Entertainment Journalism Or Toxic Trash?
The overdose of celebrity gossip
I remember the 90s, when the only source of entertainment news, were TV guides and the little corners in newspaper supplements. Changing times brought over exposure through the internet, and before we knew it, entertainment journalism began spiraling out of control. From movies to harmless celebrity gossip, the spotlight has now moved on to the minutest details of celebrities’ lives.
Every picture celebrities post on instagram, becomes a headline, every response on twitter becomes an article on savage comeback, every celebrity wedding becomes event of the nation, and every patch up and break up makes the news, as if it were a relationship between two nations, that could make or rewrite history. With each passing phase, the lines between journalism and mindless gossiping seems to be blurring. How else would you explain statements such as “Karan Johar changes his underwear three times a day”, to “Here’s what Deepika said about Ranveer” making it to full paged articles. Media’s darling Taimur Ali Khan waves at the paparazzi and they lose their cool like a teenage Justin Bieber fan, a celebrity goes on a vacation, and the pictures are thrust by media for everyone to see. Now that’s quite some specific information I have, for someone who can’t stop cribbing about the very same headlines, but here’s where the problem exists — it’s everywhere! I have been occasionally guilty of reading such mindless articles, more out of curiosity as to how much can one postmortem something as simple as celebrities meeting up for lunch, or expressing an opinion. From click bait headlines to utterly made up scenarios, celebrity gossip is in your face all the time, no matter how hard you’d try to avoid it. It’s in the papers, in magazines, on websites, on social media, it’s everywhere! Like they say, you may love it or hate it, but you just can’t avoid it. You may not want to read such news when you see it, but its presence like hovering mosquitoes, does test your ability to not lose your cool over it.
While one may argue it is harmless at the end of the day, is it really? What kind of media and content are we projecting to the young minds ? Could this have anything to do with the number of hours people spend, especially in the comments section, defending and attacking celebrities? It’s not just the readers I pity, but celebrities too, irrespective of whether or not it’s their own doing for PR. No matter how big a star, they’re all still humans, and to have every little detail about your life being put on the scanner, is no fun. Imagine the horror of stories from your bedroom to relationships, being published on the internet, for random strangers to read, judge, and make a hullabaloo about. And as if the news itself isn’t cringe-worthy, the utter horror of bad grammar and poorly framed sentences, makes you question every rule of journalism there is.
This toxic trash that’s thrown to us in the name of entertainment journalism, makes me wonder what really is the difference between such media and the neighborhood aunties we complain about for being too interested in others’ lives? At least the aunties’ gossip dies within the colony’s periphery. Is it too much to ask to not force feed such useless information on netizens, and may be, just may be, practice a little ethics when penning down such seemingly important information that the nation doesn’t really want to know?
