Moral Concerns With The Media At Celebrity Weddings
Paparazzi have become a stable part of today’s media. If a celebrity’s aiming to have a private Santa Barbara wedding, you can be sure there’ll be paparazzi there waiting. At every destination wedding photographers will have their cameras out and ready to take a million-dollar image of the celebrities. While the ethics of invading ones privacy would come as morally questionable to most of the public, members of the paparazzi are forever looking for images that can earn them millions. When this kind of money is in question, issues of morality and ethics tend to come second place.
While one might think that tabloid journalists would feel a twinge of guilt for their behavior, most see themselves as fulfilling a desire from the public. This can’t be argued against, as the popularity of magazines that sell photographs of celebrities at their most vulnerable or, indeed, getting married is staggering. These images allow readers to see beyond the heavily made-up, airbrushed and generally “fake” celebrities, and see that those we idolize as somehow above us are human after all.
The development of the worldwide web seems to have increased the popularity of paparazzi photographs. While newspapers are undergoing massiving downsizing with decreasing sales, many reporters of substantial news stories have been put out of work. For those who give celebrity gossip and photos, however, there is still a lot of work available, and even respected newspapers have tabloid images at the forefront of their websites. The question of why this is can be guessed without effort: The lives of celebrities attract greater numbers of readers.
Consider the big weddings in recent years such as Brad and Angelina, Tom and Kate, Jennifer and Ben. The famous couple at each of these weddings took extreme care to control the media treatment of these events. In fact, these celebrities decided to determine themselves how the media would portray them, agreeing to only certain reporters having access to their wedding, and having these reporters agree to a set version of events to take back to the news desk.
This manipulation of the media has become necessary due to the pressure famous people are put under to provide information to their fans. Each of the three couples mentioned above also found it necessary to release a few pre-approved images of their weddings to the media, in order to pacify their need for images of the event, and to lessen the value of paparazzi images that may have been taken.
The way the paparazzi works today has become unnecessarily invasive. The wider problem that needs to be considered here, however, is why there is the desire of “normal” people to peer into the private lives of the rich and famous. As long as this desire is in place, the paparazzi will always have an audience of paying customers. So long as money can be made, someone will be willing to go into uncertain ethical territory, in order to get the massive payday on offer.