El Paso Times, Texas, Annamaria Longo Column

By Annamaria Longo, El Paso Times, Texas

Jul. 20–Keeping a gossip blog forces you to walk a fine line between entertainment and cruelty.

I post on a celebrity gossip/entertainment blog for the Times, and I often find myself questioning if I’m being too mean or too lenient. I’m no angel, but I try to be nice and keep it fun, if only to keep my own karma in check.

Unfortunately, there are some bloggers out in the gossip-sphere who take their scribblings way too far, posting scathing commentaries about an actress’s nearly invisible cellulite or even a celebrity baby’s first photos.

But it isn’t just the bloggers being mean. If you read down the reader comments on those blogs, you’ll find that people can be unnecessarily cruel. Just because someone is famous, some people feel the need to bring him or her (usually her) down.

A recent one-day symposium in Britain examined this fascination with celebrities, especially “train-wreck” ones such as Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse and Lindsay Lohan.

One of the organizers told the Associated Press that the participants sought to study why people take “pleasure in seeing women brought low.”

Diane Negra, a film and television professor at the University of East Anglia in Britain, told the AP, “The massive coverage these women draw in is only a little bit about themselves. These women operate as lightning rods for a lot of other concerns.”

She also said that coverage of the trials of Spears, Lohan, Winehouse and others is more judgmental, serving as “cautionary tales.”

Also in the AP story, a psychology and health professor, Cary Cooper of England’s Lancaster University, said we want to watch celebrities struggle. “It makes people feel good.”

Celebrities “look like they lead a golden life, and yet it doesn’t make them happy. So in a way it justifies our humdrum existence.”

Well, it’s sort of true, I guess. We feel superior to Spears because, hey, most of us don’t drive around with our children in our laps. We feel sympathy for Amy Winehouse, whose struggles with drugs and her husband are well-documented by both the British and U.S. press. We won’t even get to the material that Lindsay Lohan and her family give the media on a weekly basis.

Let’s be honest here, though. Celebrities aren’t necessarily victims. They depend on the tabloids as much as the tabloids depend on them. Old Hollywood had its publicity machine; New Hollywood has its People, Us Weekly and OK! magazines, its PerezHilton.coms and E!Onlines.

I don’t really know how to reconcile a need to learn all about the Jolie-Pitt twins with the knowledge that it’s probably none of my business. I don’t think any of us who read the tabloids and scan the blogs do.

But I do think that if Britney and company chose to stay away from paparazzi hot spots or get professional help for addictions instead of seemingly pretending they don’t exist, these women would give the tabloids and bloggers like me less to write about.

Plus, I’m tired of blogging about Britney.

—–

To see more of the El Paso Times or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.elpasotimes.com/.

Copyright (c) 2008, El Paso Times, Texas

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.