Does Britney reflect the dark side of gossip?

By ANITA CREAMER

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

Let’s flash back a year to the world as it was early in 2007, when a tabloid TV-infested nation received daily updates on Anna Nicole Smith, in what amounted to a pop culture death watch.

The tabloid shows in question would never put matters quite that bluntly, but you know it’s true.

Frankly, celebrity gossip seems a whole lot less juicy when it amounts to peering in on an emotionally unstable star’s downward spiral.

Only the most callous among us could find joy in stars’ usual self-involved high jinks — Suspected substance abuse! Rocky relationships! Custody issues! — when the celebrity in question is so clearly heading toward the brink.

It’s one thing to find a certain amusement in teary, spoiled Paris Hilton being carted off to jail. It’s another to play the catty voyeur while unmistakably troubled stars struggle with the hardships they’ve created for themselves.

Celebrity train wreck

Which brings us, of course, to Britney Spears, this year’s celebrity train wreck, whose every move is assiduously documented by the paparazzi and the tabloid media — Internet, TV and print alike.

They’re doing it again: waiting like vultures for a star to collapse into disaster, to implode and to crash.

And once again, we’re watching it happen.

Britney is big business. As Portfolio magazine has reported, she contributes a reliable $110 million a year to the jittery American economy, most of it through the publication and sale of tabloids bearing tawdry details of her descent into scandal.

The lurid coverage comes oozing into our homes slick with tabloid TV hosts’ fake compassion, so all of us — audience and tabloid professionals alike — can pretend we’re only wallowing in the stories because we care so much.

A kinder explanation for the public’s interest is that in this disconnected age, in which neighbors are strangers and family is far away, we know more about celebrities than about people we’ve actually met.

Famous virtual playmates

They populate our daily existence, these famous virtual playmates, these stars whose lives we think we know from paparazzi photos and well-placed gossip column items.

Internet chat rooms have replaced the backyard fence as the base of chatterbox culture.

And somehow it feels less mean — and less morally complicit — to watch a tabloid show speculating on Britney’s mental state than to spread rumors about real acquaintances who are falling apart.

But is it?

On my way home from an interview in the suburbs a few weeks ago, I waited at a stoplight as an oncoming car ran the light, smashed into a truck and careened across the busy intersection, bouncing one vehicle into another and another, almost in slow motion. All I could do was watch, hoping my car wouldn’t be hit next. (It wasn’t.)

The unfolding of celebrity meltdowns feels much the same — beyond our control, leaving us powerless gawkers. Bystanders in disaster.

The thing is, we’re not powerless at all: Death spiral or no, we don’t have to watch.

X Anita Creamer is a columnist for the Sacramento Bee. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.