Abstract
Debate about the ideal content or purpose of journalism is as old as print itself. The messy characteristics of popular culture have always intruded into the high principles and purposes of the communication of politics and journalism’s intentions to provide information of importance for the public. In the intensity of the contemporary media era it is necessary to reconsider the interplay between celebrity news and journalism: beyond oxymoron and towards the appreciation of a paradox. This contribution seeks to explore some of the forms and functions of celebrity news in contemporary British culture and speculates on the increasing relevance of celebrity to the future of journalism.
‘Celebrity news – an oxymoron’ was the provocative and yet productive title of a conference organized at the University of Geneva in September 2010. Oxymoron is a figure of speech which combines contradictory qualities for literary effect. Celebrity journalism, if an oxymoron, would suggest that journalism is incompatible with the coverage of celebrity issues and that the juxtaposition of these two nouns demonstrates that journalism cannot be considered to be upholding its true purpose if it is dealing with celebrity. However, this begs the question what is journalism’s true purpose and assumes that the coverage of celebrity does not match a higher set of ideals.
A paradox, a contradiction which can be revealed on closer inspection to be no contradiction at all but merely a baffling truth, is, in fact, a better articulation of the characteristics of journalism over many years. The word ‘journalism’ enters the English language in 1833 in large part as an attempt to categorize an activity which had come to be understood as a yoking together of aspects of elite information and commentary with lower cultural narratives of scandal and crime (Campbell, 2000). Journalism contains information and entertainment, can divert and concentrate the mind, and is vital to democracy and to the well-oiled functioning of the rumour mill. It owes, according to many of its more principled practitioners as well as its political advocates, an allegiance to the democratic good but only persists because it can make sizable profits for global conglomerates. As a complicating factor, it is not simply either/or, it is very often a shuttling between or a balance between these poles.
Early popular material in Western Europe such as ballads and broadsheets were as obsessive as our contemporary electronic media universe about the famous and the notorious as part of a commercially successful print culture. In England these representations can tell an observer a great deal about the morality and popular tastes of the time. From the 17th century, fictional heroes such as Robin Hood and King Arthur acted as exemplary, mythical role models, and tales of moral improvement of folk from humble origins fitted into a sententious, quasi-religious cultural landscape such as that of John Hawkwood, the tailor’s apprentice made good or Tom Hickathrift, the giant-slaying son of a labourer. This tone changed with the upheavals of the English Civil War as characters such as Royalist highwayman Captain James Hind and master thief Richard Hannam were presented as characters whose notoriety flowed from their mocking the social proprieties of the time and exposing the hypocrisies of the new order (Friedman, 1993).
The tropes of fame, notoriety and celebrity, although all slightly different categories, have always been unified in their role as indicators of concern about some social or cultural phenomenon beyond their immediate subject matter. Inglis (2010) claims that celebrity as we understand it in the contemporary world begins in the 18th century. The key figures in the emergence of an identifiable celebrity culture were, according to this thesis, Georgina, Duchess of Devonshire and the painter Joshua Reynolds. The Duchess of Devonshire’s life and loves were played out as a mediated public spectacle while Reynolds’ skill as a portraitist brought fame to his wealthy patrons as well as to himself. This new dimension to public attention drew upon the interplay between the mediation of personality and popular admiration which began to structure a new level of intensity in the public scrutiny of the wealthy and the famous.
Braudy (1997) claims that fame (as distinguished from celebrity) in western culture, prior to the modern era of mass media, had been dependent on either the trappings of public office or on notable, heroic deeds. This may well have been the case in elite culture but popular print culture had consistently celebrated a more everyday sort of notoriety in the activities of outlaws and highway men and, by the 19th century, ‘Last Will and Testament’-style publications had been perfected as a commercially lucrative formula. These were popular as moral codas to lives spent in wickedness because they combined a vicarious thrill with the prospect of possible salvation.
Despite having quibbled with any notion of a fixed starting date for the celebrity phenomenon, it is clear that the commercialization of the 19th-century mass media was a significant constituent of celebrity, as rival publications for a popular market sought to privilege their own position in relation to popular cultural figures in order to enhance their profitability and their claims to be keeping pace with the increasingly influential notion of popular taste. This found expression in coverage of the professional and private lives of prize-fighters, opera singers, leading stage actors and music hall performers.
