Not that anyone really noticed but…
So, the Associated Press ignored Paris Hilton for a week.
Media coverage of Paris and Britney and poor dead Anna Nicole and all the rest has increased. I’m sure it’s because with the internet there’s more space for that stuff. When the news was limited to what would fit in a newspaper, magazine, or broadcast, fluff was limited. Those limits are gone.
Some people are complaining that fluff coverage is pushing out real news coverage. I don’t know if that’s true. Real news coverage is easier to find now than ever. It’s just that people don’t want to read it. They want to read about Brit’s bald head.
So, back to the AP. Not sure what their point was, and according to the article, they’re not so sure themselves.
Would anyone notice? And would that tell us something interesting?
It turned out that people noticed plenty — but not in the way that might have been expected. None of the thousands of media outlets that depend on AP called in asking for a Paris Hilton story. No one felt a newsworthy event had been ignored. (To be fair, nothing too out-of-the-ordinary happened in the Hilton universe.)
The reaction was to the idea of the ban, not the effects of it. There was some internal hand-wringing. Some felt we were tinkering dangerously with the news. Whom, they asked, would we ban next? Others loved the idea. “I vote we do the same for North Korea,” one AP writer said facetiously.
What is there to be gained by an outright ban? I mean, say Paris was arrested as a suspect in a rash of brutal attacks on personal assistants or something? That would be a newsworthy item despite Paris’ involvement, but would they break their ban to cover it?
And if they would, was it a “ban” in the first place?
Cover Paris, cover Brit, cover Angelina (hey, she’s gonna adopt again!). There’s room on the internet for all of it.