6. The Black Hollywood Media | Just Like Us: The Tabloids That Changed America

Ringer Dish

The Ringer

Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2022

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

For most of the 2000s, the stars that outlets like Us Weekly and People covered were overwhelmingly white. But as the internet became more widely available, blogs like Bossip and MediaTakeout decided to focus on the Black stars that lots of people wanted to read about. In this episode, we explore how these blogs filled a gap in the coverage of Black celebrities and broadened popular interest in celebrity gossip along the way. Host: Clare Malone Producers: Amanda Dobbins, Sean Fennessey, Juliet Litman, Vikram Patel, and Kaya McMullen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	In 2006, the celebrities you saw on tabloid magazine covers were pretty much running on
0:07.4	repeat.
0:09.9	Lindsay Lohan was always good for headline.
0:12.1	Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes were busy intriguing and kind of freaking people out with their
0:16.0	love story.
0:17.0	Denise Richards and Charlie Sheen were splitting up, and so were Jessica Simpson and Nick Lache.
0:22.8	On the swankier side of the print equation, George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Terry Hatcher,
0:27.7	and Hillary Swank all graced the cover of Vanity Fair.
0:31.7	The internet was howling with celeb news, too.
0:34.7	That year, Perez Hilton was getting 2.5 million hits on his site per day.
0:39.9	The celebrity internet was becoming well-established as the wave of the future.
0:48.6	But many people saw a hole in all the coverage.
0:52.1	Black celebrities were everywhere in American pop culture.
0:55.4	Why weren't they being covered by mainstream celebrity news?
0:58.7	I knew that there were tons of people that were TMZ, Perez Hilton readers that wanted
1:03.8	to know more about Beyonce and Rihanna and some of the other African American celebrities
1:07.5	that they just weren't doing a great job covering.
1:10.1	This is Fred.
1:11.1	My name is Fred Wonka-Kahunga.
1:12.1	I'm the founder and editor of MediaTakeOut.com.
1:15.8	Media TakeOut, which started in 2006, was a staple of the Wild West blog scape of the
1:20.9	mid to late 2000s.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Ringer, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Ringer and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.