In Our Opinion...

What Makes Paris Hilton so Fascinating?

By Jolene Larson

News content has lost its journalistic touch. It is more common to watch a news piece on Britney Spears’ latest trip to Jamba Juice than to hear a news piece on how developing countries are struggling economically and need help. Has our country has become so bored with problems beyond our borders that we’ve just stopped caring? Why do we care so much about celebrity gossip?

Today each major news network will report on some sort of celebrity news. Most of these stories aren’t even newsworthy, I highly doubt a news story on Jennifer Aniston’s latest vacation will educate or stimulate viewers’ minds. However these ridiculous stories continue to be printed and read daily. According to the Herald Tribune, Paris Hilton’s trip to jail was the fourth most read article on the web this year, the first being the war on Iraq, followed by the death of Anna Nicole Smith and the Virginia Tech shootings. Sadly more people were interested in an apparent celebrity overdose than in the death of innocent victims in a tragic campus shooting.

News anchor, Mika Brzezinski was shocked when she was asked to open the MSNBC morning show, “Morning Joe” with a story on Paris Hilton. She is quoted as saying: "Among journalists it touched a nerve because I think we're tired of pretending this is important. We also know that, deep down inside, our viewers know that we don't believe this is news. They can't. They can't think we're that dumb.”

Journalists have one job and that is to inform us of issues and events that are important and relevant to our lives, locally as well as internationally -- whether it’s economics, politics, education, or culture. I do believe, however, that most journalists report on these topics, but I feel like the quality of what is considered news has gone downhill.

 

International Relations through the Lens of Paranoia

By Tarja Kallinen

In1964 Richard Hofstadter wrote that America has suffered from ‘paranoid style’ political movements since the establishment of the nation (Hofstadter, R., Harper’s Magazine , 1964). First these movements exhibited themselves in the fear of the Illuminati and the Free Masons, then the Catholics and later Communism. The common denominators in all of these movements were: 1) fear of loss of “our way of life” (privilege); 2) belief in a religious battle of good and evil; 3) inability to compromise; 4) lack of understanding/tolerance of human nature (projections of self); 5) belief in a conspiracy; and often sexual fantasies and feelings of powerlessness, or lack of access to power. These paranoid tendencies are universal among humans, but are more likely to appear in an atmosphere of fanaticism and fear. American exceptionalism and Puritanism have certainly contributed to the fear of ‘other’.

Fast forward forty years; add an apocalyptic terrorist attack, a religiously fervent president, and an anxious citizenry: you have a perfect formula for mainstream paranoia exhibiting itself through the emasculated media.

Americans are politically socialized to feel superior (‘City upon a hill’) and to fear others who are different. The media’s portrayal of ‘other’ is often xenophobic and unappreciative of language, culture or history. (Doesn’t everybody speak English and love Starbucks and Spiderman?) This belief was so strong after 9/11, that when the Iraq war was launched, nobody in the media questioned the wisdom of forcefully “democratizing” a country full of ethnic and sectarian hostility, with no precedent or appreciation for Western democracy. Instead, we were fed with images of “a mushroom cloud” and orange terror alerts.

The paranoia that has beset the fringes of America since Colonial times has spread through the mainstream - due in large part to the media’s lack of judgment or scruples. ‘Fear itself’ has prevailed.