Here’s the rough draft of a fake op-ed I’ve written for my journalism class. In case any of you out there are regular purchasers of US Weekly, or OK, or People, I thought it might be worth a post. Here goes:
Britney Goes Completely Bonkers, and the Whole World Cares
Look away, America. Look away.
Britney Spears’ downward spiral is drawing more and media attention, even as outcries against her paparazzi stalkers abound. In January, The Pew Research Center published a study revealing that Britney gets more headlines than George Bush. The week after Heath Ledger died, only he, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were in the news more than Britney. Our foreign wars, the tense situation in Gaza, and concern over the economy all took a backseat to Britney’s breakdown.
Most of the more conservative voices out there calling for a reinstatement of journalistic ethics in the Britney debacle blame her photographers, the journalists who cover her stories, and the tabloids and media outlets that pay big money for piteous photos of the star. Asra Nomani called for a moratorium on the Britshow until her mental health stabilizes. Jon Friedman of Market Watch wrote, “Enough is enough.” Jeff Bercovici of Portfolio.com argued that the media has an obligation to leave crazy enough alone. These criticisms, not surprisingly, seem to be falling on deaf ears.
Why? Because Britney makes people a lot of money. Britney makes the media more money than any other star. She makes other people far more money than she makes herself – even though she is cashing into the frenzy with her recent single, “Piece of Me.” So calling off the hounds is complicated. It would lose people jobs (however seedy they may be). It would hurt the revenues of countless companies – perhaps most of all the paparazzi conglomerates that send photographers out to stalk Britney 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
So the ethical journalists of today may holler all they want about mental illness, tragedy and common decency, but the reason they are ignored is that they are missing the point. At the heart of the paparazzi phenomenon is our growing, unabashed voyeurism. The best representation of this is David Samuels’ “Shooting Britney” in The Atlantic Monthly. He writes, “The paparazzi exist for the same reason the stars exist: we want to see their pictures. Happier, wealthier, wildly more beautiful, partying harder, driving better cars, they live the lives that the rest of us can only dream about, until the party ends and we are confirmed in our belief that it is better, after all, not to be them.”
The most Britney- and celebrity-obsessed members of the population are young women between the ages of 16 and 34. This is the saddest component of the Britney phenomenon, and is really the crux of the issue. The reason that Britney is a goldmine is that people – mostly women my age – can’t get enough of her, and quite frankly, don’t care what that does to Britney. We couldn’t get enough of her when she was 17, beautiful, and advocating abstinence before marriage (how refreshing!). We couldn’t get enough of her when she became a slave 4 us. We couldn’t get enough of her six-pack, and then her post-pregnancy chub. We were jealous of her deal with Pepsi, her childhood romance with Justin Timberlake, and her seemingly impossible rags-to-riches story, with nothing but a passable voice, the ability to dance, and a tolerably pretty face as her assets. So when she married her back-up dancer (what was she thinking?) and started driving around with her babies not strapped in (let alone in a car seat), we reveled in our self-righteous condemnation. We wanted to be her so badly that we needed a reason to feel good that we were not, in fact, her – or anything like her. And Britney, ever the slave, delivered.
We’re the problem. It is the consumer, not the paparazzo, who is fueling this obsessive train. If nobody wanted to buy a picture of Britney without her underwear – if nobody cared – then Britney could live in loony peace. At the end of the day, the media is a servant to the interests of its consumers. And we’re interested in the wrong things. Imagine a world in which the overdosed death of a handsome actor commands more attention among professional, educated people than the atrocities of war. The depraved, schadenfreude-ridden society you’ve just imagined is the one you actually live in.
It is not only Britney at stake. It is our identity as a decent and caring society. If Britney dies in a fiasco that recalls Diana’s harrowing demise, we will all be to blame. My fear is that the thought might never occur to us, even after it is too late. We want to know and can’t help ourselves – and while we might feel some indignation at the paparazzi for stalking our darlings, the fact remains that we pay their bills. For those of us who value our privacy, our sanity, and our peace, we should curtail our spending such that it allows Britney a right to the same. Because we all made her bed, but she’s the only one who has to lie in it. And if that doesn’t make us cruel, I don’t know what would.
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I hope you have enjoyed this foray into my journalistic aspirations.
