As I sit here and reflect on Anna Nicole’s death, I am faced with a very disturbing fact of life. We as humans LOVE gossip. We love to read about it, listen to it and do it ourselves. Especially when it is about celebrities.
Ironically, a few days before Anna Nicole’s demise, I wrote an article about celebrity death and scandal and how much the general public feeds into and holds such a hungry interest in what the media has to say as far as rumors go. It’s very sand that such nasty gossip follows around people, even in death. Maybe especially in death.
There are a number of popular celebrity gossip websites out on the web right now. All of them are entertaining to read, but you must really take them with a grain of salt. Especially when reading some of the vulgar and immature comments that readers leave on the sites. Here are two of the more popular ones that I have been to.
Perez Hilton. Perez Hilton, real name Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr., is a very popular celebrity gossip blogger. His blog, at one point nicknamed “Hollywood’s Most Hated Website” is known for showing unflattering pictures of celebrities, including little nasty captions he writes himself over the pictures. Often times an picture of a woman celebrity standing is shown with little dots drawn between the legs by Perez, which are supposed to be urine marks. The grammar and spelling on the site is not the best, and the site itself is very, very pink, but it’s gossip, so no one cares. The juicier the better.
The Superficial. This website is another extremely popular celebrity gossip site. It has an Alexa rating of approximately 1,234 as of February. Worse than Perez Hilton’s site, The Superficial can be extremely raunchy and not afraid to call a celebrity baby ugly, or call it like they see it. Unlike websites that report celebrity news, The Superficial makes it’s marks by trashing celebrities that are often fawned over and given nothing but love on other websites. The Superficial gets it’s gossip from other sites, citing the source they got it from and a snippet of the story and a quote. Often times there are many pictures to look at. If you click on the pictures, you can see what the fans of The Superficial have said about the stories. Often times the comment posters are very crude and cruel.
Currently, Britney Spears has been taking some of the spotlight away from the Anna Nicole saga. Poor Britney. She is in need of some real friend I think. She seems to be going through a tough time where she really just needs her mama. Maybe she is feeling like she is lost and doesn’t have an identity outside of celebrity? Former child star syndrome maybe? I feel bad for her. I wish the gossip sites would just let her be already. Enough is enough. It will never stop though. As long as we can’t help our curiosity by peeking, there will always be a need and a market for gossip magazines and websites.