The thrill of vicarious connections via print media to the highs and lows in the lives of the rich and famous continued along familiar patterns until the early 20th century. The ‘stars’ in the divorce courts at this point were taken as broadly indicative of upper-class corruption and were exploited because of this, particularly by left-leaning newspapers like the Daily Herald (Bingham, 2009: 133–144). This dangerous exposure to the potential of lower-class ridicule and contempt was something which hastened the passing of the Divorce Courts Act in 1926. However, at this point, the rise of cinema and the development of sensationalized reporting in a whole range of mass popular newspapers in the UK extended the tradition in different ways (Conboy, 2011).
Connell (1992) has claimed that celebrity coverage acts as a commentary on the disparity between social classes and the resultant gulf in wealth in western societies and that such observation does not find an expression elsewhere in our mediascape, concluding that the popular tabloids have generated a necessary if limited awareness of these discrepancies. We might add that since Connell provided this insight, celebrity has diversified to act as a prismatic panorama on contemporary discourses on gender, sexual morality, politics, national identity and mental health – in fact most aspects of contemporary life. Nevertheless, this coverage falls well short of any critique or commentary beyond its melodramatic moralism (Gripsrud, 1992). A notable recent example was when a winner of £9.7 million on the UK National Lottery, Michael Carroll, an ex-bin man, lost all of the money in a short period of reckless spending and investment. He was regularly castigated in the blue-collar Sun as Lotto Yobbo, in effect demonstrating that he had been given an opportunity which was unsuitable for one of such lowly status and by 29 April 2005 he was dubbed the ‘King of the Chavs’ by the Daily Mirror. Coverage across the tabloids highlighted his anti-social behaviour, court appearances, bad taste in clothes and fondness for brash displays of wealth. Almost by definition a case of the undeserving rich, it provided an inverted fairy story for our age; a rags to rags story very much in keeping with the narrative shape of the modern celebrity morality tale.
Incorporating celebrity
This piece is an attempt to provide a narrative account of the accretion of celebrity within news, not a taxonomy of the phenomenon of celebrity itself. It is worth therefore repeating that the process of the incorporation of celebrity culture within our news media is a long one. Turner (2004) helpfully divides modern celebrity into two categories: the film star and the television personality. The first has an aura, a managed mystique which serves to separate the star from the public while keeping them very much in their minds. This analysis builds on the pioneering work of Dyer (1979). The second form of celebrity is more accessible and is attractive on account of the fact that they are much more prone to the vicissitudes and chaos of the everyday. This coming together of celebrity with the everyday allows a significant amount of commentary on moral and ethical issues in the domestic sphere which had not previously been regular features of news. The everydayness of celebrity news becomes amplified with the proliferation of melodramatic storylines (e.g. soaps on television from the 1970s and 1980s onwards) and melodramatic entertainment formulae from the 1990s where a combination of celebrities and ordinary people become the stars of television contests.
There is also a technological chain in motion here. Television triggered certain changes in the news media ecology with its entertainment-driven structure and visuality, which encouraged newspapers to go further in their deployment of news categories, moving them closer to traditions of gossip and hearsay than they had been previously as television became increasingly proficient at presenting the news first. This in turn impacted on television, which was also forced to include more on the sort of news the newspapers were printing for fear of appearing out of date, behind the times or off the popular pulse.
Newspapers, in their increasing need to provide big names to attract readers, began to routinely use by-lines and then photo-enhanced by-lines to combat television’s use of personality news anchors from the arrival of ITN in 1955. Newspapers increased their share of opinion, which included oblique commentary on the lives and lifestyles of those in the public eye. Bromley observed this trend as it gathered momentum through the 1990s: At first, the ‘quality’ press ignored the substantive issues of tabloid news; then decried them. These papers … subsequently began reporting and commenting on the behaviour of the tabloid press, which led to the vicarious reporting of the issues themselves. Finally, the broadsheet papers, too, carried the same news items. (1998: 31)
Through the 1990s and 2000s those celebrity anchors became increasingly employed as leads in a variety of other news spin-offs, celebrity games shows and televised competitions. At the same time, one of the primary functions of newspapers in democratic culture has been relegated to a secondary position as the views of the opinion-brokering journalists have gained supremacy over the words of the politicians themselves (Thomas, 2005). Celebrity, having become increasingly embedded within the popular tabloids, has spread rapidly to all news media to become an essential structuring device of much of the contemporary information flow. Celebrity across the board has become one of the stand-bys in maintaining the specific market appeal of newspapers into the 21st century. In the digital era, newspapers in their old-style newspaper format still act as brand identifiers for news media activities and are, though in decline, still an important, popular and profitable part of news media operations. It is often through their engagement with celebrity that they maintain a lead over online sources as they are better resourced and can pry more consistently than the amateur blogger or paparazzo. So we can conclude that celebrity has, as one of its functions, the extension of the influence of newspapers into the new century by enabling them to become integrated enough within popular cultural patterns to hold off media which may at first sight be more technologically attuned to contemporary demands.
