Who Should Report Entertainment News?

By Julia Bianco on February 14, 2014

Photo Courtesy of chrissyrose70 on flickr.com

I really hate to be that person that starts their article with a definition, but I just need to put this out there: according to dictionary.com, the definition of ‘news’ is “a report of a recent event, intelligence, or information.”

Okay, so it seems pretty straightforward— news is anything that has happened recently. But we don’t report on everything that happens, ever, and not every news outlet reports on everything other news outlets pick up. Star reports celebrity gossip, Wired reports on science and technology, Entertainment Weekly reports on television and movies. All of these publications have very specific goals and agendas— they make it clear what they’re going to report, and then that’s what they discuss. However, the lines become blurred when you move onto larger and more general publications, such as The Associated Press, with less specific agendas. What should they be reporting?

Recent AP headlines have ranged from “Barbie doll featured in Sports illustrated Swimsuit’s 50th anniversary issue,” to “Long, merciless winter takes heavy toll on nation’s pipes, pavement, and road-repair budgets,” to “Congress votes to restore full cost of living pension increases for younger military retirees”–a wide variety of topics, none of which received any questions about their validity as news.

However, I have never seen quite so much vitriol directed at a news organization as when the AP decided to tweet the news about Justin Bieber’s recent arrest. The offending tweet, “BREAKING: Police official says Justin Bieber is expected to turn himself in on assault charge in Toronto,” received such hateful responses as “This deserves BREAKING?” from Scott Faldon, “They need a new alert: Biebing,” from Alex Heard, and a straight up “this is not newss!!!” from Lando- L2P.

Responses like this are common when a more serious news outlet tweets something about entertainment. Any mention of a celebrity is often regarded as a superficial topic, and people are ready to jump on news organizations for talking about something they deem so shallow. Why is this? And is the outrage justified?

I say no. If we’re going by the dictionary definition of what news is, which is what I think we should go by, then big things that happen to celebrities is news. If Justin Bieber gets arrested or if Shia LaBeouf opens a weird art exhibit where he wears a bag over his head, then that’s something that happened, and it’s something that should be reported.

However, there is a flip side to that coin. If a regular person who you would walk by on the street were to get arrested on something like a suspicion of a DUI, the AP would not report on it, because it would be considered too small scale. One could argue that what happens to Justin Bieber is just as inconsequential to the rest of the world as the things that happen to you or me on a day to day basis.

This is where we really have to consider the nature of society, and, especially, the nature of celebrity. Many people blame our celebrity obsession on new media, but fame has been around for centuries. News about the comings and goings of Alexander the Great was written in paint on stones because people wanted to hear about it. We as a society need someone to idolize, and celebrities give us someone easy to look up to. We want to hear about what they do because it gives us an easy escape from our day to day lives.

Fame is fickle, and it is often hard to trace how specific celebrities got famous and when it got to the point that their every move was the talk of the hour. However, there are clearly certain people who society has taken a fascination with for whatever reason, and they have become an integral part of our culture and our identity as Americans. Treat that as what you will, but it’s hard to deny that it is a fact, however much some people may not like it. We are a culture obsessed with fame, and it is reflected in what we see, what we read, and what we do.

Clearly, there are just as many people, if not more, who want to hear about Justin Bieber’s arrest as a Congressional decision or a recent weather trend. That’s not something that can be called into question—again, you can say that this is a fundamental flaw in our society, but it’s hard to say that it’s not true. What this issue really comes down to, though, is the question of whether a news outlet that prides itself for reporting only the best information should be stooping to the level of our fame-obsessed culture.

Objectively, the answer to this question should be yes. If people want to read about it, for whatever reason, it is news. There is no going around that. News can be more specifically defined as what has happened to people or places or things that people want to hear about.

The Associated Press is an organization that states its purpose as “the essential global news network, delivering accurate, insightful news from every corner of the world, 24 hours a day.” Hollywood is, for better or for worse, a corner of the world, and it would be almost unethical for the AP to ignore it completely just because it’s considered ‘lowbrow’ news.

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