The Hot Blog: Good... But Has The Lesson Taken At All?

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January 31, 2008

Good... But Has The Lesson Taken At All?

Entertainment Tonight/The Insider decided NOT to run the Heath Ledger tape. I was traveling, so I haven't heard the on-air excuse. But I read this AP story and while I think the choice was right, that's still about the only thing that was.

From The Story:
Executives at "Entertainment Tonight" refused to talk publicly about the retreat. There was some bewilderment and anger at the company about why its show was singled out when many other publications and TV outlets were talking about the same thing. The party video is likely to be seen soon in England, and is already available over the Internet.

Well, the reason ET/Insider was singled out is, a) they are the biggest, b) they are truly MAINSTREAM Media, meaning they have not turned completely into trash gossip rags and no one wants to see them become one, and c) is answered in the next pull...

Ledger is seen standing in the doorway of a room where the party was taking place, swigging from a beer bottle. The actor is heard saying that he was "going to get serious (word bleeped) from my girlfriend" for being at the party.

The show made clear that there was nothing on the video showing Ledger taking any drug. At one point, however, the then-26-year-old said he "used to smoke five joints a day."

But a person who has seen the entire video, who asked not to be identified because of its sensitive nature, said Ledger then points to his tattoo of "M" (for his daughter, Matilda Rose) and says, "this is to remind me never to smoke weed again." That part of the quote was not used in Wednesday's preview.

Later, with Ledger in the background, an unidentified man, his face blurred, seems to snort cocaine from a table.

So... not only is the tape NOT shocking... and NOT heartbreaking... it doesn't even contain an image of the man doing a drug of any kind aside from alcohol in the form of BEER!

Will the off-the-record complainers at ET wake up and get it? This is the WORST form of gossip mongering... it tarnishes without actually delivering the goods.

It would be sad and disgusting for them to run a video of Mr Ledger snorting 3 or 4 lines of cocaine... and in Hollywood, not remotely shocking. But this is so much worse... he isn't even doing drugs and they have Dr. Drew Pinsky – who is starring a cable show for ET-parent Paramount’s VH-1- deconstructing how he is “convinced that if this heart-wrenching video had aired, it would have gotten through and had a positive effect on young people in America. Perhaps it could have even saved some lives." Really? Lives would have been saved by Heath Ledger drinking a beer while some schmuck did coke 5 feet away from him.

Kelly Bush makes a good point when she says, "I hope it represents a turning point," she said. "I think we have all heard from members of the media and members of the public that it's too much. Britney Spears and Paris Hilton are the top news stories when Darfur should be."

But I have to say… personal publicists are NOT without responsibility in the current media culture. I don’t point specifically at Kelly Bush or ID/PR. And for the sake of full disclosure, I have had an excellent working relationship with that organization overall, where they seem interested in getting their clients more than soundbites.

The intensity of the wall put around individual stars has, no doubt, intensified the way that these same stars are now hunted. Nature abhors a vacuum. And if personal publicists seek to sanitize talent beyond what is reasonable, there is always going to be blowback of the media seeking to knock down that wall.

And then, the frenzy feeds on itself. Every small story becomes overhyped and overdramatized. And then when real ugliness occurs and our better instincts as humans and journalists should kick in, we are too close to see the forest for the trees. Britney Spears stopped being funny a long time ago. The tabs knew about Amy Winehouse’s quite serious problems before her first hit single landed in the U.S. And if entertainment journalists were serious about making an impact on lives, we would all find a way to tell the stories of which stars are getting into serious trouble when we all know… before the fall.

The irony is that the studios do know. They are not hiring heroin addicts or serious alcoholics who don’t show up for work without knowing what they are getting into. So would we in the media be killing careers? Not really. Not unless we were wrong.

This is an endless internal battle as a journalist. We know things we don’t print. We have the ability to turn things upside down. But we and our editors make choices. We make them every single day.

We must all ask ourselves, “What business are we in?” Are we in the upskirt business or the news business? Does our lust for attention, whether in ratings or links from other sites, make anything game? How much of our ass are we willing to show in order to “win?”

The biggest story in this tale of Ledger and woe is of the incremental death of dignity in Traditional Media and the question of whether New Media can be more than just an endless parade of “look at me!”

Is it really fair to expect Entertainment Tonight to act like a real journalistic outlet when they never really have been one… though they put together a well produced and enormously successful TV show?

We all have our line… and for me, it was pretty much underwear-free celebrities, now followed by this video debacle and events like it.