Sparks (1992: 37–38) argues that the forms of address and language of the British popular press form an important part of its own distinctive news values. This language lies within the traditions of working-class entertainment and is thereby more connected to everyday life and tends to relegate the serious to a secondary place and foregrounds the carnival and the colloquial (Conboy, 2002).
Despite the fact that the content and influence of tabloid news media worldwide generate a great deal of hostility from elite commentators, it emerges from the complex of commercial and social exigencies which drive the whole globalized media market. Comparisons of tabloid media with idealized versions of what the news ought to be doing ignore the historical evidence that tabloid news and its various predecessors in popular print culture have always sought to contest dominant bourgeois values. The tabloid press are located within, and draw on, the ‘popular’ traditions of entertainment and consumption, rather than attempting to provide a single, bourgeois form of rational public debate (Bromley and Tumber, 1998: 365). From a social perspective, it is because of the close association of these news media forms with the ordinary people as consumers that investigating the value of certain varieties of news media brings us into what Sparks calls ‘the explosive territory of social worth’ (2000: 29).
Tabloidization is too complex a phenomenon to judge as a single entity and too fraught with questions of taste and commercialism for simple judgements on its quality. It can either be considered as a lowering of the standards of an idealized journalism or a re-orientation of popular national markets within globalized competition for news. According to this latter perspective, it may be considered neither a good nor a bad set of processes but simply a pragmatic approach to maintaining a market share using the familiar strategy of constructing an appeal to an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1987) of nation which has traditionally structured the content of news. This may not be to the tastes of established social elites and it may not serve the political interests of the politically marginalized either, but little mainstream commercial journalism ever has. Whannel has concluded that this process has led to a more populist mode of address and a restructuring of the relationship between subject of the news and consumer in which areas of life once resolutely private are now in the public domain (2010: 72).
Some might argue that such a cultural flattening has a broad democratic potential. Yet Turner (2004), referring critically to this notion as ‘democratainment’, queries any assumption that by broadening access to entertainment media we are in any way necessarily broadening access to democratic involvement in politics. Media involvement does not equate to political involvement and in fact might actually militate against it. The popular tabloid newspapers are simply competing in what may be a last-ditch battle to maintain their market appeal. Yet the fact is that despite much fascination with their decline in readerships they are still extraordinarily popular, both in their old-style print form where they still sell millions of copies per day – a healthy performance indeed, compared to many new media outlets – and also in their penetration of other media outlets as a paradigm for new forms of popular communication. Even if they disappeared tomorrow, the impact of the popular tabloids on broader media culture would be of enormous significance.
Tabloid celebrity: Rhetoric and community
So let us consider the contours of celebrity rhetoric as one of the means by which popular tabloids attempt to maintain their readerships. Celebrity coverage has long been a mainstay of popular tabloid newspapers in Britain. It has been crafted into a witty and marketable approach to news which appeals to audiences which have evolved as part of a more generalized tabloid culture inside and outside these papers. We begin by considering some of the ways in which rhetorical features are used in the tabloids, which in combination generate a tone specific to their market ambitions. The patterning of these features plays a big part in providing the ideological cohesion important for any newspaper’s sense of editorial identity. With the popular tabloids, this identity is predicated on an exclusively populist set of assumptions about its target audience. Bell has called the language of newspapers an exercise in audience design (1984: 145–204) and this is certainly demonstrated by the tabloids and their confident grasp of the identity of their ideal reader. It has been argued that it is in the language of different types of newspapers, not in their layout, that the distinction lies; between the neutral language of those aiming to be considered as serious newspapers of record and the ‘emotionally charged’ language of the popular tabloids (Kitis and Milapedes, 1997: 562). Language is employed across the popular tabloid paper in a systematic way to build a composite version of the vocabulary and style of their ideal average reader; a sort of vernacular ventriloquism (Conboy, 2002: 162).
