Studying celebrity news

Celebrity news and the dark planet of contemporary journalismThere was a time when news coverage of celebrities was mostly confined to tabloids, distinctive magazines and special sections of newspapers.Today, celebrity news is an endemic phenomenon; it has found its place across the entire media spectrum where it proved its capacity to attract a wide range of publics and to drive consumption (Turner, 2010).Celebrity coverage has become omnipresent and pervasive even to the extent that it constitutes a new normality in the contemporary media world.The increasing presence of celebrity news has often been subjected to critical accounts of the media and cultural industries.Public consciousness tends to perceive celebrity coverage in terms of a dirty pleasure of sensationalist tabloid reporters who capitalize on exposing the private lives of the famous.It is considered by many to be the 'dark planet' of contemporary journalism.As a symptom of tabloidization it is seen as contributing to the dumbing down of news content and journalistic quality (Franklin, 1997).Celebrity news may well distract public attention from the important issues in public conversation, diverting public interest from the issues that really matter (Couldry et al., 2007;Postman, 1985).In this issue, Martin Conboy warns that such a cultural flattening may have a broad, if apolitical, democratic potential.The consequences of the 'discursive bleeding of celebrity discourse' (P.David Marshall, in this issue) into the political context might also be more direct.In his contribution to this special issue, Jason Wilson argues that the infiltration of the political sphere by the celebrity logic raises questions about reforming political leadership and modes of democracy in an environment where significant proportions of the population have tuned out from official politics.These questions bear enormous relevance across contemporary democracies.