My position on Nikki Finke, for instance, has been unpopular lately. So be it. Anyone who wants to think about how she rolls can see everything I see. But people don’t want to. They prefer to keep feeding on the back-channel source-serving gossip mongering even though most know that when a story they actually know something about comes up, it is either dead wrong or at least, quite one-sided. But as long as it's not in their backyard, it's fun, fun, fun to spread the fertilizer.

Is a gun to ET’s head keeping them from continuing the witch hunt on Mr Ledger really a victory? Only if we all learn from it… behind the camera, in front of it, and watching the output on TV, the web, and in print.

The real hope for the future is, sadly, not about doing the right thing. It’s about the public getting bored with this form of discourse, which will lead to the tabs being marginalized again and other forms of discourse coming back to the front. And in time, the wave will return again… bigger, uglier, more intimate. Our grandchildren will see US2.1k comparing pap smears instead of duplicated designer wear. And Hot Blog 5.0 will still be whining about it.

And so it goes…

Posted by poland at January 31, 2008 07:46 PM

Comments

Heat, the people love discussing the royalty. The celebs are the defacto loyalty and so it goes. Yes this stuff can get worse. Or it could simply stop being interesting. It was never this big in the past. If you go back only 10 years on the net. This sort of gossip and carrying-on about celebrities does not exist. Hell. If I could find a freakin US magazine from 10 years ago this very week. I doubt it's a third or even a fourth as hardcore as this week's US magazine. So we have gotten more hardcore.

The thing with being hardcore is... it can only last so long. There will come a point when people -- or let's state that the people who are caught up in the gossip now -- will simply walk away.

Sure the core audience will still be there. Yet the people -- or those folks -- will move on to something else that's maybe less HARDCORE and less up people's asses.

That's the thing with you Heat. You always tend to go DOCTOR DOOM with your analysis about the future. The future of the tabloids could be that ugly, or the people could stop caring. However, one must always remember this fact: THE HUMAN RACE BECAME BORED WITH SPACE TRAVEL! If not as a whole but a collective. We found something people could only dream of in the past... BORING!

If people can find space boring. They may at one point find all of this nonsense boring. The net is a young medium. You know. It has a ways to go before it's mature enough, that people stop giving a shit about celebrities. Here's hopin. HUZZAH!

Posted by: IOIOIOI at January 31, 2008 10:10 PM

Huh, the more and more we read on Heath over these past days, the cooler he becomes. Even his 'drug video' is a noble call to cleaning up (as he did).

Two joints a day wouldn't be bad, though. -_-b

Posted by: Tofu at January 31, 2008 11:08 PM

The Late Mr. Ledger does come across now like a stand-up guy that had problems like most stand-up guys. Being a stand-up guy takes it's toll on people. It's not an excuse as much as it seems to be the case. Nevertheless, his passing sucks and will continue to suck for years to come. The rags are simply trying to supply some reason to something that simply has no reason behind it. So it goes. So it is.

Posted by: IOIOIOI at February 1, 2008 12:10 AM

Interesting story on Defamer that names some certain celebs as threatening to blackball ET & The Insider access to them if they aired the video.

I don't know if it's true, but intriguing if so.

Posted by: THX5334 at February 1, 2008 12:39 AM

David, I don't know who's giving you heat about your stance on Finke, but I for one applaud you. She's nothing more than a disgusting gossip monger and, as we say in French, a "profiteur de l'occasion" (the perfect description in english escapes me at the moment).

Sadly, however, I dont think anyone's getting bored of this sensationalism anytime soon.

Posted by: Aris P at February 1, 2008 12:48 AM

It seems like the lesson of this tape is much ado about nothing, and that to get outraged at the excesses of the news organization is also to, partially, give them the attention they desire.

Posted by: jeffmcm at February 1, 2008 02:31 AM

I would have liked to see this commentary posted in the moribund Hot Button editorial column. It's serious food for thought and deserves a bit more exposure than a daily blog entry gets.

Posted by: hatchling at February 1, 2008 07:09 AM

i'm a cynic by nature. reading your post, david, led me to wonder if ET ever intended to air the video.

there's a bump in awareness for the show just by being part of the controversy. that they were "pressured" to not air it will be lost to the ether. if anyone recalls it, they'll just remember that ET could and didn't.

if there's no hue and cry, they air the video, get a rating bump during sweeps and people expecting titillation are disappointed.

it seems very win/win to me on ET's part, also calculated.

Posted by: hendhogan at February 1, 2008 12:57 PM

The Hot Blog

January 31, 2008

Good... But Has The Lesson Taken At All?

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