For the purposes of this brief study, it might be said that it is in the two-way process between language and reader that ‘ideology is inscribed in social practice’ (Hodge and Kress, 1993: 210). This ideological relationship makes sense of the world and reduces contradictory elements in a language which amplifies references to popular culture, television shows, populist politics and, most importantly for our purposes, celebrity. An essential part of tabloid news values has always been the exaggerated foregrounding of sensation and ‘human interest’. These features have the effect of structuring the world in a way which rejects fundamental political issues and focuses instead on random events within a world of common sense (Curran et al., 1980). This concentration on sensation and human interest means that the tabloids tend to feature people at the extremes of human experience and behaviour.
Familiar names
Familiar names and nicknames are a characteristic device, deployed in the popular tabloids as a bridge of familiarity, connecting readers to a world outside the confines of their lived experience. The language of familiarity when relating to celebrities reinforces the linkage between the tabloid news agenda and broader aspects of popular culture, including television, film and popular music. Such intertextuality is what assists in the broad ‘cultural discourse’ (Dahlgren, 1988: 289) of modern popular journalism. The framing of such characters in the language of familiarity helps to establish the ‘naturalness’ of the presence of these people and their affairs in the pages of the newspaper, while at the same time helping the popular press justify how it sidelines more serious issues about the contemporary world in favour of what it claims its readers want. On a single day of the Sun we can see two examples of the first name and nickname treatment of two footballing celebrities. First, Ashley Cole, whose status has been amplified because of his marriage with Girls Aloud singer Cheryl Cole, who has herself gone on to survive a sensationalized divorce from her serially unfaithful footballer husband and has become even more famous because of her role as a judge on the X-Factor. To match a picture of Ashley Cole sharing a pipe with a photogenic female smoker, we have the caption: ‘Ashley hookahs up with lookah’ (White, 2011: 3).
Further into the newspaper we have a story centring on Wayne Rooney. Two women who claim to have been offered money for sex with the Manchester United and England striker celebrate a birthday with ‘Roo’ as the animated character he is alleged to resemble, Shrek, sculptured in icing in between figures of the two ‘vice-girls’: ‘Roo’s hookers are vicing on the cake’ (Patrick, 2011: 1).
In the Daily Mirror we see another rhetorical headlining of a first name to demonstrate the proximity of reader with television soap opera: ‘COLLEEN CUTS LOOSE / Star: I am leaving the show / COLLEEN Nolan has shocked Loose Women fans by announcing that she has decided to quit the award-winning show after 10 years’ (Methuen, 2011b: 9).
Another of the more obvious rhetorical strategies through which the tabloids attempt to reinforce their relationship with their readership is by employing colloquial expressions and slang in relation to celebrity coverage. This appears to allow the newspapers to talk to a readership in its own, informal manner and further extends the claim of these papers to be on the side of the people, leading discussion in a highly constructed version of the language of the people. The implication of this language is that the tabloids are on the side of the people as readers and opposed to the interests of the power-bloc (Fiske, 1994). It is a deliberate strategy to cement that ideological bond with a readership which sees itself as sceptical of the establishment and, by implication, the formalities of its language.
News values – The elite British nation
The vast majority of newspapers are sold on a national basis, have a strong national bias to their news values and, in Billig’s words, ‘flag the homeland daily’ (1995). Yet this bias is even more pronounced in the tabloids as they exaggerate the nationally specific while in the main ignoring international news. Some have observed this as one of the defining features of the tabloid newspaper (McLachlan and Golding, 2000). Daily newspapers and most explicitly the tabloids can be observed performing a crucial semiotic role in cementing the national form (Law, 2001: 299). This is arguably at its most effective when the lexicon of the nation is presented in a ‘banal’ fashion (Billig, 1995), enabling it to retain a background but daily presence as one of the key structuring norms of the newspapers. Celebrities assist in the commodification of a very British sphere which is specifically contemporary. This is to be contrasted to the other powerful axis in the construction of popular narratives of nation in the tabloids which is replete with historical references.
