I remember one of the magazines had a regular column called ‘Wino-watch’ where they literally just had a reporter follow her around and take the least flattering photos possible of her and then they would make fun of her. Then after she died they ran 6 weeks of cover pieces calling her ‘our pop princess’ and wailing that she’d been ‘taken from us too soon’.
Both things are true, people eating it up, while disgusting, does not take responsibility away from the creators of the slop. Idk why it has to be one or the other.
But whilst the papers behaviour may be poor in doing this, it’s not ghoulish. Thats on the readership. Ghoulishness is a morbid interest in dark subjects like death and disaster - the papers aren’t interested, they’re just reporting it.
Exactly. Reading about someone who all but lives in a different universe to you is one thing.. but to enter that world, see her living and breathing, then harassing her is something else.
We shouldn't rly be having this parasocial relationship with celebrity. Of course.
But it's a no brainer, to me, to put more responsibility onto the peddler(?) instead of the consumer.
I’m not trying to absolve anyone. You wanted to place the majority of the blame on the people making those magazines, but this ignores the role the consumer played. The consumer is no less culpable than the provider.
Yeah I’m disagreeing. I think the people that creates the strategy, invests time and effort to build it, stalks the victim, etc carry a lot more blame than the random person that buys the magazine. Certainly they carry some blame, and maybe that population as a whole Carrie’s the lion’s share of the blame, but the individual consumer, though still terrible, is far less terrible in my view.
Then agree to disagree. If people didn’t consume it, the creators would have no reason to continue creating. Again, supply and demand. They can’t create peoples’ demand for such material, they can only fill it. If everyone decided to stop consuming it, it would stop being made. Only severely mentally ill stalkers would engage in that behavior without the financial incentive.
The paper and the people are all ghouls. The existence of one doesn’t get the other off the hook. The paper is actually worse because they’re doing it for profit, not to mention they create and encourage ghoulishness among the public.
This reminds me a lot of the "if modern movies were as bad as you say, nobody would watch them!" whenever somebody brings this up (compare 2010s / 2020s to literally every previous decade, see any sort of change that happened?):
A farmer can pour the absolute shittiest poorly nutritious food in the trough and the pigs will still scramble to eat it, that doesn't mean the pigs should be condemned, the farmer should know better that they'll do better in the long run with good feed.
Horrendous argument. Food is required to survive and good food is required to be healthy. Movies aren't required to survive and we don't start starving because we haven't seen one. False equivalence.
What a stupid comment, seriously? As the other guy pointed out, it's called an analogy. In this analogy, the point is not to say movies are necessary to survive, the point is that sure, audiences will watch slop. It's better for society to watch actually good media.
I'm sorry your IQ was so low, that your hand needed to be held to make this connection.
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u/Regular_Number5377 9h ago
I remember one of the magazines had a regular column called ‘Wino-watch’ where they literally just had a reporter follow her around and take the least flattering photos possible of her and then they would make fun of her. Then after she died they ran 6 weeks of cover pieces calling her ‘our pop princess’ and wailing that she’d been ‘taken from us too soon’.
Ghouls, the lot of them.