By Melissa Gentry
HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 6/8/07 — There were serious news issues in the world today, but you would never know it if you had a TV. Paris Hilton was unavoidable: every TV news station, radio channel, and internet website was talking about her in some form or fashion and allowing it to reign as the top news story of today. Its hard to keep in mind that this is all over a traffic violation stemming from a run of the mill DUI, which for better or worse, happens to lots of people and we never hear anything about it. It doesn’t even make the local news much less the National news,yet the phrase “media frenzy” was redefined on a hourly basis.
However the media has done more than just cover this story, all day today different networks have interrupted their programming to give a Paris update. Almost every single news station around five o’clock today was running the press conference footage with Sheriff Baca as if this were a presidential inauguration. Shortly after on Fox during a rerun of “Malcom in the Middle” the news cuts in to remind viewers, in case they already didn’t know, that Paris is back in jail and that she is not happy about it. Who in their right mind would be happy about going to jail?
Paris even managed to win over and score front page news on CNN’s website, the main news organization for the world; collecting stories, news highlights, and video footage from today’s Paris happenings.
Has the media became so obsessed with celebrities and stardom to the point that it overshadows everything else, making the rest of the world unimportant?
A very angry blogger voices his opinion about MSNBC and their Paris news coverage, “What the hell is wrong with our world?!?!?! Look, I’ll say it… Paris Hilton is a nobody. She’s nothing. She has no talent, she hasn’t cured any diseases, she hasn’t developed any new technologies, she hasn’t saved any lives or rescued any kittens, she’s not even THAT attractive… Are we REALLY that sad and pathetic of a people?” Although this guy might have went a little overboard, could he have a point to the stargazed world we live in?
Obsession with celebrities is like a disease or a disorder. There is no logical explanation for it and people are so attached that they will not admit that the obsession may be a problem, just by definition if nothing more, states a writer on “Helium.com.” It’s like a sickness, standing in the grocery checkout line and before even realizing it we’ve already read the cover of “The National Enquirer” and “Us Weekly” tossing them on the conveyer belt.
Jake Halpern author of “Fame Junkies,” takes a closer look at why our society is so obsessed with celebrities and says that much of our obsession is due to our nations loneliness, “Americans are lonelier than ever: we marry later (five years later, on average, since 1956) and increasingly live alone (up nearly 20 percent from 1950). One way to combat this is to form “parasocial” relationships with characters on TV or in movies — we come to feel that we actually know celebrities through the roles they play.” He goes on to say that these parasocial relationships can sometimes eclipse real relationships.
In a sense some could say that all this celebrity hype is just creating an artificial world to fulfill the lives of the lonely.