Edition 5
Addicted to Celebrity
- Published 7th September, 2004
- ISBN: 9780733314537
- Extent: 268 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm)
Addicted to Celebrity explores our fascination with celebrity and its corrosive influence and goes inside the world of news and spin in search of fragile truths.
Writers include: David Malouf, Bille Brown, Ruth Wajnryb, Gideon Haigh, Peter Beattie, Margaret Simons, Matthew Condon, Raimond Gaita, Bruce Page, Stephen Stockwell, Brendon O’Connor, Daniel Flitton, Peter Craven, Marion Halligan, Michael Wilding and many more.
In this Edition
Orchestrating the myth
IN OCTOBER 1938, the state-controlled German newspaper Berliner Zeitung am Mittag carried this headline, "In der Staatsoper: Das Wunder Karajan" (In the State Opera, the Karajan Miracle). It referred to a production of Tosca conducted by the 30-year-old Austrian conductor, Herbert Von Karajan. That...
Celebrating “selfebrity”
WALK INTO ANY newsagent or bookshop. Scan quickly and then let your eyes rest on the racks and racks and racks of celebrity-obsessed magazines. On each cover is a face Photoshopped to within an inch of its two-dimensional life. Where do these people come...
No one to blame
IN THE MEDIA, we do love a trend. If one doesn't exist, in fact, we'll make it up. Two observable instances will suffice for the ruling of the requisite connecting line. Two celebrities seen drinking tea – it's teamania! Two movies about deaf people...
A cook’s life
Start off with a young woman walking up the steps to her apartment building, juggling handbag, computer, briefcase and shopping while she presses in the code that will open the door, walking through the bland carpeted silence of the foyer and going up in...
Out of the slipstream
WE WAITED IN the cold all morning. It was a Saturday in early June, only a few days before my fourteenth birthday. An early present – a full-length denim coat to match my denim flares and denim clutch bag – kept out the wind.Roadies...
Fifteen minutes
WHEN MILTON, IN Lycidas, tells us that "Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise/ To scorn delights and live laborious days", this Fame he is writing of, the reputation that depends on hard work and the sacrifice of ordinary pleasures, is...
A colonial state of mind
THE PUSH FOR war in Iraq went in to overdrive in September 2002, six months before the first American troops landed in ancient Mesopotamia. It began with a Bush Administration decision to release intelligence material to one of The New York Times's star reporters,...
A virtuoso in soft covers
AMERICAN ENTERTAINMENT PAYS its tributes in dollars. It has award ceremonies but we know that Oscars lead to box office, Grammys move units and Tonies put bums on seats. Elmore Leonard has received the tributes of the industry, many times over, but other types...
Delusion without variation
RUPERT MURDOCH, HIS father, Keith – and in prospect his sons – are best understood as freelance official propagandists. This is the central argument of my book The Murdoch Archipelago (Simon & Schuster, 2003). Like the condottieri who undermined the Italian republics, they serve...
Ten commandments of spin
WE CLING TO the legitimate expectation that the noble exchange of information between elected representatives and the nation's media helps form a true view of our nation and the world. If only it was true.In the gap between knowing and suspecting, reporting and speculating...
The house of fear and the house of war
IN THE 12 months since President George W. Bush made his Top Gun arrival on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to declare, "Mission accomplished", more than 600 Americans have been killed in fighting, with more than 100 dying in April alone. Over...
Spinning the fabric of reality
PITY THE POOR spin doctors. Few occupations are more despised than theirs but then few occupations offer such power with so little responsibility. We all know who the spin doctors are. They are the nasty, nefarious types, stashed in politicians' back offices, twisting words...
Using ends to justify means
THE FIRST FOUR years of the 21st century have produced enough strange and unsettling developments to haunt a far longer period. They include the September 11 attacks and widespread terrorism by suicide bombing; the descent into savage despair in that wellspring of hatred and...
When politicians lie: reflections on truth, politics and patriotism
SIMONE WEIL SAID in her book The Need for Roots (Routledge and Paul, 1952) that truth is "a need of the soul". She went on to say: "The need for truth is a need more sacred than any other need. Yet it is never...
One day in Dili
I WAS NERVOUS and sweating and my stomach was churning. I couldn't help babbling out stupid questions. "So what exactly is meant to be happening today? It's like a protest, right?" The ABC's experienced Indonesia correspondent, Mark Bowling, listened patiently. He had a relaxed...
Three months in Baghdad
AUGUST 31, 2003: After three and a half years of attempting Mission Impossible – post-war reconstruction to build pluralist democracies in Kosovo, then Montenegro – my wife, Jan, and I are ready to take on the same task in Iraq. Although we disagree with...
The knife meets the whetstone
WRITER FRANK MOORHOUSE has said that Queensland's Gold Coast is the perfect destination for an annual nervous breakdown. The place is an abrasive amalgam of Kings Cross and the Costa del Sol, strips of powdered sand and garish light, pot-bellied tourists and cosmetically altered...
“Don’t I know you?”
I AM OF course no stranger to celebrity. "Famous name," the lady at the library greets me when I produce my borrower's card. I nod, graciously.Yes, a famous name, but for someone else. It could be my collected works are ranked along the shelves,...
Herself
I AM NOT a star but I am famous in Biloela, where I grew up, and all fame is local and subject to the indifferent stroke of time's air brush. I had a brush with celebrity when I was nominated for an Olivier Award....
Electing for election
ON FOOT, TRUDGING through the early January snow, freezing in minus-10-degree misery and trying to negotiate my way across the winding traffic lanes of Dupont Circle in Washington DC, I'm accosted by a man distributing leaflets. He's wearing a giant, brown squirrel suit."You know...
Life without reputation
I HAVE HEARD some significant gossip about the Howard Government Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock. Or rather, since I heard it from two reliable and independent sources, I can elevate what I heard and call it a fact. This is how journalists, when we are working...
An affront to democracy?
WHATEVER THEIR PARTIES or programs, prime ministers and premiers eventually get angry at the media. They complain of superficial reports, a carping tone and political bias. Privately, they complain above all of the arrogance of Australian journalism, the one major institution successfully resisting the...
Featured Contributors
Catharine Lumby
Catharine Lumby is director of the media and communications program at the University of Sydney.The author of four books,...
David Malouf
David Malouf is a distinguished Brisbane-born author, essayist and librettist. He has won numerous prizes for his work, including...
Gideon Haigh
Gideon Haigh has been writing about sport, business, both and neither for more than thirty years. He has contributed...
Matthew Condon
Matthew Condon is the author of ten novels and story collections, including A Night at the Pink Poodle, winner...
