What’s wrong with the people who read celebrity magazines?
I think we’re all a bit to blame for allocating our oxygen resources so poorly.
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I’m becoming an old but I resist becoming completely out of tune with popular culture and tabloids or online tabloids are densely packed with pop culture information.
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I’m slightly horrible inasmuch as I enjoy reading about rich and famous assholes being shamed or bringing ruin upon themselves.
/This is based on online tabloid reading. I have no idea if paper tabloids are worse or better as journalism goes.
//BB sometimes delves in to reporting on the personal lives of people (albeit people who the commentariat and editorial staff agree are some shade of evil or hypocrite) which has a tabloid-y feel to it at times. Not that I object, it’s interesting.
Check out what’s promoted. Did not click to find out. She is undoubtedly attractive, but she’s taken. And so am I.
I’ve always found it amusing that the UK’s libel laws are so strict. I feel like the effect of laxer libel laws on publication in American society is more skepticism of news sources. “It says here that Charlie Sheen slept with a billion women last week and smoked crack through his bum. This is so stupid.”
Then again, we do have Fox News…
People who read celebrity magazines: they’re just like us.
My own opinion is that people seek out in entertainment what they feel they’re missing IRL. So obsessive celeb gawking would imply that they’re feeling invisible and insignificant (probably correctly, but that’s no slight on them, most of us are invisible and insignificant).
The primary difference being whether or not it bothers you. Me, I like being invisible and insignificant. 
as a school teacher i am off during times of the year when most people with day jobs are at them. i have noticed when i watch tv during the day, especially during reruns of police procedurals, the ads paint a depressing picture of the target audience. there are ads for quick, unsecured, high-interest loans, ads for places that buy gold, ads for bankruptcy and credit counselors, ads for lawyers to help you with your tax problems, ads fishing for people possibly injured by medications or medical devices, and ads for christian dating services.
I suspect that the typical reader of such magazines is less that averagely educated and as a result economically disadvantaged. So they might be more susceptible to advertisements for quack health treatments because they see these pills “sold for a low, low price” as a more affordable solution than going to an expensive doctor.
The main problem I think is that of being invested in the very concept of “celebrity”. It seems so obviously disempowering of people. I can understand a degree of admiration for figures who are truly accomplished beyond the average, such as athletes or scientists - but increasingly they are only “personalities” who are famous for the sake of being famous. They don’t do anything which the average person cannot. They are not even popular champions, but rather a diversionary sideshow funded by a small group of people.
The trickiest part of social power seems to be getting people to believe that some are more or less powerful than others, and that one inherits a position which determines one’s place in such a scheme. Do you personally believe that there are fundamentally different kinds of people? With different abilities? Who decides who seems special? Who benefits from this? Is it ultimately a useful social protocol? It works better to ask oneself such questions beforehand, without defaulting to the guesses of arbitrary social hierarchies.
I don’t know, but it can’t be much worse than whatever is wrong with people who regularly write about celebrity magazines.
Really? What are they up to now?
I saw a bunch of these pink and yellow eyesores on a rack at the train station this morning and asked myself “why are these popular?” then I check here and you’re asking the same thing. I think it’s simply an extention of the playground bully mentality, the clique of people being in on a joke at another’s expense. We all have it to some extent, the joy in seeing justice being served against a guilty party is still schadenfreude. The disgusting thing about publications like Heat or Vaj or whatever is that they’re targeting the private lives of innocent people, but they wouldn’t exist if we didn’t have that cruel part of our brains.
The soap opera is for many a vent of emotions they wouldn’t normally feel in day to day real life, the drip fed drama addicting them to extreme behaviours and unnecessary theatrics. The gossip mags delight in following, embellishing and falsifying info concerning celebrity relationships so they more closely resemble a soap opera narrative, our morbid curiosity ensuring their success.
Would it hypocritical of me to enjoy a magazine called Celeb Mag Scumbag Rag which follows the lives and dramas of people that work at celebrity magazines, posting pics of their ugly kids and fat bums, publishing 12 page specials on every breakup or divorce and basing all facts on rumours or just making it up? Yes it would, but I’d still read that one.
Gossip is just healthy information flow in a fuctioning community… inhabiting an industrialised society, in the absence of anything resembling a proper community, those inclined to gossip are forced to settle for this toxic swill, this pointless cookie-cutter effluent.
I noticed this when I was “revising” for my GCSEs years ago. In Carlisle we would have all that followed by an advert for a local company, usually with a Donald Scott voiceover (No wiki article, but he was a local entertainer and comedian who was at the peak of his fame in the 60s and 70s. Not so much by the mid 90s).
I still miss Weekly World News. I mean, if you’re going to do this at all, you might as well make it insane.
Now, let’s talk about people who read bOinGbOinG.
we’re wrong in the right way
They’re all fat too.
You are all fat. Feel guilty about it.
