The Media's Paris Fixation

June 8, 2007

 

The Paris Hilton saga gets more and more bizarre. After being let out of jail by the sheriff, the judge in her case ordered her back to jail. The whiney, little socialite wept openly like a spoiled child and was removed from the hearing kicking and screaming. Once back in jail, she refused to use the bathroom for fear that a toilet-cam might be recording her going to the bathroom. “Paris is shy,” her sister told reporters. “ She was really bummed when that sex video appeared on the Internet, and she doesn't want to go through that embarrassment again.”

 

Now, I know you're asking yourself why I'm taking up precious column space talking about Paris Hilton and, believe me, there's a good reason. It's because I think Paris Hilton is the proverbial canary in the coal mine for America. Much of this country, thanks to the 24-hour news channels, has become obsessed with this little trust-fund tramp. While the bigger issues are cast aside, television devotes hours upon hours of non-stop coverage to this puerile little debutante. Throw in an illicit sex tape and millions of dollars in inheritance and, voila!, you have a news sensation. Think about it for a moment. Aside from ole Conrad himself, how many of the Hilton family have you ever heard of? The only reason we know Paris is because of some Internet dirty movie. She parlayed that infamy into so-called superstardom. Much like Monica Lewinsky, we would have no knowledge of this girl were it not for her seedy sexual exploits.

 

As reprehensible as it is, Paris Hilton's fame speaks worse to us as Americans than it does to her as a person. We have the prerogative of simply looking away but, unfortunately, we don't have the ability. The reason the news channels feed us non-stop coverage is the same reason millions of Americans feed their pets gourmet pet food. It's what we want. It used to be that responsible news editors decided what was newsworthy, not what we wanted. They knew that millions of us were scooping up the National Enquirer at the grocery checkout but they had better taste and more class than to dispense that sort of rot-gut under the guise of news. Since the advent of the cable news channel and the thirst to remain relevant with ratings, the standards set by the Tiffany Network have long been abandoned for the absolute lowest common denominator.

 

The fascination with trust-fund babies is nothing new. What seems to be new is our fascination with useless people with money. The rich and famous are the closest we have to royalty in America but in bygone years we had little use for those who had been given so much and then squandered it. The Kennedys, for all their faults as a family, at least produced some offspring who were instilled with a commitment to contribute instead of running through the family money like Grant went through Richmond.

 

The Vanderbilts, along with producing some ne'er-do-wells, as most families do, produced a long string of trust-fund babies who actually contributed to society and to the family's vast fortune. Many are self-made in their own right. Ironically, it's one of those legacies, Anderson Cooper of CNN, who has refused to give coverage to the Paris Hilton spectacle. Cooper, the son of Gloria Vanderbilt, endured the death of his father and brother to attain a Yale education and strike out on his own as a journalist. He, apparently, is acutely attuned to those who squander such privilege and is embarrassed for aristocracy everywhere. We should all take a cue.