Paris Wall-To-Wall Sad Commentary of News Media

Even Variety is dumping on the wall-to-wall coverage of Paris going to jail, being put on house arrest and then heading back to jail again.

Story proved its irresistibility long after Hilton was again behind
bars. On Saturday, ABC's "Good Morning America" led with a story about
President Bush's visit to the Pope, but then quickly turned to Hilton.

"This is the decline of Western civilization as we know it, and
we're watching it live," TMZ.com's Harvey Levin told "GMA."

I followed the story how you would normally follow a celebrity story in the pages of the online gossip press like Defamer, A Socialites Life, and the Superficial. I wasn't even aware of the circus until we saw an OJ White Bronco style coverage of the Paris motorcade. Then we went from a gossip pages story to a media event with the real "old-school" 4th estate weighing in.

This shows how this celebrity culture that has grown to monstrous proportions in the last few years. All of this stuff belongs in the gossip pages and in the celebrity press and should never get out of the entertainment portion of Good Morning America.

This is essentially a story about a rich talentless girl who screwed up and now has to serve the time. No one died, or was murdered, or even got hurt. So the media can't use the "if it bleeds it leads" defence. I guess you can paint it as the justice system treating the rich and poor differently. It would actually have been newsworthy to compare Paris's sentence to national averages or interview other probation violators to see what their prison experiences were like.
Even getting man-on-the street interviews on what people though tabout Paris would be better then what they put on.

Instead they follow the Paris motorcade like it was an actual breaking news story and go into every twist and turn like it was something other then entertainment news. At least the Anna Nicole crappola had a dead person, a mystery, and the custody of a child to give it some legs.

I think it is up to news editors to police themselves and make sure a story about an heiress going to jail for a few weeks doesn't become more important then real news stories. They need to show integrity by keeping the entertainment news about entertainment and the "real news" as the "real news."