Have we gone too far in our treatment of celebrities?

The tabloid business is a strange one. Magazines such as People, US Weekly and Star stay afloat because of celebrities. The writers use their degrees meant for hard-hitting journalism to report on who Kim Kardashian would like to take a selfie with and Kate Winslet’s strategy for losing baby weight. 

To a point, I think this reporting is OK. That’s fair game. Pursuing a career in fashion, film or politics, for example, naturally thrusts one into the public eye — it comes with the job.

 In 2015, most of modern media is all about creating snack-sized content and clickbait to generate ad revenue, and public figures realize that their lives are often fueling this strategy. And as long as we keep reading them, magazine outlets will keep producing them. 

The problem is that many people scrutinize celebrities’ every move once they’re in the public eye. Our culture has such a hunger for useless knowledge — what celebrities ate for breakfast or at which restaurant they were spotted — that I think we’ve forgotten where to draw the line — or that there even is a line.

Tabloids often post photos of actors, basketball players, designers, etc. pumping gas, grocery shopping or taking out the trash (“Stars! They’re just like us!”). Depicting celebrities doing normal human activities attempts to take them down from the pedestal upon which we have placed them. But there is no line of discrepancy, and our culture should strive to define one.

When a celebrity goes to rehab, gets a divorce or anything personal, really, we hear about it. We see photos, read tweets and post blogs with nasty captions to attract attention, weighing in on someone we most likely do not know on a personal level, much less know at all. There is a lot of speculation right now that Bruce Jenner is undergoing a transition to become a woman, and whether he is or not, we should leave him alone. If he makes the decision to share his story with the world (making an agreement with the tabloids to generate that clickbait and ad revenue discussed earlier!), then so be it. 

But whatever Bruce is going through, he deserves nothing but respect and privacy — neither of which he is afforded when the entire  pop culture landscape has seen photos of him in his car, ducking down, with his windows rolled up, smoking cigarettes with gel tips on his nails. 

Celebrities are “Just Like Us!” — except when they are dealing with something private.

This past fall, Amanda Bynes became America’s New Train Wreck, and in November, Star Magazine posted headlines reading “Amanda Bynes’ Psych Ward Diary.” 

Stop right there.

How are we okay with this? Why do we consume news about intimate details of a difficult period in her life and hear about how she refused to shower and used a silver compact mirror as a cell phone? When she tweeted that she was homeless, the paparazzi took photos of her sleeping on benches. The paparazzi are part of the problem, yes, but they are driven by the promise of a reward for the most intimate, revealing photo. If these magazines did not put such a bounty on capturing these moments, the paparazzi would not flock to them anymore.

Bynes has tweeted that she suffers from bipolar disorder, but she shouldn’t have to do so in the public eye.

A report released by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services in 2012 found that 45.9 million American adults experience mental illness at least once annually. But we don’t publicly make fun of them, unless they’re famous, and it drives web traffic.

Bynes isn’t the first celebrity to suffer in the public eye. Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan have had their dirty laundry aired out in public as well.

The public shaming and bullying must stop. Bullying people for their mental illness is neither kind nor appropriate. When Robin Williams committed suicide last August, we collectively mourned his loss. We wrote messages ceremoniously on park benches, changed our profile pictures and tweeted movie quotes. We shared emotional stories of crying and how we felt like we had lost a friend.

The Robin Williams we knew publicly was very different than the Robin Williams who committed suicide. When his publicist released a statement that Williams suffered from severe depression, we collectively decided that we should raise awareness about mental health and remove the stigma.

But a few months later, when Bynes sought psychiatric treatment, many gossiped about her and shamed her for “going off the deep end,” instead of supporting her. If we are going to talk about helping those with mental illness, as we did following Robin Williams’ suicide, we can’t leave out celebrities such as Bynes. 

I write this article and cite these sources, not to draw more attention to them, but to point out our culture’s flaws and illustrate just how personal some of the reported information is. We have the power to change our consumption. The magazines publish what they think we want to see, and it is up to us to demand better. Humanity deserves better.

Just be kind to one another.

Write to Katie at kmm214@pitt.edu.