Celebrity journalism is rubbish

The Guardian revealed yesterday and the day before that several British tabloids accepted stories about various celebrities which were demonstrably false from an undercover documentary maker who was filming them. The stories included one about Amy Winehouse’s hair catching fire and one about Guy Ritchie getting a black eye from juggling cutlery, and they even offered to pay for confidential information, sourced from a nurse at a fictitious clinic, about famous people who’d gone in for consultations about plastic surgery.

The stings were done as part of research for a new film called Starsuckers, directed by one Chris Atkins. Perhaps we can cast aspersions on the ethics of such a trick, but it goes to show that tabloid editors will accept stories that could be shown as false, or at least unproven, with a call to the celebrity’s agent.

In questions at the London film festival, where George Clooney and Kevin Spacey, co-stars of a film called The Men Who Stare at Goats, based on Jon Ronson’s book of the same name, Spacey made the following observation:

I don’t get it. I don’t understand the notion of people who might call themselves journalists who would just make up stuff. I don’t understand it as a function of a human being. I don’t understand why that’s of interest, to write something that is false. If you even bother to say ‘that story has no whit of truth to it’ they write that you denied that that story is true, which is not the same thing as saying what we wrote was absolutely wrong.

“There are some people who choose to fight these things in the courts and there are those who say ‘you know what, it’s yesterday’s news, it’s fish wrapping and I’m not going to worry about it’.