New York – So you may have heard: Paris Hilton was ticketed the other day for driving with a suspended license.
Not huge news, even by celebrity-gossip standards. But here at The Associated Press, it meant the end of our experimental blackout on news about Paris Hilton.
It was meant to be only a week-long ban. And it wasn’t based on a view of what the public should be focusing on – the war in Iraq, for example, or the upcoming election of the next leader of the free world, as opposed to the doings of a partygoing celebrity heiress/reality-TV star most famous for a grainy sex video.
No, editors just wanted to see what would happen if we didn’t cover this media phenomenon, this creature of the Internet gossip age, for a full week. After that, we’d take it day by day.
Would anyone care? Would anyone notice? And would that tell us something interesting?
It turned out that people noticed plenty, but 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.
The experiment began Feb. 19. During “blackout week,” AP didn’t mention Hilton’s birthday party at a Beverly Hills restaurant, at which a drunken friend reportedly was ejected by security after insulting Paula Abdul and Courtney Love. And editors asked our Puerto Rico bureau not to write about her visit there to hawk her fragrance.
Then Hilton was arrested Tuesday for driving with a suspended license – an offense that could conceivably lead to jail time because she may have violated conditions of a previous sentence. By that time, our blackout was over anyway, so reporting the development was an easy call.
Also by then, an internal AP memo about the ban had found its way to the outside world. The New York Observer quoted it Wednesday, and the gossip site Gawker.com linked to it.
We felt a little sheepish that the ban was over, and braced ourselves for the comments that would come when people realized it wasn’t permanent.
We also learned that Lloyd Grove, former columnist for the New York Daily News, had attempted a much longer Paris Hilton blackout.
He began it a year into his “Lowdown” column and stuck to it, he says, for two years until the column was discontinued in October.
“The blackout was a really heartfelt attempt on my part,” he says, “to get publicity for myself.”
Grove thinks the so-called celebutante achieved her unique brand of fame because she boasts an irresistible set of traits: wealth, a big name, beauty with a “downmarket” appeal, and a tendency to seem … oversexed.
“This is what mainstream society celebrates,” he says. “She is, in the worst sense, the best expression of the maxim that no bad deed goes unrewarded in our pop culture.”
So what have we learned from the ban?
“It’s hard to tell what this really changes, since we didn’t have to make any hard decisions,” says Jesse Washington, AP’s entertainment editor. “So we’ll continue to use our news judgment on each item, individually.”
Which means that for the immediate future, if not always, we’ll still have Paris.
