When Lamar Odom was found unconscious in a Nevada brothel last Tuesday, bedlam ensued. News outlets across the nation seized immediately and persistently on the story, and there has been little rest from it since. The former NBA star and reality television celebrity became the constant focal point across national news avenues. Reports and speculations about his drug use prior to his being found flew across the media world like a whirlwind, even as he lay struggling to recover in a Las Vegas hospital. Ethical questions concerning the frenzied coverage of Odom could not be ignored – were the media going too far?
Perhaps the most immediate of the ethical concerns surrounding coverage of the star’s actions and consequent health conditions was that of the respect – or lack thereof, depending on one’s standpoint – for Odom and his family in the wake of this distressing event. The Daily Mail leaked arguably intimate photographs of Odom allegedly lying in a bed at the brothel. In one bit of its seemingly relentless coverage of the event and its aftermath, CNN mistakenly showed a photograph of San Antonio Spurs player LaMarcus Aldridge. Was the media going too far, crossing basic lines of privacy and decency? Were outlets sacrificing accuracy for the sake of getting the story out?
To ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt, the coverage of Odom was offensive. On last Wednesday night’s segment of SportsCenter, Van Pelt argued that the media was framing the star as being a reality show celebrity, focusing heavily on his involvement with the Kardashians and in his view neglecting the fact that Odom had had a 14-season NBA career in which he helped the Los Angeles Lakers win consecutive championships in 2009 and 2010.
“Kardashian reality star? No, no, no, no,” Van Pelt said. “Lamar Odom, unlike those for whom fame is oxygen, whose fame comes in the absence of accomplishment, his fame was earned.”
He added that he believed this perceived framing of Odom’s persona ultimately negatively changed the way people viewed the star.
“Passed out in a brothel makes for a hell of a headline, and I’m sure quite a juicy episode of TV, but stripped to the foundation, it’s just incredibly sad,” Van Pelt said. “All of it.”
This kind of coverage of celebrities is certainly not new to today’s mass media landscape. In today’s world of “getting clicks,” journalistic outlets publish such celebrity news in order to cater to their audiences. Celebrities sell. To some, this may be justified: If the people want to know, don’t they have the right to? And, as a celebrity, doesn’t one’s status as a public figure mean that one forfeits the right to privacy and more discrete coverage? These points are debatable and ultimately what news outlets are going to have to continue to consider in the shifting world of journalism.
But also key – and perhaps even more important to consider in the long run as a journalist – is whether or not this type of coverage is actually beneficial to the public journalists have the task of informing. Are we as journalists actually doing our audiences a disservice by covering celebrity news so heavily? Are we in the process neglecting to report on other pressing national and international issues? According to the Pew Research Center, we may be. Its 2013 State of the News Media report found, among other things, that on cable news outlets spent 67 percent of airtime on “commentary and opinion,” while devoting 33 percent to “straight news reporting.”
When one stops to think about the amount of celebrity coverage one is exposed to on a daily basis, these findings are rather alarming. Just last year, for instance, MSCBC host Andrea Mitchell interrupted Congresswoman Jane Harman’s (D-CA) commentary on the NSA’s collection of phone records to give the audience the update that pop star Justin Bieber had been arrested for driving under the influence in Miami. CNN hosted an hour-long special called, “Justin Bieber’s Wild Ride,” chronicling the singer’s career and arrest.
As issues such as the refugee crisis in Europe loom large on the international news stage, should we be devoting so much time to celebrities? Arguably not. With so many pressing national and global issues at hand, it hardly seems ethical to replace hard reporting with entertainment news.
But as Huffington Post writer Larry Atkins wrote in a 2010 op-ed piece on celebrity news coverage, it doesn’t look as though news outlets will be toning down their entertainment content anytime soon, as media organizations struggle with the pressure to draw readers and viewers with often sensationalized stories of this kind.
“In an ideal world, media outlets would ignore the trivial banalities of celebrity meltdowns and focus primarily on the real world issues that concern us all,” Atkins said. “However, the media needs to give the people what they want in order to survive. Most reporters and editors don’t want to keep acting as celebrity journalism crack dealers, but it’s a necessary part of the business.”
It is now five years later, and the ways in which outlets are handling celebrity news coverage are seemingly unchanged. As audiences continue to see constant coverage of Odom in the following weeks, we as journalists should ask ourselves: Are we as reporters acting ethically toward the subject we are covering, public figure or not? Are ratings worth news quality? And perhaps most importantly, is this how we as providers of news want the future of journalism to look like?
Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/16/sports/basketball/lamar-odoms-decline-played-out-on-tv.html?_r=0
http://www.si.com/nba/2015/10/13/los-angeles-lakers-clippers-lamar-odom-unconscious-nevada-brothel
http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/cnn-mistakes-lamarcus-aldridge-for-lamar-odom-during-live-coverage-20151510 (CNN mistake)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/espn-scott-van-pelt-lamar-odom_561fa6f1e4b0c5a1ce6222de (Van Pelt interview)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GH68bSJXGE8 (MSNBC clip)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-atkins/why-the-media-will-always_b_662457.html (Op-Ed piece)
http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2013/special-reports-landing-page/the-changing-tv-news-landscape/ (Pew Research Center data)