The Effects of Celebrity Centered Journalism

In our modern day society, media is dominated by celebrity centred journalism which has developed significantly in the last century. Journalism is often focused on people’s personal lives, mainly celebrities which include people from the film and television industry, models, musical artists and other well-known people in the entertainment business. It is clear that celebrities are a very popular topic to write about in the news as they create entertaining stories and this is what the public want to read. The relevance of celebrity journalism is often questioned because how important these stories are to the public and whether they really need to read them. However, the increase in celebrity culture has caused changes in our society which is required by the public sphere. As Farrell (2013, p. 380) said, it is clear that celebrities are an extremely popular topic to write about in the news but it is extremely dividing form which debases the public sphere.

Celebrity centred journalism is supported by a lot of the public sphere today, with one of the biggest public spheres being the internet. Online journalism and the internet allow members of the public to freely discuss and debate about different issues from all over the world by communicating online. The internet has become so big that it is the main way people connect with each other to receive news and is greater than any other communication system. Facebook and Twitter are 2 of the main examples of social networking where people come together to create a public sphere, through these sites information is spread quickly. Nowadays most people see major news headlines through stories on the internet rather than watching television or listening to the radio. Conboy (2013) argues tha...

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...it rarely happens because these social issues are discussed online instead. This can also be said because of how the majority of the public surveyed in Prior (2010) questionnaire.

However, people claim that it doesn’t debase the public sphere because Prior said that people don’t watch the television to gain knowledge. Taylor and Harris (2008) discussed that the public sphere is now dominated by amorphous and intangible associations”, meaning that it has no real structure to it this supports Farrell’s argument about ‘dumbing down’ the public sphere because it seems that people don’t really know what they are talking about. Overall these studies show that celebrity centred journalism doesn’t debase the public sphere because of the amount of online communication people have with each other and by receiving the latest breaking news all the time in our modern society.