There are few people in today's media world who are harder to ignore than Paris Hilton, but that is just what the AP did for a whole week. In an article posted at Breitbart.com, an AP national writer talks about what began as an experiment to see if anyone would notice the lack of coverage of the young star. It wasn't a bold journalistic move and it wasn't an attempt to direct the attention of the public to more pressing concerns, like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was just an experiment to see what would result.
The plan was never to make the ban permanent, and they knew that when they finally broke the ban they would look hypocritical to some. What was the result of the ban, none of the outlets that depend on the AP for news items called looking for Hilton related stories, and none of them felt like there was some news item that was missing. There were some questions about the nature of the ban, some asking who would be banned next - one writer suggested North Korea. The experiment started on Feb. 19, and during the week that followed the AP did not report her birthday parties in Las Vegas and Beverly Hills, when Hilton visited Puerto Rico to sell her fragrance, staff writers there were asked not to cover the event.
Her name did make it into other stories about Nicole Richie and Britney Spears, her name even made its way into a main page article on the primary in Las Vegas. It turns out that the AP isn't the first to come up with the idea of not covering the young star. Lloyd Grove the writer of the Lowdown column for New York Daily News had a similar ban for a number of years until his column was discontinued. Did Grove maintain the ban on Hilton for some high minded reason about the press and what should be news, no according to his own reports he did it as a way to gain publicity.
When word of the ban started to leak to the media outside the AP, reactions came back in shocking support of what they felt the AP was doing. Some letters commended them for seeing through the evil that they claim Hilton to be, and the AP was declared to be hero's. The ban of course was broken when Hilton was arrested once again for a driving related infraction on Sunset Blvd. Understandably this is an incident that in theory could result in jail time for our young star.
The plan was never to make the ban permanent, and they knew that when they finally broke the ban they would look hypocritical to some. What was the result of the ban, none of the outlets that depend on the AP for news items called looking for Hilton related stories, and none of them felt like there was some news item that was missing. There were some questions about the nature of the ban, some asking who would be banned next - one writer suggested North Korea. The experiment started on Feb. 19, and during the week that followed the AP did not report her birthday parties in Las Vegas and Beverly Hills, when Hilton visited Puerto Rico to sell her fragrance, staff writers there were asked not to cover the event.
Her name did make it into other stories about Nicole Richie and Britney Spears, her name even made its way into a main page article on the primary in Las Vegas. It turns out that the AP isn't the first to come up with the idea of not covering the young star. Lloyd Grove the writer of the Lowdown column for New York Daily News had a similar ban for a number of years until his column was discontinued. Did Grove maintain the ban on Hilton for some high minded reason about the press and what should be news, no according to his own reports he did it as a way to gain publicity.
When word of the ban started to leak to the media outside the AP, reactions came back in shocking support of what they felt the AP was doing. Some letters commended them for seeing through the evil that they claim Hilton to be, and the AP was declared to be hero's. The ban of course was broken when Hilton was arrested once again for a driving related infraction on Sunset Blvd. Understandably this is an incident that in theory could result in jail time for our young star.
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