Entertainment News Is Neither Entertainment Nor News. Discuss.

By Less Lee Moore

Normally Popshifter does not immerse itself in the murky waters of celebrity gossip or political controversy, but since those two topics frequently converge with pop culture, in this case I’ll make an exception.

A recent article on Truthdig called “Addicted To Nonsense” claims that, “Celebrity worship has banished the real from public discourse.” This is not the first time this sentiment has been expressed and I’m sure it won’t be the last. However, by only mentioning the most current celebrity obsessions (Tiger Woods, Oprah, Levi Johnston) author Chris Hedges fails to place this mania within a historical context, thus falling victim to the same instantaneous hype he claims to abhor.

Although Hedges seems to assert that this is a new phenomenon, it certainly is not. “The illusionists who shape our culture, and who profit from our incredulity, hold up the gilded cult of Us [Magazine]” is a statement that could easily apply to the early wave of celebrity cults and star system, well before the Internet, or even television, existed. (According to Wikipedia, Photoplay, one of the first film/celebrity magazines, ceased publication in 1980 and most of its staff were moved to Us.)

In History Of The American Film Industry, Benjamin B. Hampton takes the reader on an incredibly detailed and fascinating journey from the inception of the earliest cinematic creations to the advent of talkies in the late 1920s. Even in the early part of the twentieth century, the popularity of the movies and the advent of the star system (promoted endlessly by celebrity magazines) was in full swing. And as Hampton notes in the chapter called “Hollywood Scandals And Censorship”:

For several years I had been learning something of the grip acquired by movies on American life, but when thousands of letters and newspaper clippings poured into my study I began to realize that neither I nor anyone else had an adequate conception of their deep hold on the classes as well as the masses.
Hampton, page 291

Please note that although Hampton’s book was originally published in 1931, this particular epiphany took place around 1920.

Keep in mind also that when “moving pictures” first came about, many people dismissed them as nothing more than “flickering monstrosities” for the masses (Hampton, page 47), but when businessmen and even financial institutions saw the profits being made, they quickly changed their tune. One could argue that these “powers that be” soon learned to use films as an opiate of the masses.

Yet when this article was republished on AlterNet, a commenter named Beck noted that:

The people I know who watch those shows don’t devote any energy to them. Their problems are overwork, underpay, too much stress, not enough repose. It’s observers from outside who put importance upon the entertainment. It’s backwards. . .

. . . They seem no less informed than anyone else. They just need down time, and some lightheartedness to counterbalance overwork and stress.

Yes, the instant accessibility to any news—entertainment or otherwise—makes the obsession with celebrities that much more ubiquitous. But Hedges simultaneously pities and blames the poor, huddled masses without actually knowing what they really think. How does that make him any better than the illusionists themselves?

What I would have preferred from Hedges, besides acknowledging that this obsession is not new, is an analysis of HOW entertainment news filtered into so-called real news.

I will agree with him that it has gone too far: the recent, public arrests of the president of the Toronto, ON Humane Society and several board members on animal cruelty charges—at the behest of the Ontario SPCA, no less—has been on the news for days. The lawyer for the THS is furious with the SPCA for alerting the media to the raid, calling it a “TMZ tabloid-style” tactic and saying he’d “never seen it before in [my] life.” Of course, you have! You just forgot what REAL news is, that’s all.

Sources:
Benjamin B. Hampton, History Of The American Film Industry: From Its Beginnings To 1931, formerly titled A History Of The Movies, Dover Edition (Dover Publications, Inc. 1970).