Feeling Hyped

When I go shopping in grocery stores or pharmacies, I often notice that tabloid magazines really get to me. I am such a fan of magazines, but not tabloids. It’s something about the infectiously irrelevant gossip columns and their pitiful content. I even understand the want and demand for gossip, but often the subjects of such talk just get under my skin, sometimes in an upsetting way. When tabloids thrive on constantly dissecting a celebrity scandal- bit by bit, week by weekly issue, of something trivial like couple’s fights and “Brangelina’s” child hoarding- it drives me up the wall. Especially since the creators of these ridiculous texts assume we aren’t intelligent enough to know that the same huge-name stars that are always “featured” with some new drama are paying publicists fortunes to keep their names in the media at all costs. The thought sickens me- on the celebrity’s part, the tabloid creator’s part, and on part of those who love to keep trash like this circulating by buying it.
For example, I can honestly say that most of the time, I don’t want to know what’s going on in a celebrity’s private life. I feel that the invasiveness of proclaiming family and relationship dynamics to the world in a tabloid is unnecessarily cruel and almost laughable, when you think about it for a few minutes. Of course it is wrong to pry incessantly and then make a living out of publicizing someone’s privacy. All the talk a few months ago about the death of John Travolta’s son and Jennifer Hudson’s relatives made me uneasy, but those topics are nothing compared to the recent child-crazy tabloids. For example, Nadya Suleman makes me livid with her psychosis and how she horrifyingly had in-vitro for more kids when she already had several, is unmarried and unemployed. I am in total shock that everyone has been thinking of her family as “cute” and special, when it is pretty clear that this woman has an identity projection of Angelina Jolie upon herself and needs help for her mental illness. The doctor who did her in-vitro should have his license revoked. These are intensely negative feelings, no doubt, but seeing such characters (often the same ones) plastered on tabloids all the time with the same stories repeated about them just makes me feel like someone is trying to dumb me down or is completely underestimating most people's intelligence and seriousness. I certainly cannot take exploiting seriously, and being bombarded by exploit tabloids is offensive.