Celebrity News Craze: 2009

Sunday, April 5, 2009

More Evidence That The New Cycle Follows Celebrities' Lives

We care about international adoptions only when a celebrity travels overseas to adopt a foreign baby.

Howard Kurtz, anchor of the CNN program, Reliable Sources, offered commentary this morning that news programs and cable news channels followed Madonna in her quest to adopt a baby girl in Malawi.

Since Madonna was going to adopt a foreign baby, the news media decided to report stories about foreign adoptions.

Mr. Kurtz said that when we learned that entertainer Chris Brown allegedly battered Rihanna, talk shows and news programs began to dedicate time to the issue of domestic violence.

Next, Mr. Kurtz said that when Nadya Suleman (also known as Octomom in the media) delivered multiple babies, all of a sudden in vitro fertilization became a hot news topic.

The news is all about getting on the bandwagon.

Media Bias in the United States

According to Wikipedia, this is how we can think of media bias:

Media bias in the United States is the description of systematically non-uniform selection or coverage of news stories in the United States media. Claims of bias in the media include claims of liberal bias, conservative bias, claims of mainstream bias, and claims of corporate bias. There are a variety of watchdog groups that attempt to find the facts behind both biased reporting and unfounded claims of bias, and research about media bias is a subject of systematic scholarship in a variety of disciplines.

What can independent website publishers and bloggers do that the mainstream media can't?

In an interesting blog post on Daily Kos, a blogger acknowledges the sensibility that is emerging about critics of the mainstream media: that there is a valid role for bloggers and independent website publishers in reporting the news.

This blog will aim to add to that conversation from the perspective of other bloggers and independent website publishers.

Where I'm starting out is from the perspective of society's and the media's shared obession with celebrities. How does this focus on celebrities blur our concentration of other subjects?

Disclosures

I am a registered Democrat, and I have long had an interest in the media.

I've read a lot about a bias in the media lately revolving around the U.S. Democratic Party's primary campaign. But even before this, I was lucky to have worked for the journalist Aphrodite Jones, who wrote a book about media bias. Although I will rely on that book to give some context to this blog, I hope the scope of this blog can encompass a larger conversation about fairness and accuracy in the media.

Thank you for visiting Celebrity Media Craze.