Wait For It… a blog by Andy Ross

Celebrity Gossip

Hey, you guys, I just realized I've been running this celebrity gossip blog for well over a year without posting any actual celebrity gossip. Sorry about that. I must have gotten distracted. To make it up to you---my gossip-obsessed readers---I've got some really juicy scoops.

Really juicy. Like, super juicy. Juicier than you can imagine. Okay, so imagine the juiciest scoop you can imagine. Even juicier than that. That’s how juicy these scoops are gonna be. Are you sitting down? Are you seated? Because things are about to get juicy.

Blind item: Okay, now this one is really salacious. Super juicy. Ready? It turns out that a big time movie star, whom everybody thought was nice, it turns out he’s…

Wait, before I get to that, I feel like maybe I should explain why I haven’t been better about loading you up on celebrity gossip.

It’s hard being a professional celebrity gossipist. The pressure to get juicy scoops; the scarcity of the scoops, themselves; the public relations people constantly feeding you scoops that might seem juicy at first but aren’t actually juicy at all---it wears a person down.

I mean, just sifting and winnowing through all the would-be scoops day in and day out, deciding which ones are juicy… Is this scoop juicy enough? Is it too juicy? How juicy is too juicy? That’s a lot of responsibility.

Add to that the overhead costs of being a working gossip hound. There’s laptop upkeep and wifi access. There are bribery payments to loose-lipped doormen. There are constant cab rides, chasing celebrities around the city hoping to catch them doing something juicy. It adds up.

Plus, I don’t know if you guys realize this, but there’s an almost infinite amount of competition out there for the juicy scoops and only a finite number of celebrities to produce juiciness. I mean, it’s not like any old random person can become a celebrity. It’s not like you can get on television without any discernible talent or skill, make a fool of yourself, and suddenly be a celebrity.

I mean, if that were the case, folks would be chasing fame all the time. There would be an entire metropolis filled with soulless, beautiful automatons doing whatever it takes to become famous. They’d fabricate opportunities to be out in front of photographers. They’d make scenes at nightclubs. They’d shoplift or flash their undergarments or, worst of all, become DJs.

Can you imagine a world like that? It’d be terrible. We’d be flooded with all sorts of false juicy scoops every day until we forgot which were the real scoops were and which were just juiceless static.

Soon, with the fall of celebrity journalism, other kinds of journalism---political, business, scientific---would collapse. The rich and powerful would realize that the social narrative could be manipulated and manufactured. Juiciness would be replaced by faux juiciness, and we’d be too distracted to know the difference.

As Edward R. Murrow said: If every scoop is the juiciest, then no scoop is the juiciest.

It’s a horrific idea, I know. Let’s just be grateful that it’s not the case.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I believe I just saw a cable television persona/teenage mother buy Starbucks while wearing a see-through tank top and carrying an iguana. Time for a little investigative journalism…