by Jessica Reed
Not too long ago I blogged about the media's distorted vision of the Gen Y generation - today's teenagers. According to many mainstream publication, our pop-toxic culture would be doing great damages to the morals and values of global youth. Right.
This week Newsweek decided to perpetuate the cliche by featuting Paris Hilton and Britney Spears on their front page, followed by an agonizingly ignorant, condescending and conservative-minded article seemingly written by a mother worried sick about her daughter's admiration for teen-idol Lindsay Lohan. After all, 2007 is the first year ever we hear about pop and rock stars' substance abuse issues, isn't it?
In my imagination I picture Newsweek's editorial meeting pretty clearly; in fact I picture it to be like those Orange advertisements featuring the infamous "Orange Film Funding board" - the ones the audience always sees in European theaters before any movie starts:
Marketing chief to Newsweek staff: We're not doing so well these days. We need something to boost our sales, and can't have G.W.Bush on our cover anymore.
Editorial staff: We can't really beat the TIME's "person of the year" idea though, they were too good on this one. Flattering one's ego by making one believe he's important, what a strike of genius!
Intern: Maybe we can scare our readers instead? They love to be frightenned: terrorism threats, pandemics, wars!
Editor in chief: That's brilliant! We'll assure every American family that their beloved children are about to become -gasp- sexually active adults! What's more menacing than that! Putting to female teen idols on the cover will make this issue's our best seller - young men can have sexual relationships if they want to, but women...
You get the idea.
Sacha Zimmerman at the New Republic blogged an excellent post about the article, and Vanessa at Feministing underlines how sexist the main argument is. But the best comment I've read is from a junior blogger who wrote [unedited] :
(...) it made me think that maybe some of this superficial media is just a way of keeping Americans minds numb to the real issues going on in the world. It's much easier to read about Brittany Spears not wearing underwear than hear news of policy and other political issues.
