18 Avenue de Suffren
“Paris Hilton is a nobody! She may have money, but she’s a thoughtless, talentless lowlife.” - Mr. Slave
Despite my sincerest efforts to avoid her, Paris Hilton barged into my life again this week. Near as I can tell she was in and out of jail on account of getting caught behind the wheel of a car while intoxicated. The overtly smarmy coverage precipitated the usual pleas for sanity from serious journalists. (Quick, bi-coastal examples: Steve Lopez in the Los Angeles Times on 8 June and Bob Herbert in the New York Times on 9 June.) The point of these gripes is basically that we have real problems and spending even a tiny amount of attention on someone as inconsequential as this is a waste. I couldn’t agree more, it’s just that I don’t care.
We’ve always had real problems and we’ve always had frivolous distractions. I doubt any of the media people there at the courthouse would be reporting from Baghdad or Kabul if this ditsy broad had decided to call a cab. There are heartrending stories going unreported in those far away lands and here at home, but we couldn’t cover them all even if we sent every accredited journalist in the world.
The reply to that line of escapism is that it is about focus, that there is only so much media oxygen to go around. I suppose that’s true, but so what? I suspect that anyone following the Hilton story with rapt attention isn’t going to be following the news from the Middle East anyway. It’s not like all the bad stories in the world are going anywhere. One does not need to keep up with the daily calamities to have an informed opinion any more than one need follow the entire twenty four months of presidential campaigning to vote.
Let those who are interested follow the travails of Hilton. Let those with columns to file and airtime to fill act indignant about it. Try to remember in a month you’ll barely remember the entire affair, and six months from now, when every media outlet in the country is doing a year-in-review piece, you’ll go, “Oh yeah…” and then move right on to the next item.
