Confessions Of A Celebrity Gossip Girl

That was approximately a week before her head-shaving incident. Around the same time, I was assigned to harass a Trim Spa executive with some drummed up stories in the hopes of collecting excess dirt on then-newly deceased Anna Nicole Smith. These and countless other incidents collectively known as "my career" for the past 5-plus years have led to a reassessment of my personal moral fabric—and its decay.

In 2004, Jay T. Harris, a former big-city tabloid editor and the founding director of The Center for the Study of Journalism and Democracy at the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Southern California, was a panelist at USC's "Reporting on Celebrities: The Ethics of News Coverage" conference. There, Harris declared, "The American tradition of free speech and free press gives us a nearly 'unbounded' right to cover the banal, the bizarre, and the shamelessly self-promoting. The choice of whether to do so is one that journalists make."

Everyone knows that "celebrity" sells. There's a multi-million dollar press industry based around Britney Spears alone. Just ask Donald Trump if his celebrity billionaire image and TV shows have helped or hindered business. (Take a wild guess.)

Generally speaking, publications attract a wider audience if they include celebrity coverage. Harris compared this to the instinct of rubbernecking—the more cars, ambulances, and stretchers, the slower traffic will move.

"Journalists could argue that celebrity coverage is smart business," he said. "Competitive pressures provide a plausible justification for celebrity coverage, i.e., 'If I don't do it, my competitor will and that will be to my disadvantage.'"

But, Harris went a step further and wondered aloud, "Is the news media acting in the public interest by giving the public a steady diet of its baser desires?