Posts Tagged ‘CNN’

I’ve been travelling around California for the last 10 days, taking in the sights and sounds and meeting people on a research trip for a book on the ways that sexuality has been used to create fame. Hollywood is a spawning ground for media whores, after all. I thought I’d be taking time out of blogging, but there are three celebrity stories subsuming the news in the USA at the moment and I could not let them pass as, even by my own standards of morbid interest, the American news coverage of Lindsay Lohan, Mel Gibson and Rachel Uchitel’s latest shenanigans is overkill.

Mel Gibson’s everywhere, in stories relating to the tapes that are allegedly of him violently, angrily haranguing the mother of his youngest child, Oksana Grigorieva, in racist, sexist and vulgar terms. It smacks of a put-up job to me, but it’s a story that will run and run.

Lindsay Lohan, in case you missed it, is also in trouble, serving ninety days in jail for drink-driving offences. If you were judging by the amount of comment and analysis the story’s getting, you’d expect her to have been found guilty of triggering an unprovoked nuclear attack on the Falkland Islands or something similar. Not that Lohan will serve her time – the latest reports suggest that she could serve as little as nine days “because of overcrowding”. Read the rest of this entry »

About a month ago, I wrote a blog on brand immortality and the way that people are exploiting dead celebrities to generate vast amounts of money in the wake of Michael Jackson’s death. Now, as the world gears up for This Is It, a film of Jackson rehearsals, CNN have come out with a report detailing what seems like the beginnings of a cult of dead celeb exploitation – there are even “death hags” who tour the sites of their favourite stars’ deathplaces, always on the lookout for morbid curiosities to buy.

Last year’s top-earning dead celebrities, according to Forbes magazine’s forthcoming report, are Elvis Presley, Charles M. Schulz, Heath Ledger, Albert Einstein, Aaron Spelling, Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel), John Lennon, Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, James Dean, and Marvin Gaye, who earned a combined $194 million in 2008.

It’s a revealing article, and it makes me think I may not have gone far enough with my predictions of the exploitations of dead stars that are to come.

To read my original blog, click here. To read the CNN report in full, click here.

Twitter has demonstrated its awesome power of its network in the ugliest of circumstances; the massacre in Mumbai has brought the networking, information sharing website right to the forefront of news gathering as the tragedy was played out on millions of people’s mobile phones and inboxes second by second.

CNN reported Twitter user “naomieve”’s response to the outpouring of information: “Mumbai is not a city under attack as much as it is a social media experiment in action.”

This is correct to an extent – certainly, news of the attack spread via Twitter far quicker than the old media could report on it, to the extent that immediate reports were dictated by the often conflicting information that was pouring out of Mumbai, twitted, re-twitted and passed around the world as fast as the eye can blink. But that soon gave way to traditional media headlines being recycled.

The astonishing speed and multiplicity of Twitter is also its weakness – the amount of re-twitted reports mean that it is impossible to tell what is an eyewitness account from a hotel and what is rumour or even mean-minded invention.

It is worth bearing in mind that it is a tool as useful to the terrorists as it is to anyone and to remember, as the old Second World War posters instructed, that “careless talk costs lives”. Twitter is an exciting tool and it’s now very much in the spotlight, at the cutting edge of communications. All that remains now is for all of us, from commentators to people in desperate situations such as those faced in Mumbai, to use it responsibly.

To read the full story from CNN click here.