'Manufacturing Celebrity' Spotlights Exploitation in Hollywood-Obsessed Media
A president that honed his celebrity status through hosting fourteen seasons of The Apprentice, is up for reelection. In two months, voters have the opportunity to cancel or renew, so to speak, another term of Donald Trump’s reality television horror show of an administration. This is the bizarre, urgent moment that Vanessa Diaz’s revelatory Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood arrives in. Although mentioning Trump, through his assault of former People magazine reporter Natasha Stoynoff in 2005, it’s, thankfully, not another book about the president.
But in laying bare the pecking order of what Diaz calls the “Hollywood-industrial complex,” it’s hard to ignore that the people with the least agency and representation in celebrity news production—Latinos, immigrants, Blacks and women—are also favored prey in Trump’s electoral season of scapegoating.
It would seem that a reality show president isn’t the only blurring of celebrity and politics.
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