Celebrity experts are the new norm
Typically you’d be hard-pressed to find a celebrity connection with a global illness. And yet the same pattern has followed in the coronavirus outbreak and the aftermath of Caroline Flack’s death. There’s an incident, and everyone becomes an expert with insights on the causes and next steps.
There’s a pattern of snowballing sensationalism that’s at the heart of our culture. It’s not just propagated by “the Media” (who some like to scapegoat).
Some outlets are simply a platform – essentially the textbook definition of that and little else – for supply-anddemand assumption, giving people what they want, if not what they need, and usually, that means indulging big-name opinions.
Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp earned laurels online when he a rebuked a journalist for asking him about coronavirus.
He didn’t understand why a football coach’s view on the matter was relevant, adding he only knew as much as the journalist.
Such a simple point, but an important one at a time when we presume that celebrities have a monopoly on activism, on knowledge, on lighting the way to a better future.
Or certainly, we thought they did until a week ago. What might become known as the “Tom Hanks” moment occurred when the acclaimed star revealed he had the disease.
That untouchable stratum of celebrity was breached and he and wife Rita Wilson found themselves in the same boat as the rest of us.
That’s not stopped other celebrities “doing their bit” (a double-edged sword of ignorant, even hypocritical proselytising versus actual health benefits).
Kim Kardashian, Justin Beiber and Miley Cyrus are among the latest wave to offer up their “insights” into what can be done.
Some are laughing it off, others have the disease, and some are looking at what can be done to stop it. And yet, in a standard Boy Who Cried Wolf irony, most are dismissed.
Gary Oldman performed a late-night sketch a few years ago where he decried – half-seriously – sports stars who make blockbuster films. His “joke” argument was it takes years to learn the craft, so why are people arrogant enough to skip the years of training? There’s a broader parallel right there.
Flippancy aside, most household names have followers in the millions. Society has already been locked in a social media bubble for years, and it’s likely we’re going to stay in it for some time yet.
More isolation means more screen time; more phone hours inevitably means a higher preponderance for reading headlines with famous names attached. Should special guidelines be written exclusively aimed at influencers?
Mike Tindall belongs to a league of extraordinary gentleman that thinks it knows better than leading experts.
The former rugby player, who questioned whether “cancelling everything is going to solve” the coronavirus outbreak, is one of an evergrowing throng that purports to have some greater insight by going against the grain of government considerations. Whatever one thinks of celebrity culture, that echelon still has special status. People pay attention to it.
When a tragedy strikes for a famous face, we’re one part psychologist, lawyer and – usually – judge, jury and executioner. The public often rests its view on the most memorable soundbites and not the tomes of documents that inform the decisions of lawyers or doctors or a plethora of other professionals. Cafe chit-chat is the new legalese, and the people are the voyeuristic expert witnesses.
Just maybe the OJ Simpson murder trial was the start of it. Everyone “had an opinion” on “who did it”, with little deference to the nuisances of jurisprudence or the mammoth documentation of the case.
That particularly arrogant and cancerous presumption, 25 years later, has now taken hold as the new natural norm after generations got hooked on reality TV and verdicts based on phone-ins.
Now, as we’ve so sadly seen in the last week, folk are panic buying and hoarding over the coronavirus.
Even expert opinions are watered down to a binary choice of “nothing to worry about” versus Ragnarok. The media isn’t the progenitor of sensationalism, but certain publications do sex it up.
Everyone is now a virologist, immunologist, and epidemiologist.
At the time of writing, there have been warnings against attending events of more than 500 people in Scotland. Schools are teetering on the edge of closing; there’s speculation as to what exactly is going on at government levels and outright panic buying.
It would seem logical that specialist guidelines are released for those in the Twitterblue tick brigade. Government guidelines are not always going to be read or seen, and if there’s an acceptable level of celebrity culture, there must also be a moral responsibility to deploy it when times of mass need.
Share the same advice, present it in a way that will get to people so they understand and know what’s going on.
It’s always been a problem that while we can change our laws quite quickly, we’re much slower to change our culture.
Now is not the time to try and reverse that. Celebrities and expert amateurs are the new norms, and we must fight cognitive dissonance; use the influencers in society and channel the right information to form a new wisdom of crowds.
An Ode to Irony this piece may be.
● Alastair Stewart is a freelance writer and public affairs consultant. Read more at www.agjstewart.com and on Twitter @agjstewart
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