Celebrification In The Media Essay

The celebrification of politicians is not a new phenomena, politicians have been using the media to build up a profile of themselves, a one that they want to portray, for decades. Adolf Hitler used the media to a whole new extent in the 1930s and by many, was seen as a celebrity. In Michael Munn’s Hitler and the Nazi Cult of Celebrity, he likens the hysteria caused by Hitler’s public appearances to the “adolescent frenzy of Beatlemania”(2013: 41). There’s evidence of the celebrification of politicians even in the 1800’s in Chris Rojek’s Celebrity (2001: 143), where Ulysess S Grant visited Newcastle, and 800,000 people lined the streets to greet him, as a celebrity. Even now, the celebrification of politicians is rife, with Boris Johnson being a devout advocate of this tool. The celebrification of politicians is having quite an effect on the public sphere, as some claim decisions are being made on the basis of celebrity and not on political ideologies (Couldry & Markham, 2007) while (Rojek, 2011) believes any widening of the public sphere is a welcome addition. The blurring of lines between what is a celebrity and what is a politician is becoming increasingly hard to decipher as Streets’ Mass Media, Politics and Democracy states “TV schedules and newspapers draw neat boundaries between what is politics and what is entertainment…but this formal distinction between what counts as politics and what does not is sometimes not as clear as it seems.” (Street, 2001 :61) and this is the problem facing the public sphere. Jurgen Habermas defined the public sphere in his 1989 work The Strucutural Transformation of the Public Sphere – An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, as “the sphere of private people who join together to form a ‘...

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...phere as the “sphere of private people who join together to form a ‘public’” and through the celebrification of politicians, the public sphere has been widened. We live in a world where anyone in the news, a politician, a footballer, a reality TV star, is a celebrity. Although we do not need to know the behind-the-scenes of each of their lives, it is of interest to the public and stories that are interesting to the public, sell the most newspapers. But because people buy newspapers because of celebrity gossip etc, the public sphere widens as a result. This stark fact was candidly recognised by Rupert Murdoch and as the head of News International, he described his company as being “in the entertainment business” (Shawcross, 1992: 261) and for this reason, the celeberification of politicians will neither cease, nor damage democratical debate within the public sphere.