“How far will Miley go next?”: Miley Cyrus and the news in celebrity gossip magazines An Honours Thesis by Lucy Watson ! ! Supervised by Dr Megan Le Masurier Submitted in fulfilment of the degree of Bachelor of Arts (Media and Communications), Honours Department of Media and Communications University of Sydney October, 2014 Abstract ! This thesis examines news values in celebrity news. News values have been thoroughly analysed with regard to “serious” news, but little has been done to see how useful existing conceptions of news values are for celebrity news in gossip magazines. This thesis examines coverage of Miley Cyrus in four Australian gossip magazines from December 2010 to July 2014 according to traditional news values, and argues they are inadequate for understanding how celebrity news is produced. It then proposes and tests a different set of news values that function for celebrity news. Using a queer approach to heteronormativity, this thesis argues that the news values employed by celebrity magazines uphold and maintain a normative hierarchy, through the promotion of non-normative behaviour as scandalous gossip, and normative behaviour as worthy of celebration. Keywords: news values; celebrity news; heteronormativity; gossip magazines; Miley Cyrus !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Note: The title of this thesis, “how far will Miley go next?” is derived from a Clickhole article (“She’s at it again!”, 2014). Clickhole is a parody website that, in this article, managed to perfectly encapsulate the tone of gossip magazines, sharing their moral outrage for almost everything Miley does. The cover image is from 22nd September (“The night Miley lost it!”, 2014). ii! Certification of authorship/originality I certify that the work in this thesis has not previously been submitted for a degree nor has it been submitted as part of requirements for a degree except as fully acknowledged within the text. I also certify that the thesis has been written by me. Any help that I have received in my research work and the preparation of the thesis itself has been acknowledged. In addition, I certify that all information sources and literature used are indicated in the thesis. 13th October, 2014 iii! Acknowledgements I wouldn’t have taken the Honours year if it weren’t for my supervisor, Dr Megan Le Masurier. It was your teaching that inspired my interest in writing and academia, changing my career path entirely. I can’t thank you enough. I’d also like to thank the rest of the Media and Communications/Digital Cultures Department, particularly Dr Kathy Cleland and Dr Grant Bollmer for your teaching and guidance this year. Thanks also to my fellow Honours students, especially Astha, for trying to solve all of my problems instead of just ignoring my whining. Huge thanks goes to the Honi Soit editorial team of 2013, for while we might not be editing anymore, you’re still my support and advice team, for everything. Particular thanks to Max and Bryant for helping me code, Nina for providing valuable edits and sharing my moral outrage over Miley’s photoshopped swimmers, Nick for being the subediting king, and Hannah for coding, editing, and just getting my celebrity obsession. I’d also like to thank Bebe, I don’t know how you found the time to help me figure out Word, but you did; Steph, for everything; Grace, for joining me in the library and helping me with queer theory; Joe for the homecooked meals; and the rest of my housemates and family for putting up with me. I was going to thank Miley for providing all the news and entertainment, though perhaps it’s more accurate to thank the gossip magazines for inventing endless and predictable fiction, of which Miley is just one protagonist. iv! Table of Contents ! Abstract ii Certification of Authorship/Originality iii Acknowledgements iv List of Figures viii Chapter One: Introduction 1 Chapter Two: Literature Review 5 2.1: News and news values 5 2.2: Tabloidisation of news 10 2.3: Celebrity and celebrity news 14 2.4: (Hetero)normativity 18 2.5: Conclusion 26 Chapter Three: Methodology 27 3.1: The scope of this study 27 3.1.1: Miley Cyrus 28 3.1.2: Gossip magazines 29 3.1.3: News values 31 3.2: Methodologies 31 3.2.1: Content analysis 31 3.2.2: Thematic textual analysis 33 3.3: Process 35 3.3.1: Content analysis 35 v! 3.3.2: Thematic textual analysis 39 3.4: Conclusion 41 Chapter Four: The News Values, Applied 42 Content Analysis Results and Discussion ! 