Paris Hilton’s dancing on tables and generally acting drunk and unruly at her recent birthday party is an interesting phenomenon. Paris Hilton who has absolutely no claim to fame, manages to be a celebrity of high ranking. I think that Paris Hilton, even though one could write her off as just another blond bimbo, has worked out that the more she gets drunk, dances on tables and delivers any other semi-scandalous activity, the better her publicity rankings. If she were a demure little rich girl, nobody would bother over her. This notoriety is what allows her to host a TV show as her publicity machine is working well in her favour.

We love nothing more than to read bad press on celebrities. In fact the nasty stuff is what gets people wanting to read more and more. None of the tabloids would make money if they wrote good news stories about celebrities. It has to be nasty, character shredding, gloating over misfortune etc type stuff and Joe Public laps it up. In fact the celebrities which lead average lives and keep under the radar, are never bothered that much by the paparazzi. They are just not good for business. In fact they don’t really count as celebrities. They are just people that make a lot of money by starring in movies, or endorsing cosmetics companies, or writing mega selling books. To a certain extent they do tend to get more media exposure than mere mortals. But in comparison to the baddies such as Paris Hilton, Britney Spears etc, their press exposure is minimal.

Besides Paris Hilton there are other cases of people knowing what is good for their careers. Madonna is another case in point. Although she is famous for re-inventing herself, she somehow always has some component in the new self- invention which pushes people’s buttons. Madonna must rank as one of the arch manipulators of public interest. Princess Diana would be another example. If one were to analyse her media portfolio, it would probably show more coverage of the scandals surrounding her than all the good work she did. In her case I would not be able to say whether she manipulated this herself or whether she was a victim of the media.

The wedding marathon of second class starlet Elizabeth Hurley is another case in point. Sure the paparazzi did not have access to photos of the blissfully happy couple. But there should have been a fair number of pleasant stories available. What made the headlines in international press though, and this includes the more conservative media such as the BBC, were the fights that broke out, the protests against the use of public beaches for the festivites etc. With other words, the bad press elements were the ones that were captured by the media world wide.

The question which could be asked is why the public loves reading these stories so much. Possibly there is an element of “Schadenfreude” involved. We the readers are happy that something bad has befallen these people as they are living our fairy tale dreams. It reassures us that they possibly don’t have such fairy tale lives. Along the lines of ‘money can’t buy happiness’ thinking. This reasoning is probably also behind the story lines of soap operas. The magic formula that keeps soap operas running over decades, is the depiction of make belief wealthy dynasties, and the hardships they have to overcome and obstacles thrown in their path by script writers. Soapie addicts actually buy into the whole story, and vicariously live through the characters. In a way celebrities provide the same addictive story lines to readers and viewers of celebrity programms.

Anja Merret lives in Brighton, UK. She has recently started a blog and writes on issues that interest her from self-improvement to tech stuff for amateurs. Anja has had a varied and interesting career journey. She started as a high school teacher, changed professions to become an admin manager at her late husbands law firm because this allowed her the flexibility to look after her small children at the time. After many years she left this position to try her hand at an art gallery, moved across to public relations and finally found her niche in education again managing a computer training centre for many years. During this time she also involved herself in writing standards and qualifications in the new media field. 10 months ago she moved from South Africa to join her younger daughter. She now writes a blog and also looks after the business interests of her daughter who is a Flash and Accessibility expert. She has BA (Hons) MBA degrees and on rare occassions she feels like a frustrated wannabe academic. That passes quickly though. anjamerret.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Anja_Merret

http://EzineArticles.com/?Paris-Hilton-The-Bad-Little-Rich-Girl-Again&id=494282

Photo by Chesi (flickr.com/people/pimkie_fotos/)