Making Celebrity Speech Matter
How much is a celebrity endorsement worth, after all?
Gawker (via Slatest) offers ten tips for the world’s most famous goodwill pitchman, U2’s Bono, who himself offered ten recommendations for general world harmony and progress in the New York Times last Saturday. While much of their advice is suitably snarky, given the source (e.g., the suggestion that Bono get new sunglasses), their critique highlights the resentment that celeb endorsements can sometimes engender.
The argument for famous people speaking out on Issues of Importance, of course, is that it’s preferable to use one’s fame for something important (ending genocide) rather than a frivolous matter (selling a fragrance). This is a difficult position to refute. It’s also difficult, however, to believe someone who tells us to give money when we know that that person carries the equivalent of a developing country’s GDP in their checking account.
What’s legitimately interesting about the Gawker critique is that it highlights the two types of efforts celebs can make, both of which tend to be more uncomfortable than the typical famous-person endorsement. “You have enough money to figure out some of these problems,” Gawker argues. “So do it.” This is a frequent, if somewhat problematic, argument against celebrity endorsements: why should people (by which we usually mean taxpayers) fork over their money if you, the famous rich person, will not do so yourself? The same is true of celeb requests for donations. The logical issue with this argument is that it’s not necessarily one person’s responsibility to, say, fund antiretroviral medication for a continent. Without knowing that the spokespeople for such causes have put their money where their mouths are, however, it’s difficult to not view such requests as hypocritical.
There is, however, one area in which famous people do have a unique ability to make a difference: the realm of ideas. “Take a difficult position,” Gawker urges Bono. This is something that neither Bono nor many other famous endorsers of things tend to do; it’s much easier to fight against something everybody already thinks is bad (North Korea, genocide in Darfur) than to take a stand on a difficult position. “What about Iran?” the article asks. “And why not take a stance on Israel-Palestine?”
What celebrities have going for them is an audience that most of us can only dream of (humble journalists included). The real power of the star lies not in their advocacy for greater funding of this or that cause, which often (though not always) rings hypocritical, but simply in their ability to make their ideas, the sides they take, widely known. This is the good that famous people can (potentially) do – not telling us what to do, but simply letting us know what they think and why, not asking of us anything but an ear to listen.
Whether or not we should listen to the opinions of a man simply because he’s had a number of hit records or won an Oscar, of course, is another debate entirely. But celebrity endorsements would be a lot less irritating and a good deal more meaningful if they acknowledged what celebrities are – amplified versions of ourselves, with greater power to speak out – and ceased simply telling us what to do. Also, if they came from men without silly eyewear.
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