The other day I was watching MSNBC when suddenly I saw a camera shot of a large crowd swarming outside of a courthouse. Live helicopter shots showed the crowd from an aerial perspective so the whole crowd could be seen.
My first thought was, "This is serious, what's going on? Did something happen overnight that I didn't know about yet? Was Joran van der Sloot extradited to the United States? Was a decision made on Proposition 8?"
No. They were waiting on Lindsay Lohan to turn herself into jail at the Central Regional Detention Facility in Los Angeles, Calif.
Maybe I had accidently changed the channel, but then I noticed the colorful peacock on the corner of my television screen and realized that I was on the correct station. MSNBC cut back to the Lohan story every 20 minutes or so of programming. I changed the channel with slight disgust that this was really happening.
When I think of news outlets like MSNBC, FOX and CNN, I think about real news, the kind of news that affects the world – not Paris Hilton being sued over hair extensions or Lindsay Lohan and her most recent trip to jail. News about celebrities should be saved for shows like Entertainment Tonight and websites like Perezhilton.com and TMZ.com.
With everything going on in the world, wouldn't you think these news stations would have far too many important, serious events to cover? Why is there enough programming time to even mention Lohan going to jail, let alone report on the story every 20 minutes?
News stations aren't the only ones guilty of this malpractice; newspapers and magazines are as well.
Why did The New York Times run an article about Britney Spears losing her kids in a section that was not the Arts and Entertainment section? Every major gossip magazine covered
Spears exactly the same. It's not as if the Times broke the story to the public, it was just following the trend.
We officially live in a world where the National Enquirer runs a story about the John Edwards' affair and gets nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
It shouldn't come as a surprise to know that most media outlets report the news that people want to hear, not always what the need to hear. They need to score ratings like any other show.
This poses an even deeper question: Is America too celebrity obsessed?
If you do a simple Google search for the word "gossip," in less than a second, dozens of celebrity gossip websites appear. Hollywood gossip is definitely in high demand.
Our obsession with Hollywood has gotten so intense there is now an official psychiatric condition. Researchers say that as many as one-third of us have "celebrity worship syndrome," an unhealthy interest in the rich and fabulous.
There are three different levels of celebrity worship syndrome:
• Entertainment social: the normal everyday interest in celebrities.
• Intense personal: the person feels they are connected to the celebrity in some way.
• Borderline pathological: the person takes a left turn into Crazytown and starts stalking the celebrity or believes they have a relationship with them.
For those of us who have a healthy interest in celebrities, it still makes you wonder why we even care a little bit. Some may say that we are unhappy with ourselves and are trying to live vicariously through these celebrities. Others say that we are studying what they do so we can hit it big just as they did. I think that we focus on news that doesn't really matter because everything going on in the world is just so depressing.
So, America I ask you this: Have we become so extremely shallow, to the point where we really care about this nonsense tabloid fodder, or is it that Hollywood's most recent gossip is far less depressing than what's going on in the world today?
Catherina Davidson is a senior majoring in public relations. She can be reached at mcd2q@mtmail.mtsu.edu.
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