On newsstands across the United States, the faces that most often stare out from magazine covers are not those of political leaders or victims of war but those of Kim Kardashian, George Clooney, Beyoncé, and the like. Celebrities fascinate the American public and, consequently, capture significant media coverage in celebrity news outlets.
The significance of the tabloid industry lies in its size and ability to consistently captivate the curiosity of millions of Americans. The industry’s breadth is sizable: celebrity news consumes entire magazines, websites, and television channels including People, US Weekly, Star Magazine, Perezhilton.com, E! News, and TMZ. It also plays a role in men and women’s fashion and lifestyle magazines that focus less on celebrity gossip yet rely on celebrities’ photographs, magazine spreads, and lifestyles to attract readers and generate content. The industry is worth billions of dollars. People alone generated $1.1 billion in advertising revenue in 2013, making it the American magazine with the greatest revenue based on advertising.
While the prevalence of tabloids and celebrity news is not unique to the United States, their popularity and stable profit has particular meaning in the American context. Thanks to their popularity, tabloids illustrate the priorities and aspirations of the American public. Celebrity news outlets are paradoxical reflections of the American Dream and the American belief in equality of all people. All news, at its most basic level, is driven by the interest of its readers. Though they focus intensely on the lives of celebrities, tabloids ultimately reveal the most about Americans’ fundamental desires and insecurities.
Sneak Peek at the Lavish Life You Want to Live
Tabloids are filled with conspicuous and lavish demonstrations of wealth, from pictures of celebrities going on expensive shopping sprees to “tours” of their multi-million dollar homes. Take the October 30 story in Star titled “EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS: Owen Wilson Buys His Baby Mama a House!” detailing actor Owen Wilson’s $1.5 million home purchase. These stories reflect celebrities’ wealth and the expensive entertainment world that most inhabit.
Importantly, the level of conspicuous consumption depicted in most celebrity news outlets is unachievable by any but the richest Americans. Such fascination with wealth and luxury, some say, may be due to a natural curiosity with things that we can’t have. In an interview, Professor Ellis Cashmore, author of Celebrity/Culture, says that tabloids have “helped cultivate a taste amongst us consumers for following the lives of others” in a form of acceptable and respectable voyeurism. In the U.S., this voyeuristic taste must be contextualized within the ideal of the American Dream. The American Dream is the belief that “anyone can make it in America” with hard work and dedication. Though the true achievability of the American Dream is debatable, the ideal remains strong in the American narrative as an embodiment of the desire for upward social mobility and the nation’s meritocratic values which make this mobility possible.
Tabloids’ celebration of celebrities’ conspicuous, lavish consumption reflects the American Dream and Americans’ hope for upward social mobility. Tabloids and celebrity news outlets positively report how much celebrities spend on everything from vacations and homes to handbags and a dinner out. For example, OK! Magazine published a story titled “North West Gifts Kim Kardashian With a Customized Hermes Bag for Her Birthday!” detailing the luxury designer handbag which Kim Kardashian’s one-year old daughter customized for her mother’s birthday. Tabloids’ expressed and implicit praise and desire for celebrities’ luxury are manifestations of the American belief in creating one’s own success.
The amorphous, unpredictable nature of celebrity in which public opinion decides whom is a celebrity and for how long they remain famous means that celebrities must create and maintain their own fame. Thus, becoming a celebrity represents an increase in status, wealth, and fame that aligns with the upward social mobility which most Americans strive for. In an interview, Professor Susan J. Drucker, professor of Media Studies at the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University, elaborates on how the accessibility of celebrity has made it more desirable: “…The whole celebrification process I think is a much more open, democratic process… I think that becoming famous has become much more part of, in a sense, the American Dream. That, because it seems achievable, I think it becomes much more of the dream of more people.”
“STARS: THEY’RE JUST LIKE US!”
Open any tabloid magazine today and you will find a section with a variation of this title. These sections show celebrities doing things that “regular people” do, like going to the supermarket, walking their dog, carrying their own shopping bags, and applying sunscreen. They focus on trivial matters but reflect a desire to know that celebrities are similar to us in some ways.
Another manifestation of this desire in tabloids is nastier and far more pervasive: negative coverage and speculation about private aspects of celebrities’ lives. In the same magazine in which a celebrity like Kim Kardashian is admired for her wealth and luxury, she is heavily criticized and even ridiculed, like her 2013 Met Gala dress that was compared to a couch. Celebrity news feeds off the private details of celebrities’ lives, and the more dramatic the news, the better (and the more profitable). Few things are off limits: breakups, divorce, financial and legal struggles, weight fluctuation, adultery, and professional failure are all consistent topics of tabloid stories.
Tabloids also cover more serious situations like criminal actions and jail time; notable examples include TMZ’s exclusive breaks on Rihanna’s domestic abuse by Chris Brown and videos of Ray Rice beating his wife along with, more recently, “Real Housewives of New Jersey” star Teresa Guidice’s 15-month-long jail sentence due to tax evasion. Similarly, PerezHilton.com wrote an October 31 story titled “Honey Boo Boo’s Mama June Felt Bad For Child Molester Boyfriend And That’s Why She’s Been Helping Him???”
This harsh, negative coverage paints a stark contrast to the previously described positive adoration of celebrities’ lifestyles in the same outlets. Because they embody so much of the American dream to us, we view celebrities with the same democratic principles that underlie that dream, namely the equality of all people. Tabloids’ ability and willingness to criticize celebrities embodies these democratic principles because they do not keep celebrities on a pedestal but instead analyze and critique all parts of their lives. By focusing on the negative aspects of celebrities’ lives that are often the exact opposite of the seemingly perfect lifestyles they lead, tabloids equalize celebrities by demonstrating that they encounter the same challenges that other Americans do. Celebrity status in America is earned, not inherited, meaning that it is easy to imagine celebrities as ordinary citizens because Americans know that, no so long ago, they were just as ordinary. As celebrity status arguably becomes easier to achieve, the equalizing impulse of celebrity news and tabloids becomes stronger. Publicly discussing how celebrities experience heartbreak, betrayal, financial loss, and other negative situations demonstrates that we all share something very human: a life that is never perfect.
The Larger Relevance of Celebrity News
Celebrity news is often dismissed as frivolous, wasteful, and unworthy of attention. However, the size, profit, and mass appeal of celebrity news cannot be ignored and, in fact, reveals much about American society. As Cashmore wrote in Celebrity/Culture, “Like it or loathe it, celebrity culture is with us: it surrounds us and even invades us. It shapes our thought and conduct, style, and manner. It affects and is affected by not just hardcore fans but by entire populations.” Tabloids have also impacted other types of journalism and how we receive news. Drucker describes a “blurring between news and entertainment” and “between tabloid journalism and traditional journalism” because “the desire to be entertained has become so great that it’s spilled over…into what has historically been a more traditional, serious media environment.”
Tabloids expose the lives of the rich and famous in adoring and unflattering ways, but ultimately they are more a mirror of the values, priorities, and desires of Americans themselves. These values drive not only what we want to know about celebrities but also what we expect from other news. As a mirror into the American psyche, understanding celebrity news and tabloids as a legitimate type of media is critical in allowing deeper insight into the changing media landscape we see today.
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