Austin Smith – Special to the Southern News
Every day the press publishes a variety of different news stories covering several topics. World news, local news, business, sports, and entertainment are the news genres that each story falls under. However, only some stories are considered to be headlining news. On January 23, 2014, a news article on Justin Bieber’s arrest was the top article on USA Today’s webpage. A few stories down a woman in India was gang raped as a court order against the woman. Is celebrity news more important than other news?
“Depending on what’s the news subject,” said Malaysia Jiminez, news editor for the Southern News, “I have someone covering the Dr. Martin Luther King event happening on campus.” The coverage of this event will most likely make it to the front page because of how big the news story is.
On the morning of January 23, 2014, Brianna Vollenweider, a Bridgeport resident, was outraged to learn that Justin Bieber’s arrest was considered front page news, but the story about the Indian woman was not. “The story about the woman gang-raped in India is, in my opinion, infinitely more newsworthy than Justin Bieber,” said Vollenweider. “Violence against women is a rampant issue that plagues every country on this planet, and making a story about a multi-millionaire pop star more prominent than a story about a woman who was brutally raped but stood up to her attackers by identifying them to police shows we have a long way to go before we understand what true news is.”
According to Ipsos, a poll was taken in Canada on celebrity news that reported 63 percent of Canadians thought celebrity news is not “real” news. The survey also said 80 percent of Canadians regularly follow domestic news, 72 percent international news, 41 percent business news, and only 35 percent regularly follow stories on celebrities, stars, and entertainment. However, these polls show that the celebrity news has some impact on the general public.
“Celebrity news is more like just gossip,” said Justin Philips, a Bridgeport resident, reading the newspaper at a local Dunkin Donuts. “People like to hear it to escape the reality of the news in the world around them.”
“I think that, as a society, we have come to accept this as our ‘Headline’ and ‘Breaking’ news in the United States. I could go as far as saying that we’ve been dumbed down enough to believe that the antics of a teenage pop star seem to hold more weight in our society than real-life problems and events that affect people in a huge, huge way every day,” said Vollenweider.
“I think society has come to the point where we are worrying more about what people are going to be wearing at the Academy Awards versus the deadly radiation leaking out of the crippled Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. There are countless stories that need to be headline news, but people—and this seems very true for Americans—seem to want to soak up and revel in the lives of pop stars and actors more than they want to face the problems that come with living in an ever-changing global community. Problems need solving, and we’ve become afraid of that responsibility.”
[…] an article for Southern News, a student who was interviewed commented, “Celebrity news is more like just […]