The Hilton Effect: How the Media is Trying to Turn a Good Miley Cyrus Bad

It sucks being a teenager today - when you're exploding with hormones and are caught somewhere between that time when you were a naive child where everything you could do just months prior can no longer be explained away as innocence, and you're developing into your own, independent person, things can seem dominating, confusing. Now slap onto this inherent adolescent confusion that every book on parenting calls one of the hardest times in a person's life with a collective media obsession with transforming you from the pure image your entire career and future is based on, into the drunken, raunchy, drug-induced, mania that plagues American headlines.

It's truly an amazing thing to watch, as the collective behavior of both parents and children, media and consumers, turns malignant the very moment an opportunity presents itself in a picturesque metaphor for vultures just waiting for that one mistake that kills the creature they hover over. It's ironic of course, as this photo centrist obsession almost calls for Kevin Carter's return to capture this moment of scavengers and their desire to see the tiniest slip so that Miley Cyrus, an otherwise typical, relatively innocent, young girl can have that pedestal knocked out from under her, tossing her in with the likes of Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton.

For anyone with internet access, it is impossible to avoid the bombardment of recent media. It seemed to start with the accusation that the teenage daughter of Billy-Ray Cyrus, immortalized in bar rooms everywhere with his overplayed Achy Breaky Heart, was carrying a child. Perhaps fueling the fires, as though issuing a challenge to tabloids and media magazines the country over, Miley Cyrus dismissed the rumors and explained that she did not believe in sex before marriage.

Since then, everything has seemed like a chance to trample her image, or force her to set down a path that she doesn't seem to have elected for herself. Racy was the word used to describe photos of a slumber party, where the least innocuous image was her posing, sharing a piece of candy with a friend in a photo.

The controversy did not cease here - just as crowds stopped comparing her to the underwearless wonder in Britney Spears, parents were aghast at the audacity that during her Hannah Montana Best of Both Worlds Tour, she disappeared under stage for a few seconds to change costumes as a body double danced in her place. Perhaps it was a paparazzi based rage that she did not change on stage, thereby giving them the fuel they so desperately wanted.

More pajama photos have leaked - something organizations such as the National Ledger accuse her of "revealing" in her underwear, accusing her of virtually tempting the viewer with the camera.

As one whose seen the pictures, this was naturally not the impression I got, but rather that these were the same myriad of photographs that any other 15-year-old girl takes. However, with the seemingly obvious media agenda to transform her into the next sensation of failure and ethical malaise, these photographs that depict a clothed Miley Cyrus amount to the same furor as High School Musical's Vanessa Hudgens's far less innocuous, full body nude photograph. Apparently, a pajama picture needs to be transformed into the next Dr. Laura.

The fact that Hudgens's images generated far less controversy demonstrates the absolute market need for some of these outlets to transform Miley into the walking trainwreck they've turned others into.