1.4.15
Celebrity Gossip News Has Lost Its Luster for Me
7:19 PM
I used to be the biggest hound for celebrity gossip news. I watched shows like TMZ and Extra on a regular basis, and I loved hearing the latest rumors about various celebrities.
I started to realize a few years ago, however, that celebrities are human beings like everyone else, and celebrity gossip news quickly began to lose its appeal for me.
I think it is only natural to want to listen to gossip, and celebrity gossip news is typically pretty juicy. You hear about all of the sordid details of a love affair gone awry or an ugly feud between two celebrities, and it gives you something to talk about with other people and it almost makes you feel privy to something that should be a secret.
The fact of the matter is that it should be a secret, as all of our private lives should be a secret. One of the things you most often hear about is that many of the rumors about celebrities are untrue, but even when that is revealed, many people still associate the celebrity with the rumor, and that person has to live with that forever.
Celebrity gossip news appeals to most people, I think, because we do want to know about people and gossip can either show us that they are regular people like us, or it can knock them off of their pedestal and give them a proper lesson in humility. Either way you look at it, even when the gossip is true, all it does is prove that celebrities, like the rest of us, are human and make mistakes.
One of the greatest analogies about gossip that I have ever heard came from the movie Doubt. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a priest, and in his sermon, he is telling the story of a young woman that goes to confession and said that she has gossiped about another person, and wants to know if that is a sin.
The old priest tells her that, for her penance, she must go home, get on top of her roof with a pillow, cut it open, and empty all of the feathers from the roof. She does so, and comes back the next to tell the priest she has done what he asked.
The priest then tells her to go and gather up every feather that came from the pillow, and put it back in the case. The girl protests saying that it would be impossible, that the feathers went everywhere and are all over now. There is no way that she can find them all.
And that's gossip, the old priest tells her.
While celebrity gossip news may be entertaining and intriguing in some cases for us, it is not necessarily a good thing. Our natural fascination with celebrities leads us to want to know more about them, but I think we should all remembers that they are people, too.