Screw the News, More Brangelina
BY Matt Semansky
Magazines like People and Us Weekly make it their business to showcase celebrities. While there is no shortage of folks who want to read about the latest events in Brad Pitt’s love life, it’s reasonable to expect that the front section of a national Canadian daily newspaper will serve up more nutritious fare to balance out this intellectual candy. However, the National Post seems to be in the midst of its own sugar rush—in its struggle for readership, it is leaning increasingly on celebrity skin rather than the hard news and reporting the paper has tried to build its reputation on.
In June, July and August of this year, the National Post featured 19 shots of celebrities on its front page, meaning that a famous face adorned the cover of about one in every four editions this summer. Compare this to the 11 celebrity covers that graced the Globe and Mail and the 12 on the Toronto Star during the same period.
More troubling than just the presence of this paparazzi fodder is that it’s taking up space where important stories should be. On June 7, the front page of the National Post showed a handcuffed Russell Crowe after his assault arrest, while Senator Anne Cools’ claim that her fellow senators had assaulted women and children was buried on page A7. The July 20 edition featured an above-the-fold photo of actress Mia Farrow leaving the scene of director Roman Polanski’s libel case against Vanity Fair—meanwhile, the small matter of Canada enshrining same-sex marriage into law was reported on page six.
The Post’s emphasis on celebrity isn’t just a summer phenomenon, traditionally a slow time for most newsrooms. On September 8, the heads of Jake Gyllenhaal and Kirsten Dunst obscured the “O,” “S” and “T” in the paper’s title. The two young actors were in Canada for the Toronto International Film Festival. Certainly the festival is worth covering, but the placement of their photos is symbolic of the Post’s priorities. That day a story about the four-year detention of Islamic school principal Mahmoud Jaballah on unspecified terror suspicions earned only two small columns on page A4.
Sure, the Post reported on the Liberals’ many scandals, the war in Iraq and the failures of FEMA in New Orleans—but those stories were usually hidden behind the smiling faces of actors and pro athletes. With its increasing reliance on celebrities to sell papers, hard news becomes an afterthought and the National Post runs the risk of becoming Canada’s answer to the National Enquirer.
