Britney Spears saves the world?
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I made a random comment, on an X-Factor controversy. Some 14,000 likes later, I am left doubting an earlier version of this column — on celebrity news being essential to an effective 4th Estate. I wrote this two weeks ago, but have been unable to publish until now due to verification problems.
[A version of this column appeared earlier on LinkedIN]
I had been musing off-and-on about the flip-side of much maligned ‘celebrity news’ for the last few years.
Is celebrity news really so bad?
Surely there must be some good in it.
In fact, I pondered, if it draws people into the news, and get them exercising opinions, even acting on them, celebrities could even be considered essential to accessing the role and functions of an active 4th Estate.
Eventually, such musings began gathering themselves together, until one day the idea for a headline came to mind: “Britney Spears saves the world!”
This bounced around in my head for another year.
A few days ago, I wrote a woefully undisciplined piece and published it on LinkedIN, where it generated a handsome 47 views, seven likes, and three comments.
I had no idea that my rough stab at link bait celeb churnalism was about to be eclipsed by a real-life example of viral monstering via Facebook, courtesy of another celebrity machine, the X-Factor.
What follows here is a bit of a tidy up of that earlier column, about an aspect of the ongoing, and global, journalism crisis. If you want to go straight to the bit about ‘my’ X-Factor moment, scroll down nearer the bottom.
Crisis, I began my earlier piece. What crisis?
“As global journalism continues to slide into obscurity, you’d expect the one group to be most alarmed about their status would be journalists themselves,” I wrote.
Most journalism watchdogs seem obsessed with ethical naval gazing, while trumpeting ephemeral technical triumphs, as former media titans rip themselves apart on the melting iceberg of fading business models.
So I was glad to get a response to an earlier column from outside the profession.
Change advocate Saeeda Bukhari shows a rare willingness to engage meaningfully and in some depth on challenges facing global journalism.
She notes:
In the current model of news journalism, frequently, stories need to be sensationalist to get coverage. Therefore there is little understanding of scale and impact. Not an issue when the story is Britney Spears knickers, however a big issue, if the story is about threats that could create fear and social impact.
Borrowing from media practice, I would like here to isolate an element of her comments, and blow it all out of proportion — the reference to “Britney Spears’ knickers” is too compelling to ignore.
I understand her implicit condemnation of obsession with celebrity news, which many suggest comes at the cost of dumbing down debate on more important areas.
However here is a contrary view.
If a social change advocates were to sit down and deconstruct the basic building blocks of mobilising mass audiences, who would they seek support from to build awareness?
Policy wonks (or wonkettes)? Politicians? So-called thought leaders? Business leaders? Aid workers? The United Nations? Journalists?
Yeah, sure.
Most likely they would also look for people with a combination of the following: household names, public trust, and credibility.
Fire fighters, doctors and teachers usually top public trust surveys, such as those long run by Reader’s Digest, including here in New Zealand.
But, aside from, say, Dr. Oz in America, few enjoy household name status.
Like it or not, actors hold the highest public profile, and many contribute long hours to social awareness.
Many cynically dismiss this as self-serving tokenism, of little more impact than slacktivists clicking ‘Like’ on social networks, or signing online petitions.
Such cynicism overlooks the deeper reasons for public fascination with celebrities — and the opportunities this holds for those hoping to change the world, for the better.
At the centre of this fascination is an inherent morality, usually on the seamier side, e.g. sex. As a gossip column I used to read put it years ago: “Who’s up who, and who hasn’t paid.”
Celebrity gossip assumes a moral stance — that sleeping with someone other than your partner is wrong. That getting drunk and smashing up a hotel room is wrong. Ditto driving drunk, casting racial slurs, beating your kids, in fact doing anything to kids other than showing them endless patience and love — all wrong.
Viewed through a positive prism, celeb goss is, essentially, a gateway opportunity for moral stances, in turn the basis for developing ethical attitudes.
So Britney Spears flashing some lingerie achieves more, much more than just grabbing a few (million) eyeballs. She also triggers judgement.
Shallow, vacuous, ill-considered judgement, most of the time, but judgement all the same.
It gets down to this: If celebrities were not pushing judgement buttons, how often would most people otherwise consider moral or ethical issues? If people are not given constant opportunity for flexing their moral muscles, then how do we expect them to develop the confidence to tackle more ethical conundrums?
In effect, the wily woes of actors, pop stars and other celebrities could be regarded as the training weights of an ethical society.
Politics? For many, far too painful, too complex to decipher.
In an increasingly unequal world, most people are so busy surviving, too exhausted to worry about much outside their own reality. Celebrity news is an easy option for venting some frustration.
Celebrity news offers, an opportunity to introduce more complex issues — such as much maligned visits to Africa.
Or tax havens. Inequality. War. This is when infotainment, in other words, blurs into information.
Celebrity gossip has been said to be linked with self-obsession, in an alleged increase of the number of young people wanting to be actors, rappers and models, instead of doctors, lawyers or accountants.
The criticism is that we are at the end of generational change — that humanity is now stuck in an endless “Me” generation, with this species dooming itself and every other with it.
If this were true, then you might expect the United States and its Hollywood dream factories to be the epicentre of this societal implosion.
Not so.
Not according to the 2014 World Giving Index from the Charities Aid Foundation in the United Kingdom, an organisation with nine offices in six continents.
