Kansan Article #2: The Stupidness of Celebrity Worship

Here's my second article published in the UDK. My third one got bumped from this Friday's paper, so it will be up on here next week sometime. Enjoy!

I know everyone’s sick of hearing about Anna Nicole Smith and her babies and her old dead husbands. I roll my eyes and growl at Court TV and CNN whenever her name pops up. Forgive me if I’m adding to the noise.

I hope my noise is different sounding.

Some students are obsessed with other people’s lives. These kinds of students (who love the gossip magazines and things like that) aren’t satisfied with just living his/her own life and being concerned with actual people and events that affect the world. Instead, our society is obsessed with knowing what kind of purse so-and-so has. Real life is taking a back seat to fantasy.

Sure, watching the “E!” channel and picking up the gossip rags in the grocery store checkout line may seem harmless, but it hides something deeper, something darker. Because these “celebrity-chasing” students don’t care about their own lives, they are causing two terrible things to happen.

First, they are forcing the journalism world to cover worthless stories like what party Kanye West attended. Journalists are supposed to seek the truth and report it. Celebrity-chasers are forcing journalists to seek out information about celebrities that very well may be true, but not important in the least bit. The important truth is things like the genocide going on in Darfur and what the city council decided at its last meeting. The important truth is things like why China wants to get rid of Starbucks and why John Doe opened up that new deli down the street. The important truth is not what kind of shampoo Jessica Simpson uses.

Secondly, celebrity-chasers are forcing themselves to disconnect with the very world they live in. The AP wire on any given day has three or four headlines about problems in the Middle-East and other news, and then is filled with stories of this party and that DUI. Celebrity-chasers, by being interested in every little thing that celebrities do, are making themselves dumber. These students don’t pay attention to the real news, the news that actually affects the way they live. They live a fantasy life vicariously. They live their lives through the lives of celebrities.

Students need to wake up. We shouldn’t care about the mundane details of people we’ll never meet. We need to care about the events that affect our world. We need to pay attention to what businesses are doing well, what the situation in Iraq is like, and what we as citizens can do about the problems in our world. Sure, those famous people provide us with entertainment, but that’s what iTunes and the movie theaters are for. Let’s not let celebrities distract us from the importance of living in this crazy world.

Instead of watching Laguna Beach and E! in all your free time, watch CNN in the mornings to get the headlines. As you go to lunch or class, pick up the Kansan or one of the four free papers available for students (The New York Times, The Kansas City Star, The Lawrence Journal-World, and USA Today). If we start getting connected to the world, we will know more about our surroundings and therefore be able to affect the world around us for the better.