Baldwin's Tirades Latest Example of Celebrities Going Bad

TMZ.com recently aired on its website a voice mail 30 Rock actor Alec Baldwin left for his daughter, in which he called her a "rude, little pig" among other things. This latest news is but a recent spate of celebrity bad behavior over the last few months, with the recent ousting of talk radio host Don Imus for racist and sexist comments he made about the Rutgers' women's basketball team.

While the behavior of celebrities has been fodder for tabloid magazines for years, these past few months have been a goldmine for rags such as Us Weekly and the National Enquirer (not to mention mainstream news organizations CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News). Earlier this year, the news was rife with stories about Britney Spears' meltdown and her very public battles with drug and alcohol abuse. When Anna Nicole Smith passed away two months ago, her bad behavior over the years was discussed endlessly by pundits and journalists alike. The level of coverage her death received was nearly tantamount to coverage the war in Iraq has received, this despite the fact that Smith was known less for her talent and more for her talent to get into the news with her outrageous and often bizarre behavior.

But celebrity bad behavior doesn't stop there. Ball player Tim Hardaway was ousted from his position as a spokesman for the NBA after he made homophobic comments on a sport radio program after former colleague John Amaechi came out of the closet. Isaiah Washington, who stars in the hit ABC drama Grey's Anatomy, likewise had to seek counseling when his homophobic insults against a castmate caused a near meltdown on the set of the program. Actor/director Mel Gibson, after being arrested for driving under the influence, was caught in the spotlight last year when he made sexist and anti-semitic slurs to the arresting officer.

Is there an epidemic of celebrity meltdowns or are they simply the result of our celebrity-worshipping culture, not to mention the MSM (mainstream media), with its emphasis away from hard news and toward celebrity fluff?

Perhaps a lot of it has to do with the fact that we are living in a media saturated environment of unprecedented proportions. Not only do we have 24-hour news networks like CNN and Fox News to supply us with a steady diet of news, but we also have the Internet, which has become a town square of sorts where every bit of news and gossip is uploaded and digested with the click of a mouse. Gibson's tirade, for instance, didn't become news until a blog site released transcripts of the arrest report online. It wasn't until a few days later that the mainstream news media picked up the story and ran with it. Likewise, no Don Imus's comments about the Rutgers' Women's basketball team was first broadcast on Youtube. TMZ.com, a celebrity news website, is the latest example of how the Internet has become a repository for maintaining and publishing celebrity bad behavior.

The Internet comes to influence much of the news we now see on MSM, including stories about celebrities and their bad behavior now proliferate. But celebrities aren't the only ones who have been receiving public spankings because of the Internet. Sen. George Allen's "macaca" slur also first appeared on Youtube and was re-broadcast on cable and network news programs.

In some ways, the Internet has proven to be the perfect vehicle to post stories that would otherwise be ignored and dropped down into the memory hole by the MSM. The U.S. attorney firings, for instance, was first reported on in a political blog. But there is no doubt that as the MSM takes its cues from the Internet, more stories of celebrity bad behavior will proliferate.

TMZ.com's posting of Baldwin's voice mail tirade is just the latest example of the Internet outing celebrity bad behavior. In the past, P.R. reps were usually called upon to clean up the mess of their celebrity clients' bad behavior. Today, celebrities also use the Internet as a shortcut to explain their bad behavior or apologize to fans. Baldwin did just this when he released a statement on his website, stating "

Given the recent news of the Virginia Tech school shootings and the Gonzales scandal, Baldwin's tirade toward his daughter might not reach the tipping point to knock them off the news radar the way Smith's death and Spears' meltdown apparently did with the Iraq war. But news about celebrity bad behavior will do doubt make it into the headlines in the future, and expect to see the Internet in the center of bringing that bad behavior to light.