Media not helping Britney's public collapse
Posted by pinrobot123 on February 29, 2008
The pop superstar, 26, is coming unhinged — and in full view of the world, thanks to an unprecedented 24/7 media watch that makes her the only celebrity anywhere with this level of scrutiny.
Her outlandish behavior — lack of underwear, head-shaving, rehab, custody battle, psych ward — has been chronicled in mind-boggling detail. So has the mundane. On Tuesday, there was a hearing in her custody case over a gag order, which was denied. She went to a restaurant with her dad and kept getting up to go to the bathroom. It was all covered.
Expect her life to continue to unspool before us. One reason: There is big money to be made.
“The biggest news in the world right now is celebrity news,” and Britney is the biggest story, says Gary Morgan, CEO and co-owner of Splash News, a paparazzi photo agency.
Helping to fuel the interest: dramatic changes in the media landscape. The number of celebrity media outlets, journalists, photographers and bloggers has soared. News-delivery technology — the Internet, cellphones, podcasting — has rapidly expanded, and the revenue derived from covering celebs has multiplied.
Portfolio magazine recently calculated the value of what it called “the Britney Industrial Complex” and found that she and her travails are worth $110 million to $120 million a year to the economy. The Britney paparazzi alone take in $4 million annually, or about 20% of the overall paparazzi business.
The mainstream media also has turned its attention to Spears. “She’s a mess, and people want to see what happens,” Morgan says.
Indeed, demand is not flagging. Sales of Us Weekly and OK! climbed in 2007 (10% for Us and more than 23% for OK!) even as other celebrity magazines saw circulation diminish. The reason cited: their coverage of Spears, who has been on OK!’s cover 54 times in the 103 issues since January 2006. She has been the No. 1 weekly celebrity in USA TODAY’s Celebrity Heat Index, which has measured media attention since last January, more times than any other celebrity, and she outpaces No. 2 in total exposure (Angelina Jolie) 2-to-1.
The Los Angeles bureau chief of the Associated Press issued a memo to his staff last month reminding employees that for the foreseeable future, anything involving Spears is big-deal news. Rolling Stone, which first put her on the cover when she was 17, has her on the current issue with the headline, “Inside an American Tragedy.”
Then there’s the Chico Enterprise-Record. The 32,000-circulation daily in Chico, Calif., declared a month-long moratorium on Spears stories on Jan. 20 and is considering extending the ban for another month. Nobody has complained, the paper continues to publish, life goes on — just without Britney Spears news.
But maybe the reason Chico readers didn’t complain is that it doesn’t matter — there are countless other places to find Spears news these days.
Still, the Britney mess raises questions for the media, or at least for those who consider themselves responsible journalists: Have they become part of the story? Is the overpowering coverage contributing to her downward spiral? Should they pull back? Or is it their job to keep the cameras running until whatever happens … happens?
“We are taking pleasure in the spectacle of her self-destruction. By looking, we add momentum to what is already the most dramatic and publicly detailed immolation of a public figure in our lifetime,” says Michael Joseph Gross, a writer for Blender magazine who spent weeks hanging out with the Spears paparazzi for his March cover story on her “Road to Ruin.”
The experience left him deeply disturbed, he says, partly because of the role of the media and the public.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever written about. There is no light in this story,” Gross says.
It’s tempting to place the bulk of the blame for Spears’ predicament on increasingly aggressive paparazzi, and there’s no doubt they play a role, Gross says. “The paps I rode with are aware they are helping Britney along a destructive path,” he says. “But they don’t seem to take her life or their own lives seriously enough to stop and honestly assess what’s going on.”
The paparazzi now number in the hundreds in Los Angeles, many of them foreign-born; when Splash opened in 1989, there were just a handful and all were American, says Morgan, who is British.
Some agencies, such as TMZ.
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com, require their photographers to sign contracts promising to obey all laws in pursuit of a story. Others are less picky: A substantial number of the new paparazzi, according to Gross and veteran paparazzi, are untrained as photographers and willing to do anything to get pictures, including driving dangerously and subjecting their targets (and their children) to verbal abuse to provoke a reaction.
“They threaten to hurt us, spit in our face, run us off the road, damage our cars,” says Harvey Levin, head of TMZ.com, the celebrity site that has broken scores of scoops about Spears.
“We had to hire security guards to protect our cameramen from other paparazzi — that’s how aggressive it has gotten.”
Not all are like that, protests Brandy Navarre, co-owner of X17, an agency known as “pro-Britney” that has teams of shooters on Spears 24/7. “Some of these guys who’ve been shooting her for five or six years start to feel really close to her,” Navarre says. “They love her because they’re making money off her, but they honestly like the girl.”
The editors who buy those pictures play a role, too, says Gross, who acknowledges being conflicted about it: His own Britney stories “just furnished my living room.”
“There has been a complete demolition of all standards of taste and decorum,” Gross says.
Now Spears is becoming an object of sympathy — from ordinary people, other celebrities, even some editors, photographers and bloggers.
Support sites — such as PrayersforBritney.com — have appeared, offering pep talks and positive thoughts from fans.
This month, a Splash paparazzo quit in a huff, declaring the situation out of control.
Last week, Mike Nichols, director of the Broadway musical Spamalot, ordered a rewrite of a show lyric that made fun of Spears, inserting Posh Spice instead.
Why? “Because we don’t laugh at sad people,” said show author Eric Idle. “Britney Spears is being tortured to death, and we don’t want to be on that side.”
And yet no one seems able to stop reading, watching, filming.
“We can’t just walk away. That would be like ignoring a pink elephant in the living room,” says Sarah Ivens, U.S. editor of OK! Weekly, a new British import in the ever-growing celeb-magazine category.
Spears’ predicament isn’t helped by the fact that until recently, no one among her family, friends or employees has been able to control her (although her father has been granted temporary conservatorship over his daughter’s affairs).
Nor does it help that for whatever reason, she acts in ways that encourage the paparazzi; she’s so friendly, she has even dated one.
“What we’ve done is present her life as the soap opera that it is,” says Perez Hilton, whose celebrity gossip blog, PerezHilton.com, has been critical of Spears for years. “The coverage wouldn’t be as intense if she wasn’t giving them all those crazy things to write about. It’s supply and demand. The demand is insatiable, and Britney feeds it. I see no end in sight.”
The public’s fascination with celebrity antics is of course not new and not surprising.
“People want access to the people they adore. It’s like touching the hem of Jesus,” says Frank Griffin, co-owner of paparazzi agency Bauer-Griffin. “People are sick of news about dead and wounded coming back from Iraq, about losing jobs and houses being repossessed, so they spend $1.29 on Us Weekly or Life&Style and get 20 or 30 minutes of relief.”
Besides, Americans are peculiarly susceptible to redemption themes with celebrities, say Griffin and Ivens, both of whom are British. “They like to see people taking pratfalls and then come back,” Griffin says.
“People really want a happy ending,” Ivens adds. “In this country, there’s a real desire for her to come back and be a success again.”
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