Paris Hilton Not Newsworthy…Wait, This Just In
March 2nd, 2007 by jeff
I know it seems confusing, but try to follow this logic. The Associated Press released a story explaining that they had placed an internal boycott on stories about socialite Paris Hilton for one week as an experiment.
That experiment failed when the story of Hilton being ticketed was just too good to pass up.
Please note the irony (as subtle as a lead pipe to the base of the skull) that this failed “experiment” for the very purpose of limiting news on a particular subject was, in and of itself, deemed worthy of a news story emphasizing said subject.
It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.
NEW YORK — So you may have heard: Paris Hilton was ticketed the other day for driving with a suspended license.
Not huge news, even by celebrity-gossip standards. Here at the Associated Press, we put out an initial item of some 300 words. But it actually meant more to us than that.
It meant the end of our experimental blackout on news about Paris Hilton.
It was only meant to be a weeklong ban — not the boldest of journalistic initiatives, and one, we realized, that might seem hypocritical once it ended. And it wasn’t based on a view of what the public should be focusing on — the war in Iraq, for example, or the upcoming election of the next leader of the free world, as opposed to the doings of a partygoing celebrity heiress/reality TV star most famous for a grainy sex video.
No, editors just wanted to see what would happen if we didn’t cover this media phenomenon, this creature of the Internet gossip age, for a full week. After that, we’d take it day by day. Would anyone care? Would anyone notice? And would that tell us something interesting?
Here’s a suggestion. How about you just report whatever is actually newsworthy and not manufacture news about nothing? It’s bad enough that we have to read about Hilton without then having to hear about your internal debate over her. If that doesn’t prove a media obsession, I don’t know what does.
