Listening to gossip is like eating cheap candy;
do you really want junk like that in your belly?
Proverbs 18:8
When I am languishing in a long line at the checkout counter of the grocery store, there is little to catch my attention except for the huge magazine rack that is located just before the conveyor belt. US magazine, People magazine, OK! magazine, Star magazine, and the ever-present tabloids such as the National Enquirer blare out their headlines for all to see: Why Katie Left! The Kardashian Connection! Who's Fat Now? Macaulay Culkin - Six months to live!! These publications bill themselves as purveyors of "celebrity news," but a perusal of the contents shows them to be nothing but gossip rags.
Who actually knows exactly why Katie Holmes left Tom Cruise? Katie, obviously, and probably her parents, but other than that - precious few people are in the inner circle - in the "know." The publications will talk to (and print) anyone who claims a kinship with the pair, but all they will learn is gossip. True, unvarnished facts are not going to be available to the mere curious or obsessed.
And obsessed we are, in this celebrity-driven culture. So we hunger for all those juicy details, and the gossip rags keep gathering their "information" and pouring out the printed page. Silly us not to realize that if the magazines cannot find actual information, they will simply manufacture some. Why let truth or fact stand in the way of making a quick buck (lots of quick bucks, actually).
I, for one, do not need all of the lurid details of other people's lives clogging up the avenues of my brain and ramping up my emotional control center. My father used to say, "What you don't know won't hurt you." I don't necessarily agree with that statement in all things, but when it comes to celebrity gossip, it is right on the money.
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