Hey Gossip, how are you doing in the media industry?

Gossip, the word that we love to hate or hate to love, we love it and we hate it at the same time. It is almost trivia but yet I feel some kind of disconnected in case if I didn’t know about the latest gossip in school or in my hall of resident. Why is it so important? What is the magic behind? Because we all like to learn about others’ privacy,  like who was drunk last Friday and did what sort of thing to someone. Who wears the biggest muffin top etc…

Base on our preference of comparing with others. We are all pretty keen to learn and laugh at those gossip. For a gossip to be a gossip, it has to be something happened on someone which compare to your situation is treated as worse off then what you are  (e.g. someones muffin top is larger than mine is consider to be worse off to me in comparing). However, we hate gossip since we have the fear of being the topic of gossip!

This little word- gossip is almost magical!

It almost is the next topic after the hottest one – today’s weather (for more detail about topics among new friends/ strange in English culture please refer to the book “Watching The English“) But the thing is, where can you find all the gossip when there are no ones story  worth to “share” among your friends. No worries. Here we come, tabloid.
This magical paper provides endless topics for everyone of us. How could they do that?  The answer is easy, just go for the celebrities. Because we all know who are they!

We all seemed happy to learn about negative news of celebrities based on the rationale above. But the truth is, are those celebrities really in trouble. Is it the case if you are married and you happened to be sitting alone in a cafe and reading a book with your drink, could deemed to be “have problem with his wife”?? Should I believe what the tabloid, or shouldn’t I? Is it ethical for such behaviour of story making if case is not supoosed to be in those tabloid/ gossip magazine? For more information. You could refer to the book written by Margaret Simmons, The Content Maker: understanding the media in Australia, 2007. P. 53- 53 “Celebrities and morality”

The long time struggle of me for whether to believe what I seen from tabloid about celebrities seemed to be relieved.    I am glad to listened to a guest speaker in class last week, she was a experienced entertainment reporter.  According to Caron the speaker, of most the stories in the gossip column in newspaper of those news in tabloid, are made up. There are some indicator that you could find in the article if the key term like ” a source close to someone said”. The source will be the journalist’s mind and her keyboard. So why people still like it? It is all base on our preference in knowing something bad happened in others especially public figures. In case we could make ourselves feel better when knowing their privacy and creating a kind of feeling that ” getting closer” or have the sensitive nose in those events happened on people who are under the limelight. And it is a good way to kill time too (You will know how useful is a gossip magazine when traveling from the place I live to the city.

The power of word could be tremendous, it could manufacture a celebrity, it could also destroy a celebrity. It all depends on the editor’s preference. With the emerging trend for media to manufacture star via the launch of reality show. Tabloid/ gossip magazine seemed to be the alternative source for them to gain higher exposure and hence one step closer to the limelight. Or vice verse.

The creditability of information in almost all gossip news are in doubt. In reflecting the nature of gossip news, is it something what the audience really need to know?

p.s. I don’t get the idea why the following news did not appear in any of the Tabloid/ gossip magazine

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