4.1: The data 42 4.2: Old vs. new: Harcup and O’Neill and why new news values are necessary 48 4.2.1: Testing Harcup and O’Neill’s values 48 4.2.2: Adapting Harcup and O’Neill’s values for the celebrity news genre: A new set of celebrity news values 50 4.3: The new news values 53 4.3.1: ‘Feud’ 55 4.3.2: ‘A-list status’ 56 4.3.3: ‘Good behaviour’ 57 4.3.4: ‘Sad celebs’ 57 4.3.5: ‘Shocking sexuality’ 58 4.3.6: ‘Bad behaviour’ 59 4.3.7: 'Bad bodies’ 60 4.3.8: ‘Ongoing saga’ 60 4.4: Cover stories 61 4.5: A summary of the key findings 62 Chapter Five: The News as Narrative 63 A Thematic Textual Analysis of the Role of News Values in Creating News Narratives ! 5.1: Appearance 68 5.1.1: Plastic surgery 68 5.1.2: Weight 71 vi! 5.2: Substance abuse 73 5.3: Romantic relationships and sex life 80 5.3.1: Break ups 80 5.3.2: Cheating 85 5.3.3: Promiscuity 90 5.3.4: Pregnancy 94 5.4: The bigger picture 98 Chapter Six: Conclusion 102 6.1: In summary 102 6.2: Contributions to the field 105 6.3: What’s next? 107 Appendix A: Codebook and Information for Coders 109 Appendix B: Sample Magazine Cover 114 Appendix C: Coding Sheet 115 Bibliography 131 vii! List of Figures Figure 2.01: Rubin’s sex hierarchy (1984, p. 282) 21 Table 3.01: Coder A/Principal coder agreement scores 38 Table 3.02: Coder B/Principal coder agreement scores 38 Table 3.03: Principal coder intracoder agreement scores 38 ! Figure 4.01: Breakdown of stories by their focus 43 Figure 4.02: Frequency of articles (as a percentage of total issues per month) 44 Figure 4.03: A timeline of the key events in Miley’s life (according to the gossip magazines). 45 Figure 4.04: Breakdown of stories by their source 46 Figure 4.05: Breakdown of stories by their attitude towards Miley 47 Figure 4.06: Distribution of each of the news values across all stories, all cover stories, and the main cover stories 55 Figure 4.07: The source and attitude breakdown of stories containing ‘feud’ 56 Figure 4.08: The source and attitude breakdown of stories containing ‘A-list status’ 56 Figure 4.09: The source and attitude breakdown of stories containing ‘good behaviour’ 57 Figure 4.10: The source and attitude breakdown of stories containing ‘sad celebs’ 58 Figure 4.11: The source and attitude breakdown of stories containing ‘shocking sexuality’ 59 Figure 4.12: The source and attitude breakdown of stories containing ‘bad behaviour’ 59 Figure 4.13: The source and attitude breakdown of stories containing ‘bad bodies’ 60 Figure 4.14: The source and attitude breakdown of stories containing ‘ongoing saga’ 61 Figure 4.15: The source and attitude breakdown of stories that were featured on the cover 61 viii! Figure 5.01: “Miley’s extreme makeover: ‘I felt like a boy’”, 28th October, 2013 69 Figure 5.02: Left: “Miley’s secret drug problem”; right: “Family feud takes its toll”. Both 8th July, 2013 74 Figure 5.03: “Drunk Miley’s drugs spiral”, 7th April 2014 75 Figure 5.04: “The scary rise of the drunkorexics”, 26th May, 2014 77 Figure 5.05: covers demanding Miley go to rehab. Left: “Drunk and Alone”, 16th June, 2014. Right: “Miley told ‘go to rehab!’”, 20th January, 2014 78 Figure 5.06: “Separate lives”, 25th March, 2013 81 Figure 5.07: “Why Liam had to go back”, 1st July, 2013 82 Figure 5.08: Left: “Liam’s two month affair exposed”; right: “Liam’s revenge: Why he walked”. Both 30th September, 2013 83 Figure 5.09: “Dumped by text”, 9th September, 2013 84 Figure 5.10: “Miley’s shock romp”, 25th June, 2012 86 Figure 5.11: “‘I had to end it’”, 23rd September, 2013 87 Figure 5.12: “‘I know you stole him!’”, 20th May, 2013 88 Figure 5.13: “‘I’m not sorry’”, 11th November, 2013 90 Figure 5.14: “Miley confesses…‘Yes, I’m pregnant’”, 8th April, 2013 95 Figure 5.15: Left: “Miley to be a mum, but… who’s the daddy?”, 14th October, 2013; right: “Miley’s baby shock”, 28th April, 2014 97 Figure 5.16: The behaviour hierarchy in gossip magazines, and the struggle over where to draw the line. (Adapted over the course of this analysis from Rubin, 1984, p. 282) 100 ix! Chapter One: Introduction Despite the fact that no one seems willing to admit they buy them, preferring instead to claim they read them in the doctor’s waiting room, gossip magazines remain some of the most highly circulated magazines in Australia (Aedy, 2014; Bonner; 2014). Regardless of how, or where, they are consumed, it is clear that hundreds of thousands of people find what lies in the folds of the gossip weeklies enticing. But how are the stories inside selected? And what are these tales, these sordid narratives of celebrities’ private lives, really trying to tell us? In 1965, Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge developed a set of 12 values that described the selection process of translating events into news.