The Online Reflector

Lindsay Lohan headed back to jail! Kim Kardashian getting divorced after 72 days! Justin Bieber’s Baby Mama!

Each week, dozens of celebrity news outlets such as TMZ, E! News and PerezHilton.com splash headlines across their chosen mediums obsessing over the lives of celebrities. There are countless websites, magazines and TV shows whose sole content is celebrity gossip.

In fact, magazines like US Weekly and People include updates such as “Look! They’re Just Like Us!”, a section where they photograph celebrities doing things such as—get this—grocery shopping. Look! They even eat!

Well, what did you think, that they aren’t real people? Did you know they breathe, too? Or did you need “breaking news” to tell you this?

I admit that I will watch E! News and occasionally scan the headlines of TMZ, but at least these news outlets make no pretense about the type of news they produce. They openly admit that their content is celebrity gossip.

What I do have a problem with is when daily newspapers and websites such as CNN and FOX report breaking news on Lindsay Lohan’s new jail sentence. Seriously? This is serving the public good?

What’s even more irking is how many stories are about celebrities who haven’t even accomplished anything. Kim Kardashian is famous for nothing more than a sex tape and being good looking, yet her name has appeared on the most “serious” news outlets.  In fact, her job title is “celebrity personality.” Where can I apply for that?

Actress Lindsay Lohan hasn’t been in a movie since “A Prairie Home Companion” in 2006, and she hasn’t been in a movie anyone has actually seen since “Mean Girls” in 2004, yet she continues to make headlines just for being a bad person.

And at the bottom of this pile of shiny plastic fame lies my least favorite type of celebrity: the mistress-turned-famous. I understand that when the Tiger Woods story was breaking, interviewing the women involved in the story to get all of the facts was important.

Yet why does Rachel Uchitel still pop up in the news? In fact, why do I still know her name?

Or there’s the even better case of girls who pretend they have had a relationship with a celebrity just to make the news, like the girl who claimed she had Justin Bieber’s baby. Most of these people see this as a ticket to fame, as they have seen ordinary people do on reality TV shows such as “The Real World.”

Despite all of this nonsense, I have to ask myself why this opportunity even exists. These people would not be famous if we didn’t continuously report on their lives, buy magazines concerning them, make statuses about them and tweet about them. Kim Kardashian’s 72-day marriage was actually a hashtag on Twitter for one glorious day.

Maybe all of this exists because people are obsessed with celebrities’ lives. They seem so shiny and out of reach that when we hear a flaw about them, we immediately pounce on it to feel better about ourselves. I mean, how many positive stories do we see about celebrities vs. photos of  “Megan Fox With No Make-Up On!” ?

Perhaps at the end of the day, we really are to blame for fake fame. As long as it’s harmless, it’s not a big deal, right?

But last year, I watched a news show that included an interview with a 16-year-old who was disappointed she didn’t get chosen for the MTV show “16 and Pregnant.” In the interview, she described how she tried so hard to get pregnant just to be on the show.

If we are the ones who feed the monster, aren’t we the ones responsible for its growth?