One significant variation of the tabloid pattern has been the American supermarket tabloid, which is an export triumph for a globalized variation of American popular culture. While the American model highlights a particular form of global Hollywood celebrity gossip (Bird, 1992; Sloan, 2001), the British version is a more proletarian model of tabloid celebrity which focuses much more on television personalities which are restricted in the main to the national. This is reinforced by the axiomatic consequence of the tendency in British tabloid newspapers to concentrate less on foreign news, which gives an even more nationalistic slant to their content.
Nationally based news media have an important if paradoxical role in the contemporary global environment as, it must be stressed, the nationalist-orientated tabloids are in turn a part of global media corporations. They fit one of the defining patterns of contemporary identity formation in the intensified awareness of difference brought about by the latest phase of globalization in which: The driving imperative is to salvage centred, bounded and coherent identities … it is about the maintenance of protective illusion, about the struggle for wholeness and coherence through continuity. (Morley and Robins, 1995: 122)
National news may exist within global communication conglomerates but it needs a strong local resonance for its continued success. Britain in the popular tabloids is not created as some elitist political activity but as part of a populist, market-driven engagement with the pre-existing myths and language of a popular nation.
The following example demonstrates something of the ability of popular tabloid language to play with words and focuses on a celebrity-driven news story which goes to the heart of a serious issue concerning the ethnic identification of contemporary Britain. The producer of a long-running detective drama on commercial television claimed in an interview with the Radio Times that its success was in large part due to the fact that there were no black characters in the show and that this added to its appeal to an audience who were happy with a nostalgic view of Britain as a place without the complexities of a multi-cultural society. The Daily Mirror had the story on its front page but with John Nettles the celebrity star of the series as the photo-illustration, not the much less well-known producer. Nettles’ presence illustrating the story is ironic given the well-publicized decision of the actor some months previously to retire from it: ‘MIDSOMER RACE RAGE’. Inside, the story unfolds in more detail, punning on ‘White’ for ‘Right’: ‘A White Idiot. Midsomer creator axed after he claims “No blacks” rule is key to drama’s success’ (Methuen, 2011a: 9).
The Sun leads with a picture of star Nettles in its own report on the inside pages: ‘RACE ROW MIDSOMER BOSS AXED. ITV fury at “Englishness rant”’ (Holmwood, 2011: 17). This story and the way it easily fits within the rhetoric and stylistic approach of the popular tabloids, leading on celebrity within television culture even in a story where a serious matter of ethnic sensitivity is at stake, demonstrates how skilled the tabloids are in using celebrity hooks to maintain and amplify intertextual links for their target audience and implicitly use them to generate discussion about the state of contemporary Britain.
Celebrity and national community
Much has been written about the trend towards the inclusion of more celebrity-based news in our media in general. The tabloids are leading this trend towards a more generalized tabloid culture (Biressi and Nunn, 2005) in their representation of Britain as a community of interrelated media celebrities and compounding it with a style of language which matches that culture. The tabloids do not only report on the lives of celebrities, they use this information to enhance as many stories as they can with a plethora of intertextual references to them. On the one hand it may be claimed that this ‘democratizes’ the news, moving it away from its traditional insistence on the elites of society and a preponderance of political and financial reports, yet at the same time, it may also limit the reach of the news agenda and furthermore, restrict the people who can be considered as ‘elite persons’ (Galtung and Ruge, 1965) but in different ways.
