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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Legal Affairs: Big Brother and Another Overblown Privacy Scare (December 10, 2002) John Poindexter has no more power to compile a computer dossier on you than I do. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: The Hispanic Power Outage (December 10, 2002) 'Everybody agrees Latino turnout was down in California, down in Florida, down in Colorado,' a consultant notes. By William Schneider. Wealth of Nations: John Rawls and the Politics of Social Justice (December 10, 2002) Social reformers such as Rawls are in a tradition that emphasizes the best over the possible. By Clive Crook. Media: The Play's Not the Thing (November 26, 2002) Google's news machine: What happens when you take humans out of the story-selection process? By William Powers. Legal Affairs: Spying By the Government Can Save Your Life (November 26, 2002) The complexity of issues involving FISA has enabled critics to cry wolf in a most misleading fashion. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: What Would Defeating Saddam Trigger? (November 26, 2002) In the years since the Gulf War, anti-Americanism has grown along with U.S. influence in the Middle East. By William Schneider. Social Studies: America's Secret Weapon in the War on Terror: Americans (November 26, 2002) Quietly, the public is mobilizing—not in the militarized fashion of WWII but in the networked manner of WWW. By Jonathan Rauch. More from National Journal. |
Media 
All Too HumanThe respectable media are fascinated with famous people who seem headed for trouble but are not there yet by William Powers ..... As the headlines attest—looming war, tanking economy—these are dark and serious times. But be honest: Isn't there still a part of you, some hidden, embarrassing corner of your brain, that's entirely devoted to the most unserious of media pastimes, collecting, sorting, and making sense of the very latest information about the careers, lives, and loves of celebrities? And have you noticed that as the real world has grown darker, news from the dream world of fame has not only not gone away, but has taken on a new magnetism? What's interesting is how much of the celebrity news of the moment is itself rather dark. The media have a well-deserved reputation for fawning over stars, feeding the hype machine by reporting only the good stuff. But lately, it's often the stumbling, staggering celebs, those possibly headed for jail or rehab (or both), who make the biggest headlines. When Winona Ryder goes on trial, when Michael Jackson dangles his baby from a hotel balcony, when Russell Crowe pops off in public, the media rush to cover the new outrage, because we know the public craves this stuff. There's always been a dirt-dishing, lay-'em-low element to American celebrity journalism. But where coverage of celebrities used to divide neatly into the softball mainstream on the one hand, and the seamy, hardball world of the tabloids on the other, today things are more complicated. The National Enquirer, the Star, and the other supermarket tabs still deliver the scandalous stuff the mainstream won't yet touch: the whispered infidelity, the embarrassing addiction, the deeply unflattering photo (drug-addled or drunk, fat or philandering). But in tune with the modern culture of therapy, today's tabs tend to give the bad news an empathetic spin. We don't just learn about the stars' horrible failings, we feel their pain and join them on their journey to recovery. This week's National Enquirer brings a two-page spread on the aftermath of the Michael Jackson incident on the hotel balcony. It begins with a report that "the crazed baby-dangling stunt has sparked a massive battle to take away his three children and save them from his dangerous behavior." But the story morphs into a portrait of a lost man whose entire life has been ruined by fame. Jackson is not so much villain as victim. One quoted "insider" says: "His staff sometimes finds him standing pathetically in front of a huge mirror, tears streaming down his face as he examines his disintegrating nose and his other features. 'Look what they've done to me!' he cries. To blunt his pain, he's popping pills, and he's knocking back bottles of wine." In the same issue, we learn not merely that there's been a "secret split" between Antonio Banderas and wife Melanie Griffith, but that the alleged split is all about Griffith's fragile sense of self: "Melanie has such low self-esteem that when she looks in the mirror, she doesn't see what everyone else sees," says another "insider." The touchy-feely shtick allows the tabs to take wayward celebrities down without seeming utterly cold and heartless. More broadly, what's happened in the last few decades is that the media stopped treating celebrities as distant, unknowable beings, gods and goddesses who are nothing like you and me. Today's celebrities are the opposite of distant and anything but flawless. They are in our lives and our faces, like family members whom we know almost too well, in all their glory and horror. Once upon a time, celebrities had to die before we learned that they were not quite the well-adjusted husband, the wonderful mother, the consummate professional they were made out to be in the hype-heavy media. Now when celebs crash or otherwise embarrass themselves, we know it almost immediately, and we watch it unfold, more or less in real time. If the tabloids start the whole process, it's the respectable media who finish it off. The most fascinating subgenre of celebrity journalism is the coverage of famous people who seem headed for deep trouble but are not there yet. These are people on the cusp of possible scandal, celebs who the media suspects are headed for a fall. The most obvious current example is the engagement of mega-stars Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. Take Affleck's somewhat rocky personal history, including a well-publicized stint in rehab, and combine it with Lopez's short romantic attention span (she's 32 and this will be her third marriage), and this union has disaster written all over it. Given the enormous fame of the two parties, the merger also has a certain Liz Taylor-Richard Burton grandiosity. Naturally, the tabs are all over it, with this week's Star running a cover package that lays out all the dysfunctions that could sink the marriage. But the high-end media are also licking their lips. For a taste, see the December issue of GQ and Lucy Kaylin's mesmerizing profile of Lopez, a piece that appears positive on the surface, but is savage an inch beneath. Which other celebs does the media sense are headed for trouble? Too many to list here, but I'm keeping an eye on Chelsea Clinton. After she moved to England last year and started running with a jet-set crowd, the tabs ran stories suggesting she was losing her grip. Then, a few months ago, she appeared at a museum show in a bizzare outfit with a plunging neckline and chains, posing with Madonna. The tab story went mainstream, as Newsweek and others ran piquant items. Of course, Chelsea may be perfectly fine. And if she isn't, we'll be the first to know.
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. He recently spent three months in Japan as a Japan Society Fellow, studying the role of reading in Japanese life. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2002 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. | [an error occurred while processing this directive] | ||
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