Ethical Issues With The Paparazzi At Celebrity Weddings

By Simon Natta • December 30th, 2009

Paparazzi have become a stable part of today’s media. If a celebrity’s aiming to have a private Santa Barbara wedding, there’s not doubt that there’ll be photographers there waiting. At every destination wedding photographers will have their cameras out and ready to take a million-dollar image of the celebrities. While the nature of invading private activities would come as morally questionable to many of us, those who are in the paparazzi are forever looking for images that can earn them millions. When this kind of money is on the table, issues of morality and ethics tend to come second place.

While it could be expected that tabloid journalists would feel a twinge of guilt for what they do, most see themselves as fulfilling a desire from the public. This can hardly be denied, as the popularity of magazines that offer images of celebrities at their most vulnerable or, indeed, getting married is staggering. These photographs make it possible for readers to move past the heavily made-up, airbrushed and generally “fake” celebrities, and see that those we idolize as somehow above us are human after all.

The invention of the internet seems to have increased the popularity of tabloid journalism. While newspapers are slowly suffering an increasingly bleak loss in sales, many reporters of outside of the field of the paparazzi have been put out of work. For those who give celebrity gossip and photos, however, there remains plenty of work available, and even respected newspapers have tabloid journalism at the forefront of their websites. The question of why this is can be guessed without effort: The lives of celebrities get viewers to stay on that website.

Consider the popular weddings in recent times such as Brad and Angelina, Tom and Kate, Jennifer and Ben. The famous couple at each of these weddings took extreme care to control the media treatment of these events. In fact, these celebrities decided to take control of the way their wedding is portrayed, agreeing to only certain reporters having access to their wedding, and having these reporters agree to an agreed upon version of events to take back to the news desk.

This control of the media has become necessary due to the pressure famous people are put under to provide information to their fans. Each of the three couples mentioned above also found it necessary to release a few pre-approved photos of their weddings to the media, in order to placate their need for photos of the event, and to lessen the value of paparazzi images that may have been taken.

The nature of the paparazzi today has become unnecessarily invasive. The wider problem that needs to be considered here, however, is why there is the desire of “normal” people to peer into the private lives of the rich and famous. As long as this desire is in place, the paparazzi will forever have people willing to pay for their services. So long as the money is there, someone will be willing to put morality on hold, in order to get the huge payday on offer.

Share and Enjoy: