William Safire, Please Address the Matter of Celebrity Scoopage
Star magazine has a sassy little lede on its paragraph-story about Britney Spears: "Once again, Star told you breaking celebrity news first — only to have another publication follow suit!" Oh, smack. We're sure Us Weekly is positively stinging.
Isn't there something slightly absurd in the bitching about who "broke" relatively unconfirmed news first? It reminds us of when Brangelina first announced their pregnancy: In Touch or something (we honestly can't remember, they all blur as soon as we put them down) gloated that they had announced it "first," months ago. Right, because they knew for a fact, even back then.
There's this definite, cracky pattern to how many of the celebrity weeklies define their scoops: blindly throw some information out there, likely with no corroboration, and hope that maybe, someday, the speculation becomes truth. If they're wrong, no one actually cares, and if they're right 8 months later, yee-fucking-haw.
And when they're not giddily printing rumors and praying for something to be right, the celeb mags keep themselves busy by competing to see who can first reprint a press release. People has been credited with breaking the news that TomKat had given birth; to our knowledge, they were first to have the story on their website (and only by a matter of minutes). But really, their "story" was the same press release everyone ran within the same hour, with no new information or reporting. Good job with that!
Celebrity journalism certainly hasn't played by the rules of traditional journalism, and we know we're dealing with magazines that are the equivalent of a junior high lunchroom, but we're still struggling with the bitchy semantics here. Should we define "breaking" by web-publishing skill? And are scoops determined by what shit sticks to the wall?
