism.

Jeff Cohen, who is one of the founders of FAIR, the media watchdog organization, and the author of several books critical of mainstream media, said in his interview with St. Louis Journalism Review that one of the major reasons for the flood of tabloid and celebrity news is, firstly, it is cheap to produce.

“You can fill up hour after hour of coverage with a crime story, a sex scandal, with just idle speculation. And the speculation never has to be accurate; and if the speculator proves to be wrong, well, he or she will be on the next tabloid story without any problem. So they're cheap to produce.”

The second main reason is that tabloid and celebrity news does not cause any serious problems.

“If you went after President Bush and if you were ferocious as we were on the Donahue show during the run-up to the Iraq war, if you were doing sort of appositional journalism and presenting voices that were informed, well, that gets you into trouble. Remember the operative word in television, in the phrase "news show," is show. It's a show. And if you are tough, they'll freeze you out. They won't send you the guests, and management doesn't like that. If you do reporting on economic power, you might even lose a corporate sponsor. If you do real journalism and real reporting, there are some downsides.”

“At the beginning of summer 2001, the story was shark attacks. The media coverage was in heat, but there was no real increase in shark attacks. And then you had four months, right before Sept. 11--this is a chapter of American history that most television journalists would like to forget--when all they talked about was Gary Condit's sex life and the missing intern who was killed. Gary Condit had nothing to do with it, but they spent months speculating about his sex life and whether he had killed the girl. If you do thorough political coverage, there's a downside. But if you do these tabloid stories, they're cheap and there's usually no trouble for management and no economic trouble in terms of sponsor threats or sponsor flight.”

As far as I’m concerned, tabloid journalism has been increasing its impact on our society under the name of business and making money. As we can see from Paris’ example, so many ridiculous things are being decorated as news just to make money. Moreover, Paris also cleverly accumulates a lot of money with using the media’s aspect of business.

As long as the media is in relation to business, tabloid journalism will never loose its power in our society. So what I’m really worried about is that, due to a significant increase of tabloid journalism, a fundamental concept of journalism which is supposed to investigate and report the area that public can not see from the surface, will not be able to function well. As Cohen expressed the media as a nervous system of democracy, it needs to be as it should be. Am I expecting too much from a business? I don’t know…

“If you do real journalism and real reporting, there are some downsides.”