This Angelina Jolie story I talked about on the podcast raises an interesting irony. Jolie plays the wife of Daniel Pearl, a journalist who died in the pursuit of freedom of speech; yet Jolie’s handlers attempted to muzzle interviewers and narrowly limit the subject of any interview. It has struck more than one blogger as hypocritical.

It’s not.

The misconception at the root of the problem is that interviewing movie stars is journalism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Entertainment news is to news as miniature golf is to golf. It’s like a cute kid’s version of news. Often in either case, a rolling log is involved.

Frank Zappa famously told a Rolling Stone reporter that rock journalism is “people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read”, and that’s the first thing that distinguishes this field of endeavor from real news. The standards are rock bottom for this stuff. Even at TV news levels, even at LOCAL TV news levels, the entertainment news is inferior. People don’t consume it to be informed, they want gossip. They want to know who has gained weight, who is sleeping together, who is fighting.

Unless you hang out with the stars, this knowledge is of limited use to you.

The most important thing to remember here is that any serious news organization includes a story about Ben Affleck dating Jennifer Aniston not because it matters or even because it’s true. They include it because it sells papers, or gets viewers. And Benifer goes along with it because stories about their romance will sell movie tickets. With all the money to be made, who cares if it’s true? Have you ever noticed how often two big stars will fall for each other about three months before the release date of their movie? And how they’ll split up about an hour and a half after the DVD is released?

So for team Jolie to attempt to control the narrative isn’t hypocritical at all. The only unusual thing is that the press decided the attempt was more interesting than the narrative. Which is true. I’d far rather watch Angelina’s perfect lips as she tries to explain herself than hear her talk about her Oscar-mongering movie. It’s better gossip.

This all, by the way, is the reason I seldom do those kinds of stories on the show. Just talking about Paris Hilton last week gave me a case of hives, and that story was at least true. Most of the time, I’d just be helping to sell tickets, and I don’t make enough money in return to bother. Although I will say this - I read today that Shia Labeouf is dating Optimus Prime. And, I have learned, one of them can change into a giant vehicle. I’m pretty sure it’s Labeouf.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 at 12:49 pm and is filed under General, Marketing, Motion Pictures, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.