Celebrity vs. Ordinary People Phenomenon Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Celebrity vs. Ordinary People Phenomenon - Essay Example According to Franklin (1997), who has introduced such definition as â€Å"newszak†, there is a salient change in journalism’s priorities that can be explained with freelancing and unstable working conditions of reporters. It has been found that to attract as many viewers and readers as possible in extremely competitive environment, journalists use tricky method of raising people’s interest with a help of celebrities’ lives. They prefer divulge news in a soft manner due to the dominant position of sensationalism in people’s perception tendency. People start to value more the news about entertainment sphere than some actions and events with world-wide significance. Therefore, by its level of popularity public service media gradually starts to exceed coverage of political, economic and social news of the world. Due to Rojek (2001), there are three major interconnected historical facts that have managed to intensify implementation of celebrity phenomeno n in media, such as social democratization, drop of organized religion, and increase of influence of goods and services in day-to-day person’s activity. Numerous authors claim that modern society is affected by so called pseudo-events that demonstrate the obliteration between reality and fantasy (Rojek 2001). However, this peculiarity draws audience’s attention managing to propagandize role models and considerably enhance rating of consecutive TV show or magazine. Investigating consumer’s behavior on the market of goods and services, it has been noticed that today potential customers are more informed than several years ago, that is why it is hard to impress or fascinate... Famous people have managed to occupy every sphere of our life. Giles states that fame should be considered more as a process than current status, which can benefit every disputed sphere. People are still considered to be inferiors in media business. Hence, today reporters divulge only that news which authorities need to disclose, otherwise, some serious facts can be secretly hidden from audience if this information somehow is able to damage influential people. Government uses media for being able to influence and manipulate population; meanwhile, ordinary people naively accept it as a fair surge of democratization. Access of common people to media has commercial ground, because giving people opportunity to be closer to the process of news’ creation makes friendly atmosphere and relationship between population and authorities and helps government to eradicate unnecessary opinion within mass and lobby individuals to follow proclaimed principles. In opinion of different authors, modern journalism suffers from crisis of legitimacy. Therefore, it is recommended to create explanatory journalism with opinions and multi-perspective news (Allan, 2011, p. 264). In addition, it is urgent to provide new methods of people’s participation in state’s life, because as Turner (2010, p. 72) claims ‘ordinary people’ phenomenon is just another â€Å"exclusively economic method† that is not able to democratize society the way it can be falsely assumed. For enhancing democratic level of the country, more radical measures should be implemented.