TheSuperficial.com

Growing up in a small town I know first hand the human tendency to talk about other people’s lives. I know how rumors get started, and I recognize that sometimes they are based on reality, and other times they are made up entirely, a diversion from boredom or a malicious attempt to slander someone else.  I know that when you have a senior class of nine people, and a town population of less than 500 with no movie theater, no restaurants, and no ferry running after 5pm, gossiping is often the only activity available.  

Now, long after fleeing the nest and surrounded by a bustling city with plenty of stimulation at every turn, I am still drawn to the nosy habit of gossip. Every morning after the dog has been fed and a pot of coffee has been made, I am tempted to switch on the TV rather than fix breakfast.  If watching Elizabeth Hasslebeck tailspin into a panic attack as she is verbally beat down by her co-panelists proves too redundant and uninteresting on an given morning, I can plop myself in front of the computer and instantly access ten different blogs that succinctly summarize the day’s “news”, considerate enough to lead with the celebrity lifestyle items, and leave that serious stuff about Japan or the Middle East out of the mix. If I get ambitious and decide to click over to CNN or the BBC, I am still inundated with stories that all but ignore the serious issues affecting the world, and instead chronicle Charlie Sheen’s self-indulgent addiction fueled meltdown. The modern state of the news raises questions about the rest of the country. Are we really all just small town gossip mongers at heart?

The blogs I read everyday serve as the equivalent of my generation’s morning paper. Except instead of getting caught up on current affairs and international news items, I scan through page after page of speculative gossip. So and so might be pregnant, that couple is getting divorced, this young starlet went on a 48 hour drinking binge and blamed her tardiness to the set the next day on “exhaustion”.  Even reputable news outlets lead with entertainment news items, because the public demands it. These stories increase page views, raise advertising spending, and ultimately feed the conglomerate media machine that controls the majority of news today. These manufactured gossip stories subliminally promote new movies, books, or albums, utilizing cross promotion by making sweeping judgements about the personal lives of the actors, authors, and musicians responsible for today’s hottest new material.  We are a culture obsessed with celebrity, living vicariously through the lives of otherwise ordinary people whose looks or bad behavior have somehow catapulted them to stardom, placing them on a pedestal that sadly, many aspire to, and even more strive to tear down.  

What about those important people in New York City and Los Angeles, don’t they have better things to do than discuss how many pounds she gained and how many affairs he had around the water cooler? Aren’t there actual important issues facing our country, like health care reform and defense spending, and the state of the economy? What about Libya and Tunisia, and the nuclear weapons Iran is surely hiding? Or what about the environment, and the growing disparity between the rich and the poor. What about the Tea Party, besides just making fun of them for being nut-jobs, doesn’t anyone else realize how potentially dangerous those people are?

NO. No one cares. We are so obsessed with entertainment news, we can no longer even distinguish between actual content and shameless promotional advertising. Journalism itself is a dying industry, taken over by conglomerate media interests that protect profit margins and advertising budgets rather than promote meaningful content.  Reality television is a multi-billion dollar industry, spinning the artificial lives of uninteresting people into half hour long segments of product placement and shameless self promotion.  Although we are a generation of media savvy end users, few of us have the tools necessary to distinguish fact from fiction, and even fewer of us care.

Conglomerate media companies, who have grown so large in the last decades that they completely overshadow the few independent sources that still exist, are more concerned with their profit margins and less concerned with fair and responsible journalism. When journalism is viewed as a corporate business, instead of as a public service or as an essential part of upholding democracy, profits usurp ethics. Responsible journalism is characterized by four main points: fair, balanced, broad, and in depth coverage. Hard news must be timely, and must affect a large portion of its audience. The trend of “infotainment” or soft news (including gossip and entertainment items) does little to uphold these core tenants of journalism, but has nonetheless gained momentum because it increases viewership, and in turn increases profits for large media conglomerates.

It is hard to blame large media conglomerates for ruining American journalism and threatening our democratic way of life without acknowledging that these conglomerates themselves are a result of our free market economy. They are examples of how much success is possible within a capitalistic society, as they have survived and thrived through fierce competition and by protecting their own interests. It is also important to remember however, that despite the freedom of our economy, these conglomerates are subject to federal regulations and they also depend on government funding and special monopoly licenses in order to operate on such a large scale. So not only are these conglomerates biased towards programming that increases their profits, they are also biased towards programming that protects their political interests.

Although it is human nature to be interested in the lives of others, to be curious and speculative, our obsession with celebrity as a culture prevents millions of people from being active, engaged citizens. We collectively have the wool pulled over our eyes by big business, who take comfort knowing their populace is distracted by superficial information, unconcerned with the serious issues that affect us all.  The larger reality is that political and social issues do eventually trickle down and affect everyone on a human level. Instead of ignoring hard news and getting wrapped up in the artificial realities of people most of us will never meet in real life, we should take a cue from these celebrities and function in a more self-involved manner, demanding content that matters and refusing to get wrapped up in the small-town mentality of big business.