Celebrity has always formed an important part of the news but it has ‘expanded and multiplied in recent years’ (Turner, 2004: 4). In doing so as part of the formation of mediated social identity it has begun to play an even fuller part in the construction of an imagined Britain for a national audience. The tabloids have been particularly astute in harnessing and even directing this trend: … the British tabloids have almost categorically redefined what qualifies for them as news, so that tabloid news is now utterly personalised and dominated by the actions of well-known people – politicians, public officials, sportsmen and women, celebrities, soon-to-be celebrities and wanna-be celebrities. (Turner, 2004: 75)
Banality and tragedy
Celebrity lives are often represented as two-dimensional roller coaster rides between elation and depression, a dynamic which certainly fits neatly with the overall binary nature of popular tabloid news structures. In fact, celebrity is one of the few semiotic hooks which can be used to report on the general topic of disease. It allows the mundane facts of illness and death a newsworthiness which gives readers an opportunity to read about issues which would not otherwise be covered in the paper unless they are associated with a well-known celebrity face and the language associated with the world of the stars. The celebrity connection which is used as a conduit to readers’ empathy may be an attempt to humanize the problem and to relate it in terms which readers will grasp, but the very tabloid techniques and expressions risk trivializing the problem. The following two examples illustrate the delicate balancing involved in such coverage. First, flagged as an exclusive to be continued the next day, is a story of a television celebrity who has starred in Loose Women, Lynda Bellingham. She reveals in a characteristic blend of revelation and call for sympathy on a personal level, her battle with alcoholism, not a newsworthy topic when unrelated to celebrity: ‘MY STORY / Loose Women Lynda tells all / Secret sadness drove me to drink / My shame over one-night stand / Night I thought of ending it all’ (Bellingham, 2011: 1).
The second story, perhaps less obvious as a genre than the revelations of the reformed alcoholic actor, is from television presenter Denise van Outen who had decided to withdraw from the media spotlight as she feared her heavy workload was impairing her fertility. This is told in the section of the Sun named ‘Sun Woman’: Shock of low fertility made me quit job to try for baby (Watkins, 2011a: 36–37).
On the previous day in the same section of the newspaper was a story which combined the sort of cross-generational discussion of health issues which would not make the paper unless given a celebrity tag: ‘What my mother taught me. Patsy Kensit Actress / Mum had cancer but hit back with positive thinking’ (Watkins, 2011b: 35).
Even within a global economy, this local vernacular is an essential part of the appeal of these newspapers as conduits for a national culture with all of the commercial strengths and political weaknesses which such national cultures continue to generate. The performativity of language in the narratives of the nation (Bhabha, 1990: 3) is an essential tool in the construction and maintenance of the tabloid version of Britain today. Celebrity coverage and the rhetoric of the popular press which have become such influential constituents of the contemporary British media are a key part of that performative process.
The functions of celebrity journalism
Beyond the rhetorical appeal of the vernacular of the popular tabloids we can look briefly at four of its chief contemporary usages. The case of Lord Triesman demonstrates one of the functions of celebrity news, with its collapse of distinctions between private and public sphere, here exacerbated by the proactive hand of the news media themselves. A consideration of whether in normal circumstances, Triesman would have been considered a celebrity makes us reflect that celebrity journalism has more to do with the function of celebrity stories than with the status of the celebrities themselves. On 16 May 2010, the Mail on Sunday revealed that Melissa Jacobs had secretly tape-recorded David Triesman in a restaurant. Triesman was the chairman of the English Football Association. During their meal, he made comments about alleged bribery attempts by Spain and Russia of referees during the 2010 FIFA World Cup. On 18 May 2010 celebrity columnist and television presenter Gary Lineker, also a former international footballer and Ambassador for England’s 2018 World Cup bid, announced he was resigning from his columnist’s position on the paper as in his view the piece had damaged England’s chances of success. The story is alleged to have cost the paper £75,000 to procure and could be viewed as a flagrant abuse of private space. This was a meeting between former lovers in a confidential setting and the former aide went equipped to tape and presumably sell on any information indiscreetly let slip by the FA chairman. Willingness of a national newspaper to print this demonstrates an absolute corruption of private life in which nobody can trust their interlocuter not to be wired for profit. It might be argued that this is an inevitable consequence of broad celebrity trends in popular culture, enabling some of the shabbier practices of tabloid newspapers to mesh with media entertainments where participants divulge their every thought before the camera. The difference here is that a private meal is not in the public domain and that the usual defence of ‘public interest’ could not really be demonstrated here.
