Gossip Rubs Journalism’s Face in Dirt

Michael Jackson is dead, and if you’re honest, there will be a time in the past few years where you labeled him a “sick paedo”, so don’t go feigning sadness, yeah?

Now, I couldn’t give a toss about the man, and it’s not his death which interested me. It was the coverage. As a Journalism student, it made me feel incredibly uneasy to see the leading news agencies in the world running around like blue arsed flies; chomping on the recycled scraps of information left to them by celebrity gossip blog TMZ.

I may be getting well ahead of myself, but I can see a future where Kate Adie and John Simpson stand shoulder to shoulder with Perez Hilton on the front line; a world in which a representative from E! quizzes Ahmadinejad on his country’s high gender bias. Scary, no?

This isn’t the first time TMZ have beaten multi-national news corporations to scoops on celebrity deaths. Both the Steve Irwin and Heath Ledger spectacles were leaked first to this L.A based Blog, one of which happened the other side of America, and one of which happened the other side of the world.

I’m well aware of a gaping hole in this, the little voice in my head screaming “these are all celebrities, and this is a specialist celebrity blog!”. Well yes, that is true, but the fact is inescapable that the largest news agencies in the world, lost out to an online tabloid journal run by a Law graduate with no formal Journalism training.

Aside from a more than casual flirtation with facts (and a penchant for hyperbole) there is a much darker side to the celeb infatuated gossip mags and blogs. In Guardian scribe Oliver Burkeman’s “The Brangelina Industry“, he is told by head of X17 (one of the world’s largest Papparazzi agencies), that “there is this idea that there is only one truth, and that you have to stick to it. But maybe not.”. Come again?

Further damning of the industry comes from publicist Huvane (responsible for Gwyneth Paltrow, Demi Moore, Meg Ryan, Julianne Moore etc etc etc etc…). “If you co-operate with one of the magazines, their competitors become vengeful and attack clients… There is no upside to working with them … Their tactic is to make up stories that are so damaging, in the hope that we would engage in a dialogue that gives them access to the talent.” Lovely.

So here we have a biased industry, known to fabricate stories on the personal lives of celebrities (”[the story] can come from a genuine tip, or a photo. Or it can come out of our ass.” - anonymous celebrity weekly editor), at the forefront of international Journalism.

Sleep Well.