Note: This is one in a series of articles probing issues raised in a Jan. 13 conference, "Reporting on Celebrities: The Ethics of News Coverage." The conference was held at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, in collaboration with The Poynter Institute. See the sidebar below for more.
My name is Jay and I worked as a senior editor of a big city tabloid.
I have been in recovery for 15 years. I take one day at a time. I admit that under the wrong circumstances I could succumb to my powerlessness in the face of the culture of celebrity.
Today, I am particularly interested in seeking to understand the whys of celebrity coverage and what bounds, if any, circumscribe what the press will put before the public.
To make this easier, or perhaps less predictable, I want to stipulate several points at the outset.
First, the American tradition of free speech and free press gives us a nearly "unbounded" right to cover the banal, the bizarre, and the shamelessly self-promoting. The choice of whether to do so is one that journalists make, and I want to explore whether there are elements of responsible decision-making, or responsibility for the choices we make that affect the decisions of journalists?
Second, celebrity coverage sells — the whole range of it. As a general rule, journalists will attract more, not fewer readers, viewers, or listeners if they include some element of celebrity coverage in the buffet they offer to the public. This is a fact that flows, I fear, from the same primal instinct that makes drivers slow down to watch an accident in the opposite side of a highway — and the more cars, ambulances, and stretchers the slower they will go. In that sense, I guess journalists could argue that celebrity coverage is smart business. Further, I will stipulate that, by extension, competitive pressures provide a plausible justification for celebrity coverage — if I don't do it my competitor will and that will be to my disadvantage.
In the end, maybe what I really want to explore is this:
Inarguably, much of the public is interested in coverage of celebrities — what they're doing and with whom; their rise, their fall, and even their time in the gutter. But are the news media acting in the public interest by giving the public a steady diet of its baser desires?
The news media, imperfect as they are, constitute the central nervous system of our society and communications infrastructure for the culture. We are the essential plumbing — we carry useful information, including information on changing values, priorities, and shared challenges. But we also carry (or maybe spread is the better word here) that which weakens, that which corrodes, that which debases.
The decision on what we carry is made finally by journalists. The assertion that "the people made me do it" won't pass muster, although I would allow that "my boss made me do it" does not seem out of the question. In any event, my questions today include why journalists make the choices they do, whether they consider the consequences of their choices. Are they responsible gatekeepers or passive stewards of the people's plumbing? Or are journalists like any other group of workers, cogs in a business out to make as much as it can however it can?
By the way, I do have a bonus question for extra credit: What are celebrities? Are they public figures like elected officials? Are they persons in or near the press's spotlight, whether by choice or by chance? And how should they be treated and why? Are there limits?
