So many opportunities lately to review the media codes at work. If you are wondering about media coverage of the Paris Hilton situation, the codes are working pretty much as they are supposed to, just as they did three or four months ago after the death of Anna Nicole Smith.
Both stories would be tragic, if they had happened to just anybody. Since they happened to Paris and Anna Nicole, they made news. And the news made news.
People seem forever mystified by the media and how it works, but it is only a relatively simple matter of ages-old media codes at work. The codes are a collection of values, definitions and principles that the media uses to do its work. A few of the codes were developed by mass media, after its introduction to civilization in the 15th century, but most of the codes were already at work tens of thousands of years before that. All the media did was take those ancient codes and turn them into a business.
In fact that is the first key to understanding media. When you wonder why the paparazzi would chase Diana into a tunnel, or swarm over a squad car to get photos of an airhead in anguish, remember the First Law of Media: the media is a business. Paparazzi regard Paris Hilton with the same impersonal professionalism fishermen regard a prize tuna. The catch will sell for a lot of money to the purveyors, who know there is a select and faithful clientele for it. When you can think of CNN as a popular sushi joint, then you are starting to understand the Paris Hilton media coverage.
In the age of the Internet, with its very low production overhead, it starts to make good media business sense to focus exclusively on the Paris types. Hence the success of tmz.com. The vast majority may call it tripe, but tmz.com doesn’t care about the vast majority. Its customers love tripe, and it wants to be the best menudo café in town. It's only business.
Given that reality, the media stories about the media stories about Anna Nicole, and now Paris, are amazing in their stances of bemused befuddlement, and cautionary clucks of concern. Media professionals – reporters, editors, critics – go to school and get four-year degrees in the media codes. Surely they understand that which they profess not to. So the media stories about the media stories must also be a business deal, based on an audience they know is there. This is the audience, and it is a significant one, of people angrily demanding that the media explain itself. Those people are serious about that, because they honestly have no clue about the media codes, and how the media does its job. That is perfectly normal; they didn't study it in school. The New York Times took that audience seriously enough to place a Paris story on its Saturday Page One, one-column, left bottom of the page.
A meaningful media story about the Paris media stories would simply explain that it is media business as usual, nothing to worry about, that the nation is not in danger of falling in line to be led by Paris Hilton into the slimy bog of celebrity hugging at the end of civilization. Yet in its first paragraph, The Times spoke of a "national obsession with celebrity." If you check the CNN and Fox ratings for last Friday, the Paris peak day, you probably will find Neilsen ratings in the 3 range, translating into maybe eight million viewers, meaning 97 percent of viewers, or 292 million of the population, was doing something somewhere else.
I would not credit eight million people with constituting a national obsession. They do make a crowd at the menudo café, though, which is fine for the tripe lovers (hey, millions of people love hockey), who are not going away however much the "story about the story" audience may tremble for the nation. That audience, whatever its rating size, is only a spike audience, good for one or two newspaper editions or evening news segments. Then it will disappear, as the Paris story becomes old, which it will, as old as the Anna Nicole story, which was four months ago.
