What has happened to her face? That’s the front page headline I saw when a co-worker handed me the newspaper yesterday. It’s no secret how much I loath the British tabloids (as posts like ‘Why I can’t look at The Sun‘ and ‘The Anatomy of The Brain (of a Tabloid Reader)‘ will tell you), but this particular case seems to be extremely low on the integrity scale, even by their warped, money-grubbing, sensationalising standards.

Below the absurd headline and the small picture, we have the instruction to turn to page 23, wherein all we see is an enlarged version of that one same picture. So essentially, all they’ve done is manage to get one photograph of Victoria Beckham half-blinking, and then written three pages of cancerous garbage about her and her weight problems and marital problems and potential drug addiction and whatever else they think they need so that the media can get their hands on another Amy Winehouse / Whitney Houston story that they can milk and run with and slap on every issue until she too cracks under the stress of constant scrutiny and starts making bad decisions… Maybe not as bad as being in that Spice World movie, but still pretty bad.

The incredible audacity of an article like this blows me away. They’ve taken a lady; clearly very refined and proud of her appearance and who puts a lot of effort into her image, and by managing to capture one photo where she maybe has a headache or she stayed up late watching movies or she just sneezed, they’ve written an entire story on how terrible and ill she looks. Is it any wonder these celebrities keep flying out the window?

The media justify their hounding and stalking, by saying that “They owe it to us, the fans, who made them famous.”

No. That’s utter bullshit. It’s true that in the modern world of deliberate reality television humiliation (“Do I want to eat an animal penis on ‘I’m a Celebrity, Get me out of here’? Sure, if it means I get to be on TV!”), there are many people who actively seek out nothing but fame itself, but as disgusted at them as the tabloids claim to be, they themselves are the only ones that have the power to put these people on the pedestals upon which they now drunkenly stand. A famous quote, attributed to Socrates, states that “Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds“. In essence, fame should be an unneeded and insignificant by-product of a person’s actions, as opposed to the motivations of them. Fame should simply be seen as an unwarranted side effect of talent. The aforementioned ‘media whores’ can sleep around and check themselves in and out of rehab while on the phone to their publicist every week if they want, but there are still people who require nothing more than the ability to follow their own passion; and for the media to try and hold claim of ownership to them and the people around them is fundamentally sick and demonstrably wrong. Some singers love to sing and some actors love to act and if they didn’t make money and didn’t get their material shipped around the world, then they’d still be doing exactly the same thing and be just as happy doing it.

People have a go at Britney Spears for being a drunk or Charlie Sheen for being a drug addict or Russell Crowe for getting into fights, but these actions are no different from the actions of half the people in my neighbourhood. It is the scoundrel tabloid editors and journalists themselves who should be shamed and resented and stopped in the streets and hounded and driven to despair due to their actions; but instead, people read their poisonous words and form opinions of their subjects, instead of stopping to think about the heartless villain spouting this filth about someone in the first place.