June 9, 2007

'It's brain candy' but story commands popular attention

By Karla Peterson and John Wilkens
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITERS

On Wednesday, she was in jail. On Thursday, she was out of jail. Yesterday, she was being hauled back in again, her slim wrists in handcuffs and her famous face streaked with tears.
Keeping track of the latest in Paris Hilton incarceration news has been tricky these days. But not as tricky as figuring out why we care.

“At the core, it's what in a less polite era we would have called a freak show,” said Robert J. Thompson, professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University. “If she lived the lifestyle of Tom Hanks, we would no longer pay attention. But she keeps delivering. It's comic relief, but it's complicated comic relief.”

Yesterday, Paris Hilton's return to jail was the featured story on cable-and network-news broadcasts and on most newspaper Web sites. And where the media went, the people followed. Paris Hilton stories hit the top of CNN's and The New York Times' most-viewed and most e-mailed lists, as people lined up to read and comment on her return to jail.
War continues to rage in Iraq. The immigration bill is in shambles. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is being replaced. But in the midst of all this and other important world activity, we are fixated on the relatively meaningless fate of an heiress serving a 45-day jail sentence for a parole violation. Probably because it is relatively meaningless.

“She is one-dimensional in many respects,” said Nancy Snow, associate professor of communications and journalism at Cal State Fullerton. “The war, homeland security, there is so much to those issues, you have to put it all in context, understand who the players are. With Paris, you don't have to exert much mental energy. It's brain candy.”

But judging by the gleeful Internet cheer over the news that Paris was going back to the pokey, that brain candy has some very bitter filling. Money can buy you a lot of things, but sympathy doesn't appear to be one of them. “Oh dear. The drama of being rich and simple in the head,” read one pitiless posting on The San Diego Union-Tribune's Web site.

“Time to grow up little spoiled Paris!” read another.

And one poster settled for a simple, “HAHAHAHAHAHA!”

“I'm not surprised at the venom. There is always revenge against the famous for taking up so much of our time and attention,” said Leo Braudy, professor of English at the University of Southern California, and the author of “The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History.”

“Fascination can turn to disgust and revenge very easily. If she had handled this differently, there might have been a way for her to ride this out. But that would have been against her image. She could have flipped pancakes in the prison kitchen or tutored other prisoners in English, but it's not her image to do anything socially useful. Paris has an image based on triviality and emptiness. How else could she have dealt with this?”

Snow was one of those caught up in the never-ending coverage on TV yesterday, and even though paying attention to such things is part of her job, she didn't feel too good about it.

“What a waste of time,” she said. “We are all complicit in this. If we really say we hate this kind of thing, that there are more important stories we should be watching, we need to turn it off. And we need to complain.”

Braudy said there is an element of self-loathing in the fascination with Hilton. “While she remained in the world of parties, that's one thing. Now she has descended into the world of the normal, and she can't hack it. That moves people into disgust mode and then to self-disgust, where you're saying, 'Why am I paying attention to this bubblehead?' ”

That, in turn, leads to anger at the news media for covering the story. Snow said TV anchors regularly wondered out loud yesterday why people care so much about Hilton. “I'm not sure we do,” she said. “It's not as if we are taking to the streets and demanding more Paris.”

Thompson said it has become a bit of a chicken-or-egg question: Does the media cover Hilton because people watch, or are people watching because it's on?

“It's a dance in which neither is leading,” he said. “It's a perfect synergy between the media and the people who consume the media.”

Even though, in Thompson's words, “we have made people famous for very crazy reasons for a very long time,” Snow senses a “festering intolerance” with celebrity infatuation. “I think people may be starting to say, 'Enough is enough.' ”

She doubts that means people will be canceling their cable TV service in droves. But with more media Web sites offering comment sections next to stories, “the public has a lot more ability to talk back to the mainstream media. And that may lead to more discussion about what is newsworthy and what isn't.”

Braudy doubts the Hilton case will be a watershed.

“Every time I think we have reached a tipping point, something more absurd happens,” he said. “There is too much invested in celebrity culture (for it to go away). There will be disgust, and then someone else will come along who is an even better Paris.