Celebrities We're Tired of Hearing About: Jeff Weiss

I am tired of hearing and reading about people who are famous for being famous. While I'm not sure if Sarah Palin should be grouped with the likes of Nadya Suleman and Carrie Prejean, I am just as tired of hearing about her as I am the Octomom and the Perez Hilton's least favorite budding author. Palin, for a time, was a hard news story. As the first GOP vice presidential nominee in a race that would make history regardless of the outcome, Palin was the very essence of breaking news. But that was last year. The election is over, she's resigned as the governor of Alaska, and she has yet to announce a bid for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination. What she has done, however, is to manage to stay in the public eye by commenting on a wide variety of political policies via her Facebook page, and by authoring a book about her life and her historic bid to the first female vice president of the United States. Never before in history has a losing presidential candidate's running mate been so visible after an election. I wonder how many people remember that Joseph Lieberman was Al Gore's running mate in 2000, or that Jack Kemp ran alongside Bob Dole in 1996?

The other “celebrities” who manage to remain “hot topics” such as Suleman, Prejean, Johnston, and of course Jon and Kate Gosselin, have actually done nothing to deserve media attention. In a world where global news organizations covered Paris Hilton's twenty-three days in jail back in 2007 (for violating probation in a DUI charge) as if she were a head of state, I'm not surprised that Nadya Suleman's return from the hospital with the first two of her eight newborns was the lead story of every local newscast in Southern California last March -- but I am disappointed.

There is a place for the Prejeans, Gosselins, Sulemans, and all the other pseudo-celebrities in the world. Let them grace the pages of tabloids and the screens of shows like Inside Edition and Extra as often as they wish. But when they turn on up CNN, network news programs, and the front pages of newspapers -- that's when I eagerly anticipate their fifteen minutes running out.

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