Why Celebrities Aren't Celebrated
Ted Gioia has written a piece in which he asks, What Happened to the Celebrities? In it, he presents some impressive evidence of Americans’ increasing contempt for and indifference to celebrities and the entertainment industry.
I don’t have a paid subscription to Ted’s site and would be interested in the explanations he offers in this piece.
But I think it’s undeniable: Celebrities are less, well, celebrated, and they once were…and not just in the entertainment industry. (This is true, I think, even though, since 1980, we’ve elected two celebrity presidents–Reagan in 1980 and 1984 and Trump in 2016 and 2024–and a celebrity vice president–J.D. Vance in 2024.)
Why aren’t celebrities so celebrated?
1. Part of people’s low regard for celebrities must be that in our hyper-mediated era, the curtain has been pulled back more on the personal lives of celebrities. We know too much about them and have learned that they’re sinners just like us.
2. There’s also a deepening resentment of the haves by the have-nots In an era of widening wealth inequality. (Whether such resentment are warranted is probably subject for deep debate.)
3. On top of all of this, there is a growing phenomenon in our society, what I call “naïve cynicism.”
Let me explain: In the post World War II era going right up to the height of the Vietnam war, a hefty majority of Americans in one poll after another, said they were sure their government would never lie to them about any important thing. That, of course, was deeply naïve. But after the experiences of Vietnam and Watergate, the sordidness of Bill Clinton, and the deliberate lying by those who peddled various conspiracy theories, Americans have settled into an equally naïve and fact-challenged conviction. They believe that governments, celebrities, and every knowledgeable expert in the world is a liar, that these people always lie.
Today, hardly anyone believes anybody.
That’s not such a terrible thing when you’re talking about consumers’ doubts regarding a celebrity selling tennis shoes or promoting their latest movie. Celebrity is. for the most part, unhealthy idol-worship. We have a hard enough time worshiping the one true God of the universe, first revealed to Israel and now shown to all the world in Jesus of Nazareth. We don’t need celebrity gods and godlets to divert us from the life that only Jesus Christ can give us.
But when roughly half of sentient adults dismiss all truth claims made by people from the political or social tribes for which they have contempt and dismiss all fact checkers as phonies, it becomes very difficult to sustain a civil life, or govern a country, or avoid conflict with neighbors in the grocery store parking lot.
A society without commonly-accepted facts will necessarily devolve into chaos. That’s not a call for imposed uniformity, but rather a call for civility and openness.
One other thing, specific to the entertainment industry, which, as The Honest Broker shows in that portion of the article I was able to read, is well out of favor with Americans these days: Many would argue—I would argue—that American entertainment has become tiresomely predictable and uncreative (filled with sequels and “franchises” like Star Wars, Marvel Univers, etc.), overly dependent on special effects, obsessed with showing the darkness of humanity, and politically correct. The music industry is as bad as the movies, giving us warmed-over 80s pop and, often, unimaginatively pornographic or violent lyrics. Is it any wonder that so few care about the Oscars, Emmys, Tonys, or Grammys?
I might have a few prescriptions. But that will have to wait for another time.
I agree with the "naive cynicism." I would add a fourth: postmodern tribalistic nationalisms. Our country doesn't have a unified culture, but many cultures. Each culture has its own celebrities and its own status symbols. People often say they don't care for one status symbol object and yet will save up to buy the status symbol of another subgroup. One person may reject a movie star's statement outright and yet hang on a certain podcaster's every word. In report after report we find that the viewership or subscription of particular networks or newspapers dwarfs the allegedly mainstream media (leading us to ask the question if there is really a mainstream media anymore).
The process started around the early eighties, but began to pick up speed in the '90s with two media moves. First the Telecommunications Act of 1996, removed barriers for large corporations to buy up as many local syndicates as possible. Controlling the narrative of scores of local syndicates was virtually impossible for people with mass messaging; but buying them up and homogenizing them made it easy to stream line a message. On the surface this would seem to be advantageous to creating a large dominant culture; but it actually led to the opposite. Before, each small network couldn't challenge the national narrative; but as these media fiefdoms grew in power, they could create powerful new cultural confederacies that could break up the national narrative. In addition, the large media organizations which would have wanted to supplant the dominant narrative would have found it impossible to challenge the independent thinkers of each of these small media outlets. However, when they were allowed to buy them out, they could begin to amass wealth and power to create other narratives.
At the same time the rise of cable television allowed for "narrow casting," that is targeting specific audiences and giving them channels that catered to their own desired cultures. Instead of everybody watching the same television, now people could live totally separate lives and ultimately totally separate realities. This sped up with the rise of the internet and then social media.
People still have celebrities; but they are mouthpieces for already held beliefs. This is what you were talking about when you discussed the dismissal of fact checkers from outside a tribe; but I think just as their is a naive cynicism, it is part of a naive postmodernism. Postmodernism worried about the blind obedience of the modernist states like the British Empire or the Soviet Union; but didn't think that gave us an excuse to replace those regimes with a dogma of individualistic passions and desires. Naive postmodernism instead uses naive cynicism as cover for an unrestrained appetite for self-fulfillment. In the same way tribalism, as one thinker has put it, is the evil twin of patriotism. One is a member of tribalism as one is a member of a grocery store loyalty club. We shop there and get benefits, but we aren't going to die for that place. (I suppose tribalism does turn into a cult for some people, but not for everyone.) In any case, the worrisome aspect of the naive cynicism is that there might be an actual argument you could have with a cynic, but the naiveté just makes the cynicism artifice all the way through.
That could lead to the scariest thing about all of this. There has always been something artificial about American celebrity; but now some celebrities are showing they may hold to beliefs that may be more real than many of the spectators.