According to their survey, conducted by Gallup across 160 countries … well, read it yourself:
This year, the United States is the only country to be ranked in the Top 10 for all three of the charitable giving behaviours covered by the World Giving Index: helping a stranger (1st), volunteering time (joint 5th) and donating money (9th).
Not only is the United States leading in all three categories, that leadership is rising.
This performance is reflected in a further rise in the country’s overall World Giving Index, from a score of 61% last year to 64% this year.
If I was given to sarcasm, I might joke about them being selfish, hogging the philanthropy limelight.
More seriously, the bottom line.
In hard cash, US citizens raised some $335 billion for good causes, nearly double what governments in every developed country in the so-called first world managed to scrape up from their groaning if leaky tax coffers.
What that suggests is that the world’s most celebrity-obsessed country is also the least self-obsessed.
At this point, it is obligatory to insert the ‘correlation is not causation’ caution, making room for claims of, in the US example, bible-belt altruism, or, alternatively, coastal hipsterist coolism. Similarly, Bollywood, or any other Ollywood you care to canvas.
Rather than either/or arguments, however, I’d make the case for commonality — that celebrity gossip-cough-news is possibly the one uniting factor across countries, borders, cultures and people.
Kind of nagging for good, among global audiences.
My suggestion is this: rather than looking a gift horse in the mouth, let’s saddle up and ride that nag off into a glorious sunrise of ever increasing social awareness and action.
So more celebrity news, not less.
The potential impact of celebrity news is slowly being recognised, even within academic circles.
Witness the incredulous tone of a recent article from the well-respected Niemen Journalism Lab, headlined, “An argument that BuzzFeed is “the most important news organization in the world”.
Yes, Buzfeed is the source of masturbatory clickbait such as #thedress but its front page also gives exposure to issues among audiences that social change orgs can only dream of.
Nieman quotes the original article — far too wonky for my tastes — as saying:
The world needs great journalism, but great journalism needs a great business model. That’s exactly what BuzzFeed seems to have, and it’s for that reason the company is the most important news organization in the world.
It’s an argument that I’ve already rejected earlier. Journalism does not need great business models — it needs great funding models.
As Bukhari suggests, it also needs more rigorous transparency, accountability and governance models, towards achieving not just news neutrality but also integrity.
News Neutrality requires a corresponding Quality Control framework that ensures “News Integrity”. News Integrity needs to be applied at individual journalist and news article level, broadcast medium, and organisation level. It requires some codification in law.
I’ll get to these in my next post. For now, this is my argument:
‘If what makes journalism great is in its role as a “public good”, then what Nieman and others miss from the Buzzfeed example are lessons to be learnt from driving audience numbers, in turn driving audience action — and that, again like it or not, is infotainment.’
So that was where I left off my earlier column.
As outlined above, since writing this earlier version, my musing about celebrity news took on real-life form.
Last Friday night, an official New Zealand version of the X-Factor saw one overly sensitive contestant subjected to a lambasting of stunning ferocity, even for audiences jaded by years of manufactured controversy.
Overnight, tens of thousands of viewers howled their protest, and an online petition calling for them to be sacked got similar numbers. These are huge for a remote island nation of just four million.
By Monday afternoon, X-Factor producers announced the judges had been sacked. I noted something curious, though. The sacking story attracted more than 9,000 likes in little more than an hour. Another story, a touching piece on the hapless contestant, was linked next to it. Clicking, I saw that it had just six likes. As in six, not six thousand, likes.
Journalists love these kind of gaps in public attention, so I made a comment about how this was worth a read, about “a rare man honest about his feelings. Too honest for people to handle?”
The comment got a few likes from my friends and I paid it no more attention. This morning I was somewhat surprised to see that it had 130 likes, and a few dozen shares. The linked comment quickly climbed into the hundreds, and as today progressed, the thousands, passing 14,000 as I type this.
For a journalist whose years of corruption stories involving the Pacific Islands had rarely got more than a few hundred looks, let alone likes, today was a sobering moment.
There was no deep insight in my comment, and certainly nothing investigatory. I spotted an anomaly, made a comment, and just happened to be at the top of a few key Facebook feeds as thousands of outraged Kiwis were searching for the nearest comment box to vent their spleen. It could have very well been anyone’s comment that went viral.
Only a dozen or so of the hundreds of comments actually responded to me directly.
The rest were every bit as rabid as those judges, leaving me doubtful about my smug hypothesis in my earlier version of this post. Certainly not much evidence of celebrity news bringing out better natures.
Another of my comments, featuring a lefist blog post on the X-Factor controversy, bemoaning the lack of similar outrage “about child poverty, war and inequality”, got just eight likes. None of them were from the 95 strangers who wanted to be my new friend because of my newly found fake internet fame.
So it is naive of me to think that such controversies prove anything about the role of celebrity news in creating public good.
Yet, on balance, I believe my musings still deserve scrutiny.
A naturally teary young man was bullied, brutally, in front of a national audience. That nation rose to his defence. The judges are now gone, and he is an instant folk hero.
Bread and circuses, yeah.
But I wonder how many similarly bullied people took heart from this outpouring? How many, even if only a few, then felt more emboldened to express an opinion on other issues? How many bullies decided to lay off, even just for a day?
Of such days, surely, are societies built.
Thanks Britney!
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See also my earlier posts:
Other links from story:
