Celebrity and Media

- How celebrity (danh tiếng) [si'lebrity] news is changing the media.
- Think about your favorite singer, movie star, and athlete. What information do you know about each person? How did you find out this information?
- Why are people interested in famous people?

"People in our society today are focused too much on celebrities and all the activities of people in the entertainment world."  James Houran.

Many people would agree with this statement by James Houran, a psychologist. He and a group researchers interviewed over 60 people to try to understand our intense (adj-mãnh liệt) [in'tens] interest in famous people. They discovered three categories of "celebrity interest":
- Entertainment Social: People in this category have a mild interest in celebrities. For example, with their friends they might discuss the recent marriage of a famous movie star just for fun.
- Intense Personal: People in this category seem to feel that they have a special connection with a celebrity. This person say, "Tom Cruise is a good friend of mine", even though it is not true.
- Celebrity Sickness: Here, the interest in celebrities is to great that it is unhealthy, a kind of sickness. A person in this category might say. "When Helle Berry reads my love letters, she's going to fall in love with me." (U.S fits into the last category)

Houran's team says that this unhealthy interest in celebrities is caused by the increase in the amount of entertainment news in the mass media, both in print and broadcast media.
It is just one example of the effect the media has on people's lives today.

"People have been interested in celebrities for as long as there have been famous people". This interest has become much stronger with the increase in media coverage of celebrities, and all the entertainment content that we now have on the internet.

- Who is James Houran and what did he do?
- What percentage of people in the U.S have "celebrity sickness"?
- Why are more and more people interested in celebrities now?

according to: in the opinion of, as said by
kind: category or type of person or thing

= is/are                         + and
=/ is not/are not             |^ increase, rise, go up
> more than                  | decrease, fall, go down
< less than                       change, changing
# number                      % percent

Practice Lecture:
I want to talk about the science of how people relate to celebrities. I'm going to cover the idea of beauty and celebrities, and then the idea of how our brains feel pleasure when we see celebrities.

Let me start with a discussion of beauty. (celebrities are beautiful, right?):
- Research now tell us that when a person see a celebrity a part of the brain that's related to pleasure, that part of the brain gets excited.
- Scientists says humans have always had this brain reaction (phản ứng lại), and this is interesting because our ideas of what is beautiful always change, but in this case, the brain connects (v) beauty to pleasure.

Let's talk about another thing that happens in the brain.
- Biologists (nhà sinh vật học) say that when people see celebrities over and over again, so when we see a famous actor on television, in the movie, and in magazines ... (for example), the brain actually feels pleasure from seeing something it has seen before. So it seems the brain feels pleasure from repeated meetings with the same face or body.

We've talked about the brain's reaction, let's talk about how this relates to the past and today.
- So, the past. Scientists say that before TV and movies and photos the human brain felt pleasure from seeing friends and family. Those were the people we saw again and again, and those were the experiences that gave the brain pleasure.
- Now, we have media images (photos, video, movies) and the brain has changed. It's changed and it feels pleasure from seeing the faces of celebrities, of people we don't know and will never know.

Lecture:
(Yesterday: we talked about new coverage (n- tin tức) and its effects on people)
Today, I want to talk about another kind of coverage and that's the coverage of celebrities in the mass media. (movie stars, rock stars, and people like that in the media.)

The reason for this topic is: the amount of celebrity coverage has been increasing tremendously. And it's not just celebrity news sources. Today, it's not unusual to see news about movie stars or television start on the front pages of regular newspapers.

Some research:
I'd like to show you some search that actually shows how much new celebrity news coverage there is. So, take a look at this graph.
- It's got some pretty significant results.
- So, here you see the researches analyzed American news magazines, (that mean they look at serious magazines that have articles about government, the economy, crime, thinks like that). (The tall columns show the percentages of real news. And the short, red columns shows the percentage of articles about celebrities)
- You can see that in the last 25 years or so real news coverage has gone down about 10% and that celebrity news has doubled - meaning, there's twice as much celebrity news now as there was in 1980. That's big news.

Experts say:
Experts who study the media say that there is so much coverage of entertainment news - (like when a rock star gets married or divorced or when an actress has a baby) - so much of this in the newspaper (magazines or on television), (otherwise) that there is less and less time and space for real news, like news about events in the world.

Now, we have to ask ourselves:
- Why did this change happen?
- Why is there so much interest in celebrities today?

Let's look at one of the major reasons of the increase in media coverage of  celebrities:
- Back in the 1980s, newspapers were starting to lose money because more people were getting their news somewhere else, not from newspapers.
- So newspapers began to print more news about celebrities and fewer articles with real news. Why? Because celebrity news sells.
It's all about increasing their profits.There's no way around the fact.

Next, let's talk about another reason.
- This reason is also something we all know. It's the increase in the number of Internet sites and television channels. (In most places you can watch TV news 24 hours a day) So the number of new sources of news is another cause here.
(I may explain: they need to attract viewer and fill up (v) broadcast time and Internet space. They need content, and this content has to be popular with many people. So, more and more they feature entertainment news, especially Hollywood gossip.)

All right. That's enough about the change in the media.

Research about children and the media shows that kids today know much more about the lives of rock singers and movie starts than kids of the past, and they know much less about world and local  events, (like what the President does or about new law that affects them, for example).

Other research has pointed to another negative result of all the celebrity coverage.
- At the London School of Economics and Science, researchers found that the human brain isn't really made ... it's not meant to take all this constant news about celebrities. The proof (n-chứng cứ) of this ... they discovered, are losing touch with their friends and families.
- That means they're spending less time with the important people in their lives and spending more time with famous movie starts or rock starts, even though, they don't really know these celebrities. right?

To wrap up:
- I'm going to leave you with some predictions for the future.
Most media experts will tell you that the amount of celebrity coverage is not going to stop. It's going to continue to increase. (otherwise) And they also say that news (regular news coverage) is going to continue to decrease.

We'll discuss the possible effects of this in our group discussion.