Straight-up Hypocrisy

Straight-up hypocrisy

The Internet changed the way news outlets view profits and distribution. It meant that in order to find out what's happening in the world you no longer needed to wait for the 6 o' clock news or go out and buy a physical newspaper; you could log on and find out the latest happenings within a minute of being curious. But outlets recognised a loophole in this development which allowed them to exploit the nature of Internet advertising - namely, the fact that voyeuristic celebrity stories attract a huge number of hits and are easy to waste time upon. This leads to MailOnline - the website of the Daily Mail - intermittently printing requests for celebrity stories, and taking up about a quarter of their homepage. A serious publication indeed, what with all the deep analyses of Amy Childs' hilarious antics.

But, I mean, whatever. Heat magazine exists. We all know that celebrity gossip columns and the whole circus surrounding them has become an accepted form of pseudo-journalism; there are those of us who view it as a way for people to distract themselves from important issues, and those of us who think it's just a bit of harmless fun. I'm not here to pass judgement on the nature of that type of reporting - not for now, anyway. I'm here to call out publications which do pass such judgement on our "celebrity culture", all whilst contributing to it.

Of course, they never actually pinpoint the source of the problem, which is not the celebrities themselves, but the publications which choose to take notice. And they rarely, if ever, take up arms against the celebrity press, choosing instead to speak in abstract terms. But what they do is use a tone which suggests that they're sat, tutting away, at all these people who dare to be famous. Take this article, for example:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2073889/X-Factor-2011-Amelia-flashes-knickers-Sophies-chest-X-Factor-wrap-party.html

whose first paragraph actually declares that:

It may have been Little Mix who walked away with The X Factor crown, but that's not stopping the other contestants fighting to prolong their 15 minutes of fame.

the implication, of course, being that these people are attention-seeking. This may or may not be the case, but it wouldn't matter if there were no photographers there and if you didn't publish the resulting photographs in your so-called newspaper all while implying that it is these people who are in control of whether they remain famous or not. Of course, you understand this, but being the so-called newspaper that you are you have to take a moralising stance on TODAY'S YOUTH and MODERN CULTURE all whilst you propagate it because it gets people onto your website and you make money from advertising revenue every time someone clicks the god-damn link. You need them more than they need you, but good job pretending.

What About My Human Rights?

The notion of "human rights" should not be a complicated one to understand, but in the priveleged society we find ourselves in, it's easy for people - especially having been fed falsehoods and exaggerations - to fail to understand quite how fundamental and crucial the rules laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are.

The rules governing essential human rights do not concern themselves with the things you read about in the newspaper. They advocate, encourage and enforce a system which provides dignity and a basic standard of physical, emotional, mental and societal welfare to the most vulnerable people in society, and to the rest of us as well. Some of these rules are ones that we in our comfortable countries wouldn't even think twice of - article 4, for example, which deals with slavery.

Others are immediately relevant to our culture and the narratives taking place in our country right now. Unfortunately, we don't always get it correct on rights concerning free speech and expression, freedom of religion, and the like: we seem to have forgotten about the former when it suits us (i.e. the woman on the tram you've probably seen by now) and filled in invisible gaps on the latter (i.e. when we support people's rights to wear jewellery just because it's shaped like a crucifix). When we screw up on these things, it's because we've forgotten why human rights exist.

But in our world of plenty (cue Band Aid) some people manage to convince themselves that any injustice they feel should be remedied by their "human rights", totally ignoring the essence of those rules. So no, there isn't a human right which makes your tax money go exactly the way you want it to. You don't have the human right to watch the man who murdered your daughter be lethally injected. These are not human rights. They're wishes. Send them to Jim'll fucking Fix It. Alternatively, your local MP. But stop weakening the backbone of a dignified society by comparing it with your petty fucking first world problems. It makes you look like a dick.