Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve no doubt heard about the Obama’s new family pet, a Portuguese Water Dog named Bo. Various news outlets have stumbled all over one another to get the first pictures of the “first pooch,” and it isn’t new: ever since Obama’s unexpectedly adorable announcement to his daughters about adopting a dog during his presidential acceptance speech, everyone from CNN to BBC has devoted precious airtime and print space to speculating about the breed and gender of the lucky canine. And while a fluff news story can be a nice break from the violence and confusion that can often dominate journalism, the coverage of the Obama family dog is symptomatic of a larger problem in American news. Simply put, we’re nosy. We’re obsessed with knowing every detail of each other’s lives.
That’s right: we’re voyeurs. That’s why we’ve turned the celebrity gossip machine of the National Enquirer, Us Weekley, People, Star and other weekly glossies into a multimillion dollar industry based purely on speculating about the personal lives of the rich, famous, and surgically altered. It’s why we follow celebrities on Twitter when they blog about the sandwich they made for lunch or the affair they’re having with the nanny. It’s why we watch hours of The Millionaire Matchmaker, I Love Money 2, and The Biggest Loser and waste huge chunks of time clicking through Facebook photos when we should be studying for finals. As we become more and more sedentary, spending more and more time on the couch with a soda in one hand and the TV remote in the other, we increasingly live vicariously through the famous figures that abound in our culture of voyeuristic pleasure.
America has loved a good celebrity scandal ever since Marilyn Monroe sang a breathy birthday serenade to President John F. Kennedy in 1962. In the 1950s and 60s, celebrity gossip emerged as a veritable form of news and hasn’t relinquished its grip on our national consciousness since. And it’s an interesting phenomenon, because it isn’t worldwide, or even consistent across Western culture. In France, for example, the general population couldn’t be less concerned with the personal life of President Nicolas Sarkozy, who divorced his wife while in office to marry Italian model and singer Carla Bruni, who writes steamy songs about their time in the bedroom and has dozens of nude photos in European magazines. In America, national news revolved around the President’s personal life for nearly a year in 1998 as every news outlet in the country covered reports that Bill Clinton may or may not have engaged in oral sex with an intern, despite how decidedly unimportant this fact was to his ability to govern. The differences are striking.
The celebrity gossip culture goes far beyond mere curiosity. Paparazzi are so intent on snapping photographs up the skirts of famous young women that Britney Spears dedicated a two-hour television special to tearfully requesting that she be left in peace. At Gisele Bundchen and Tom Brady’s recent wedding, security guards fired shots upon two photographers who snuck into the ceremony illegally, shattering the back window of their SUV. In a world where people are famous just for being famous — Kim Kardashian and her sex tape, Paris Hilton and her pink diamond-encrusted Bentley — we feel almost entitled to know every detail of their ever-changing romances, tumultuous friendships, and sordid sex lives. Television companies make a fortune off of simply filming the actual lives of good-looking individuals fighting, making nice, and then fighting again. The Hills, anyone? And when reality isn’t good enough, a costume designer dresses the flawless Blair Waldorf to the nines so that we can watch her and her famous, fabulous “frienemies” gallavanting around New York.
Sure, reading about the lives of famous folks is a good diversion from our own problems. It makes you feel better to think that, sure, Angelina Jolie may be an international sex symbol with billions of dollars and an unbelievably sexy boyfriend, but hey, she still (supposedly) gets phones calls from a hysterical Jennifer Aniston at 3 in the morning. But ultimately, shouldn’t we more concerned with our own lives? And when it comes to politicians, especially ones as prominent as the President of the United States of America, shouldn’t we spend more time on the news discussing their leadership strategy than their family life?
President Obama has a lot on his plate in the next four years. If we as a culture could pay as much attention to his plans for Guantanamo Bay as we do to his plans for the family puppy, we’d be a much more informed nation.
Michelle Lamont is a Cavalier Daily Associate Editor. She can be reached at m.lamont@cavalierdaily.com.
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