I think that there has to be a point where collectively as a society we have to stand up and say, "Enough is enough. We're mad as hell and we're not going to take this anymore. There is absolutely no reason why anybody needs to know this much about Paris Hilton."
It is to the point that I'm wondering why CNN even exists. We're supposed to have this 24-hour news channel: the station with all the answers. It's supposed to provide us with all the news we could possibly want: that's its entire job. If it's newsworthy, we should hear about it on CNN. And logic would dictate that there is certainly enough going on in the world to fill up a news station: you send enough reporters out, and they should be coming back with something.
I mean, there's upwards of 5 billion people on the planet, somebody has to be doing something interesting.
Yet for the past month, CNN and every other major news channel have been entirely ignoring the better part of the population of humanity and focusing, almost solely, on one person. And this one person isn't even interesting.
You can't turn on the television right now without being absolutely inundated with Paris Hilton. This makes absolutely no sense. These news channels have to be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on photographers, writers, reporters and production costs all in the name of reporting the "story" of a girl, who, quite possibly, is the world's most unproductive person. And that's what's crazy: think of all the resources that are being flushed away on a story that has little to no impact on society.
Paris Hilton's incarceration has absolutely no bearing on my life or the life of anyone I know. In fact, I'll even go so far as to say that this news story doesn't affect one person in the entire state of Indiana. I guess you could say that this story is important to her fans, but that begs the question: does Paris Hilton really have fans? And, if so, why? I don't really understand how you can call yourself a fan of someone who has no societal merits.
I wonder if Paris Hilton even pays taxes. Even if she did, I don't know how she'd mail them in, because it's doubtful that she even knows how to spell "IRS."
And it's not that I don't think that her arrest and subsequent imprisonment isn't a newsworthy story; because it is. It's actually a morality tale that is proof that the bourgeoisie are not above the constraints of the American judicial system. If you screw up enough times, you can't buy or cry your way out of jail. That's how the system works, and this is proof of that.
However, this is not how the story is being spun by any news station. They're playing this story like, at best, a TV sitcom on FOX, or, at worst, a late night movie on Cinemax: that Paris Hilton is this maladjusted socialite heiress who will get into wacky (or sexy) adventures while serving her time in jail. But anyone who knows anything about anything knows that this isn't what is ultimately going to happen. Paris Hilton is going to spend her internment like every other person that goes to jail: sitting in her cell waiting for her sentence to end. Despite the wishes of every CNN bigwig, Paris Hilton is not going to tunnel out of jail, she's just not that smart.
I realize that this is a problem that's not going to just go away, and that writing about it is only adding to the problem. But talking about not talking about Paris Hilton is the first step to not talking about Paris Hilton completely.
Write to Paul at pjmetz@bsu.edu
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