Okay, I admit it. I love reading about celebrity gossip. (Don’t we all?) This secret pastime developed in 2009 as a freshman in high school. Pop culture blogs were growing fast, and I had outgrown the kid-friendly virtual worlds and games I frequented online. My interest in the celebrity world started slowly with me reading the latest stories on E! Online every day. Keeping Up with the Kardashians, their pop commentary show, The Soup, and their late-night talk show, Chelsea Lately, were all hits to me. These shows and the popular assortment of reality tv shows airing on E! during the time had me in a vice-like grip.
E! appeared to be the epicenter of pop culture news. With so many significant pop culture moments happening in 2009, like the comeback of Britney Spears, the death of Michael Jackson, and the infamous 2009 VMA awards, they always had the latest news to it all. With so many events happening at once, not only did I want to be one of the first people to know about it, but I also wanted to see what other people thought about it. The comments were just as important, or even more important, to me than the story itself. That's where things took a turn.
Eventually, I stopped reading E! Online in favor of gossip blogs focusing on Black entertainment. Blogs such as Bossip, Media Take Out, and Necole Bitchie were some of the Black entertainment blogs I frequented. The writing on these blogs was much more entertaining than anything E! Online had, with juicer stories on celebrities that I could relate to as a young Black woman. The comments on these blogs were also always poppin' with people expressing their opinion more openly and boldly. Although some stories on these blogs were seemingly true, I knew to take with a grain of salt, *cough cough* Media Take Out, others I believed as law. I would scroll for hours, wanting to know everything about the latest scandal and desperately waiting for the next update. But, what I didn’t realize was how these blogs and hate-filled comments influenced my thoughts on certain people, events, and beliefs. I was slowly losing my ability to form my own thoughts and opinions and instead adopted the most favored views of other people. You don't realize how easy it is to become a part of a hive mind until you're in it. Little did I know that the infiltration of gossip blogs had yet to reach its peak.
Once Instagram started to take over the social media scene, gossip blogs, especially for Black entertainment, saw a massive spread in influence. Instead of connecting with people on their website, they developed a direct connection to you via Instagram. Suddenly, you could quickly DM the latest gossip to all your friends, share it on your page or story, and read thousands (I mean thousands!) of comments instead of the few dozen on their website. Accounts like The Shade Room and Baller Alert had me in a chokehold, and I soon dropped the website blogs and exclusively read celebrity gossip on these social accounts. By the time we hit the late 2010s, these accounts took gossip, shade, tea, and pettiness to a whole new level, with many posts encouraging their followers to do the same. Almost every person I knew kept up with these accounts and would receive the latest gossip, true or false, as soon as it happened right to their phone. After seeing how quickly these blogs gained a massive following and how every post had thousands of comments full of arguments and bitter rage, I realized that gossip, jealousy, and even hate are seductive drugs that fuel many, with me being one of them.
For several years every day, I spent hours looking at these accounts and reading the comments to pass the time, with it quickly becoming an addiction. It wasn’t until the pandemic that I unfollowed The Shade Room and Baller Alert for good. I credit the chaos and traumatic events happening (literally. every. single. day.) during this time for finally leading me to unfollow these blogs. I did not need, nor could I handle, the extra toxicity their content added to my daily life. It all just became too much. In addition, my friend, whom I usually shared celebrity gossip with, told me only knew about the latest news from me sharing it with them because they had unfollowed a while back. I realized then that I I had become the gossip blog in their life, and I knew I needed to cut the cord.
As I slowly started to shake the hold gossip and entertainment blogs had on me, I realized how much they still had a grip on so many other people. It was not until December 2022, when the trial began between Los Angeles County prosecutors and Tory Lanez for the shooting of Megan Thee Stallion, that I saw the true extent of the massive damage done by these blogs. I watched in real-time as “blogs” and “news sites” spread malicious lies and unsubstantiated claims on the case that not only helped paint the victim, Megan Thee Stallion, as a liar but painted the perpetrator, Tory Lanez, as an innocent victim. For over two years, stories were being twisted with lies about the event, leading Megan to reveal during her testimony that she wished she would have died during the shooting instead of going through the countless media onslaughts against her. Lanez was eventually convicted of three felony firearm counts, even though a false not-guilty verdict leaked to the public during jury deliberation, which only complicated an already sensitive and highly publicized case.
This trial stunned me as I didn’t realize how much blogs and social media platforms had become news sources for people instead of reputable and established news organizations. As someone with a degree in media and journalism from an HBCU, no less, the importance of reading trustworthy news was ingrained in us budding journalists early and often. In fact, one of the first things we did in my Fundamentals of Journalism class was go on Twitter and follow as many credible news organizations as possible, like The Washington Post, The New York Times, Associated Press, etc. From doing this alone, I should have known better than to follow these gossip blogs and accounts in the first place. Their stories were not from real journalists who took the time to research all the details and gather all the facts but from people with no previous background or knowledge in journalism posting unsubstantiated claims and “information”.
However, the allure of entertaining gossip, whether true or false, always pulled me back in. *cue Chingy and Tyrese* On top of this, I realized blogs had an agenda more often than not by turning public opinion against people they did not like or by getting paid to create stories with a specific narrative. They targeted loads of damaging content to the Black community, yet to add insult to injury, many blogs were not Black-owned. I was disgusted that we let blogs get this far, and I started blocking every entertainment gossip account I could find. I no longer wanted to be persuaded by their stories and claims. I was completely over it.
Although I’m not currently practicing journalism, seeing the excellent reporting by Meghann Cuniff during the trial reminded me that real journalism still exists, even if it seems to have been eclipsed by the world of bloggers. As consumers, we need to be more responsible when spreading and sharing news. We must do our due diligence by making sure we’re reading factual information from trustworthy sources. After the past few years that we have experienced in America, we all have a responsibility to discern what is true and false before sharing it with others. By recognizing the depth of impact inaccurate information can have on how we think and feel, we must commit to doing better together.
