I love it when so-called respectable newspapers run stories that are little more than celebrity gossip repeated under the guise of critique. It’s like, oh my god, I can’t believe those horrid tabloids…we’re so above this…it’s terrible..blah blah blah.


The piece that set me off was in last Thursday’s Globe and Mail, check it out here. In it Siri Agrell lists a bunch of celeb peep gossip about Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus and others then asks, all pretend worked up, “But since when has it become acceptable to obsess over the sex lives of teenagers?” Wow, like, how about ever since mainstream newspapers starting replacing serious articles on the arts with wire stories about the troubles and tribulations of celebrities?


An article in the newly released edition of the Ryerson Review of Journalism notes that in 2002 there were no celebrity stories in the Globe and Mail Weekend Review section. In 2007 the number averaged 2.75, ah, hell, let’s call it 3. Throw in stories like the kind the Globe published on Thursday (which could run in Life or Style or even Focus) and I’m sure we can get that number higher.


I shouldn’t pick on the Globe. I read a very similar story not that long ago that ran in the Toronto Star, pulled off the wire services and originally written for the LA Times. The headline was “Tabloids and bloggers target celebrities’ children.” No! Not the children! Once again, it managed to list all kinds of peep gossip under the guise of being indignant.


So if you’re worried that your celeb content is a little lite but you don’t want to seem light weight, go for the indignant angle, splash a big a pic of a hot celeb immersed in scandal and you’ve got the best of both worlds!


By the way, I can do this too! Here’s a pic of a celebrity and her kid that I came upon while entering celebrity kids in google trying to remember where I first read that article about bloggers targeting celebrity children. Actually I have no idea who this woman is but then I’m not the overseer of the Celebrity Baby blog, am I? Anyway, the blogger provides a caption that tells us this is a pic of “actress Jennie Garth, 35, and her middle daughter Lola Ray, 5” and she’s portrayed here “leaving a Target store in Los Angeles, CA on Monday, March 3rd. Dad is actor Peter Facinelli.” You got all that? Are you filled with revulsion for our society while also kinda curious about who this person is and why we’re looking at her? Hey, let me know what you find out.