The second case to consider is that of John Suchet. Suchet had been an ITN newscaster for 30 years. He was a face familiar to millions of television viewers in the UK. When his wife, Bonnie, was diagnosed with dementia, he started a private journal to chart his emotions during this challenging time for him, his wife and his family. In February 2009 he spoke for the first time to the national press, advised by dementia charities that his intervention would help to publicize the disease. In May 2010 the book My Bonnie: How Dementia Stole the Love of My Life was published to widespread news media coverage, demonstrating how a high-profile, celebrity name can boost the visibility of what would normally be considered a private issue, in this case, a health issue, in the public eye as well as softening and even ‘ageing’ the news agenda. Without the celebrity endorsement, such private suffering in individual cases is rarely covered and, when it is, it tends to be in terms of abstractions and statistics at the elite end or the discourse of miracle cures at the popular tabloid end of the newspaper market.
Richards (2007: 97–98) claims that we are in the midst of ‘a cultural transformation in which politics and policies in the traditional sense are becoming more enmeshed with the personal, with psychological considerations and with emotionality’. This implies that celebrity is a social interaction, but one in which the media performance of celebrity is not a democratic enhancement but more a part of the news media’s entertainment function or at best an aspect of its ability to prompt empathization as in the Suchet case. Interestingly, Inglis (2010) remarks in his history of celebrity that it has been accompanied by a rise in the public display of emotion very much encapsulated in this story.
Our third example relates to royalty and ex-royalty. Sarah Ferguson promised an undercover reporter from the News of the World access to her ex-husband, the Duke of York, for £500,000 and this was duly reported in that paper on 3 May 2010. It provides an example about how this sort of celebrity scandal fishing-trip, so carefully choreographed by the News of the World in particular, reflects upon our popular morality. This point was reinforced by acerbic commentary in elite newspaper the Guardian on 26 May. This becomes somewhat of a specialist area for cultural commentator Hadley Freeman, who pursues this tone in another assessment of the intrusion of Naomi Campbell and Wyclef Jean into world politics in the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ online section on 11 August. And as if to confirm the provocative nature of the piece, the online readers’ forum has a full range of views on the content of the piece, its place on the website and the role of celebrities in contemporary elite news media.
One view commonly articulated on the Guardian website, in printed readers’ letters and general critical commentary in the academy, is that celebrity unchained, just like any of the other aspects of journalism out of kilter with its composite whole, could bring the variety and the wider social responsibilities of journalism to an end. If celebrity is being amplified within the discourses of contemporary journalism, to the extent that it begins to drown out the other features of the balanced ecology which has maintained the dynamic of traditional journalism, then journalism could be in grave danger.
A fourth celebrity function goes to the heart of the practice and performance of journalism itself. Celebrity functions in a variety of ways, often contradictorily with respect to the journalists themselves. It might well be that prominent interviewers such as the BBC’s Paxman and Humphrys are extending the democratic probing of politicians on behalf of the public, exploiting their status as ‘public inquisitors’ (Higgins, 2010). Journalists themselves have, after all, often featured as the main attraction. Despite anonymity across much of the respectable press, English radical authors and sensationalist crusaders from Cobbett to Stead were the prototypes of these later celebrity journalists. The commercial appeal of such opinionated, high-profile journalists began to be exploited in the mainstream, starting with celebrity gossip columnists and moving on to celebrity cross-over television personalities and political pundits.
Celebrity journalists are now being used, particularly on the BBC, as a subtle form of cross-promotion, exploiting the brand of the famous presenter to add consumer appeal to other programmes beyond their usual journalistic patch: for example, Andrew Marr (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea; The Making of Modern Britain), Jeremy Paxman (University Challenge), Fiona Bruce (Police, Camera, Action; Antiques Roadshow), David Dimbleby (Seven Ages of Britain), John Humphrys (Mastermind), and always at least one featured in Strictly Come Dancing (Christine Bleakely, Chris Hollins). Celebrification of journalists here acts as a guarantor of audience ratings; journalists as the ultimate news media brands. The problem for the BBC is that in increasing the visibility of their celebrity journalists they are also inflating the journalists’ expectations of larger salary packages, which in certain high-profile cases is now leading to a showdown with a government which sees excessive pay as an abuse of public money.
The vortex of contemporary celebrity
The whole process of celebrity is followed within a set of expectations from both producers and consumers. The status has, first, to be gained and then managed and sustained for as long as possible within the mediation which has caused the celebrity to be summoned into being in the first place. How this is effected becomes part of the aesthetic appeal and attraction of the celebrity story, in much the same way as any melodrama depends for its success on the fascination of the reader towards the length of time that the protagonist can maintain the equilibrium; spinning plates or keeping a voraciously sceptical audience satisfied!
