Paris Hilton. Hype. Tabloid. Over-saturation. Sensational. Trivial. Dummying down.
What do these words have in common?
For several readers, the words equate to what they call The Bee’s frivolous and over-the-top coverage of the young Hollywood celebrity’s legal saga over the past two weeks.
“I am reading the National Enquirer masquerading as The Bee,” wrote Denise McDonald of San Andreas. “I can not believe that Paris Hilton is on your front pages and back pages. Or maybe your paper is trying to compete with People magazine. How sad.”
“I often take Sections A (main news), B (Metro), C (Sports), D (Business) and E (Scene) to school for my students,” said McDonald, who teaches at Calaveras High School. “I really can’t, in good conscience, take these A sections. What would I be teaching them?”
McDonald and other readers with similar concerns were talking about stories such as the June 9 front-page centerpiece labeled “Showdown over celebrity,” highlighted by a large fuzzy photo of Hilton sobbing in the back of a police car taking her back to the Los Angeles County Jail.
“Mom, This Isn’t Right,” was the big headline over the picture.
That was followed the next day by Hilton coverage taking up almost all of Sunday’s A-section back page, in spot called “Back Talk,” dubbed as “a not-so ordinary look at people, places & things.”
This is where the paper is supposed to take an irreverent — (irrelevant?) — look at the news and newsmakers.
Among other things, the page included a timeline of the week’s events that used the same photo — of Hilton’s prison-garbed wax museum figure — four times, as well as jokes by comedians Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien and David Letterman, and a list of Hilton by-the-numbers that had info-nuggets such as “2,700: Square footage of Hilton’s Hollywood Hills home.”
All this after a front-page story Friday about Hilton’s early release outraging the prosecutor. It included photos of cameramen staking out Hilton’s home and an overhead shot of the home itself — all painfully reminiscent of the O.J. Simpson media frenzy.
No doubt there was a here-we-go-again dimension to the week’s events, the mainstream media transfixed in that 24/7 breathless way we’ve seen and winced at all too often.
A some point in these things, the news media become a parody of themselves. We just can’t seem to help ourselves.
There is also a certain shooting-fish-in-a-barrel aspect to this. The easy criticism about elevating celebrity to front-page status and giving it large amounts of space while diminishing serious news.
And, of course, there was some of that.
A few readers pointed out that in the same week, The Bee pushed inside stories about Secretary of Defense Robert Gates deciding not to name Marine Gen. Peter Pace to another term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff because of frustration over the Iraq war and a federal judge sentencing former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to prison and calls by some for his pardon.
Several of The Bee’s stories about Hilton attempted to put the bizarre affair in a broader legal context, a commendable effort. And the online Hilton stories at sacbee.com were popular. But by the end of the weekend, the paper’s readers tired of the entire exercise, as evident by responses to this office and letters to the editor.
The decisions about coverage and story placement are made by seasoned and experienced editors, who are under pressure to make the paper and the front page enticing and relevant by mixing things up. These are editors who are not enamored of celebrity news.
What in the past might have been dismissed as not worthy of the front page — a minor celebrity jailed over a misdemeanor — now has A1 potential, on equal footing with traditional hard news stories.
The Bee, for example, was one of a handful in the country to have a Page 1 story about the winner of the recent “American Idol” contest.
News editor Linda Gonzales was one of the key editors involved in the Hilton coverage and says much has changed since she walked into a newsroom almost 25 years ago.
“Then, there was not a lot of celebrity-type news unless it was in your backyard,” she said. “Over the years, these things (celebrity news) have taken on more weight … the world is changing.”
Readers’ expectations, whetted by the Internet and cable television, are different, too, she said. “That thing on Friday (when Hilton was taken back to jail from her home) was a circus no matter how you look at it.
“People expect to see something about it in the paper the next day.”
Reader surveys, she explained, have consistency emphasized the need to go beyond what has traditionally been defined as front-page news. It gets difficult, Gonzales said, when titillating stories about “near-celebrities” such as Paris Hilton and Anna Nicole Smith take on a life of their own.
“We are trying to appeal to a whole group of people, including young people,” she said, noting that the paper tries to provide broader context to its celebrity-based Page 1 stories so they are more than simply about a celebrity in trouble.
“People will disagree, I understand that, and only want hard news on the front page. The way we’re doing it seems to be the prevailing wisdom right now and no one seems to have a better answer.”
And that’s where the paper finds itself, trying to accommodate a diverse audience with a rich buffet of media choices.
This table of plenty, though, also leads to excess, elevating relatively minor characters and ballooning their travails all out of proportion to their true news value and impact.
“We try to be a lot of things to a lot of different people,” Gonzales said, “but you can’t be everything to everybody every day, 365 days a year.”