Media celebrities can become exemplary figures to an audience and even role models from whom it is invited to learn. When this celebrity function is deployed in the blue-collar press to isolate and denigrate working-class readers who have had success in their lives (Jade Goody and Carroll, both from 2002) then the hierarchical boundaries are not collapsed (Featherstone, 1991: 48) but depend on this use of celebrity coverage to consolidate the distance across the social spectrum and codify the separation in class terms for a new era. Yet this pattern can be inverted if circumstances change. Once she was diagnosed with cancer, Jade Goody became the ‘people’s commoner’ (Picardie, 2009), somebody with whom it became difficult not to sympathize as an almost epiphanous character in a real-life soap opera of self-discovery.
The contemporary celebrity is a fascinatingly unstable construct able to be shifted or reformulated into a more suitable set of meanings as a storyline changes. In an interesting attempt to provide an explanation for the nature of this instability, Whannel (2010) coins the term ‘vortextuality’ to describe the speed and intensity of contemporary cross-media fertilization of stories about celebrities which are made possible by the use of new technologies which have assisted in the erosion of any meaningful demarcation between public and private spheres. Two of his proposed transformations of the social category of news over the last 30 years have a great deal of relevance to this discussion. The first is the erosion of the distinction between public and private and the second are the ‘processes of personalization and individualization of news which have contributed to the emergence of a celebrity-centred popular culture’ (2010: 71).
Conclusion
Marshall sees celebrity culture as part of a process which is potentially ‘widening the public sphere’ (2010: 40), but Turner, in pronouncing it a ‘demotic turn’ (2004: 82–85) rather than a necessarily democratic one, remains sceptical that the fascination of the media with the everyday is anything more than an astute representation of media openness rather than any genuine enhancement of the media’s democratic functions. Beyond the political functions of celebrity journalism what are its social functions? The use of celebrity gossip is an extension of the uses of gossip within a community as a form of social control (Marshall, 2010: 37). This certainly fits into longer patterns of coverage of famous personalities in the news media.
Celebrity culture may democratize access to knowledge of aspects of individuals’ lives but it does little to democratize access to the analysis. Popular culture reverts to the old distinction between stories and analysis (Humpherys, 1990; Van Leeuwen, 1987). We are drawn increasingly into details of individuals’ lives and yet denied access to any broader picture. The shock, horror presides over the explanation.
Celebrity journalism provides a broad, rich and often disturbing panorama of the characters of contemporary life. The specific historical nature of capitalism may mean that ‘celebrity’ is a very different economic and cultural category than its predecessors – fame and notoriety – but the appeal of coverage of persons in the public gaze has lost not of its lustre or financial incentive to the news media. Tabloid culture has developed to the extent that it has an impact even when the elite press are drawn into condemnation of the same forces of tabloidization. Celebrity poses questions familiar to journalism: questions about the worth and significance of social developments; questions about the place and function of public communicators; questions about the balance in our news agenda between the serious and the trivial. These questions form part of a longer elite suspicion of popular culture in general. Elite culture is more perturbed as it observes popular culture making inroads into almost every aspect of our contemporary media world. Perhaps most concerns about contemporary celebrity coverage have much to do with an implicit decline from the golden age of ‘worthy fame’ and are as bound up with the foregrounding of lower-class parvenus such as sports stars and lottery winners as in revealing the more sordid sides of wealth and power.
Journalism has always been a complex conflation of complementary and contradictory impulses. Contemporary journalism manifests social, technological and cultural complexity in its performance. These four minor key examples illustrate something of the range of uses that celebrity journalism can be put to. Celebrity is one area of that contemporary complexity which can present the world as a more emotionalized, personalized place, very unlike traditional journalistic views of the world; can demonstrate the breakdown in human relationships by the pandering of news media to self-interested muckraking; and can provide acerbic commentary on the phenomenon itself and on journalism’s desire to remain so fascinated by it. Journalism clearly does not deal with celebrity in any one mode. Journalism is not an ideal product but it is often one which suffers from a tendency to idealizations. One such idealization is the temptation to eject celebrity coverage as either having limited relevance to the higher purposes of the practice or insisting on a one-dimensional representation of the contemporary world.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.