MSNBC is right now running a story on ‘why Americans are so obsessed with celebrities and their scandals’ (verbal italics are MSNBC’s). Their main focus is on the recent Paris Hilton B.S.

Now, a lot of things about the news media drive me nuts, but it’s perhaps their almost-total credulity that annoys me the most — and they’re never more credulous than when dealing with celebrities.

Lets examine the situation. Paris Hilton is famous mainly for one thing, the infamous Paris Hilton Sex Tape, a grainy night-vision bit of uninteresting amateur porn.

I knew who Paris Hilton was before the tape, but that’s only because I read Page Six assiduously. On Page Six — and in similar New York gossip publications — Hilton has been well-known for some time. She was referred to in these places as a ‘scenester’, or a ‘socialite’. She was famous mainly for going to a lot of parties.

A lot of people go to a lot of parties, of course: we call most of these people Big Ten students, and they’re not famous for it. Paris Hilton was a minor celebrity for going to parties because she went to the right parties, i.e. ‘exclusive’ parties. The problem with ‘exclusive ’ parties, though, is that, to keep the thing ‘exclusive’, you can’t invite everyone: there’s a limited circle of people who know about ‘exclusive’ parties, and an even more limited circle who actually attend the things. Thus if your celebrity is based on attending ‘exclusive’ parties, it’s hard to leverage that odd celebrity into national fame.

But Paris Hilton wasn’t just famous for going to a lot of parties. She’s neither interesting nor good-looking nor quite rich enough for her mere presence to be noteworthy. Paris Hilton was, in the end, famous mostly because she had a good PR agent. Without a lot of money being spent, though, a good PR agent doesn’t win you much fame with the Great Unwashed, since the movie studios etc. spend so much on seeing to it that their stars are famous: and movie stars are famous for something that is actually visible to the public, i.e. appearing in movies.

So until the Sex Tape came out, most people in the U.S. wouldn’t have been able to distinguish between these:

That’s a problem when you’re trying to launch a career in the public eye, and when you’ve got a dodgy TV show premiering soon. So what do you do? You — and a friend who’s trying to get an amateur quasi-porn business of his own off the ground — produce a videotape that can’t itself be shown on TV, but that creates an enormous amount of publicity. It’s a masterful scheme: so far today, I’ve received over thirty e-mails trying to sell me a copy of the tape.

I’ve got no problem with any of this. As I said, I think it’s an absolutely brilliant PR gambit, not only in that it gets Paris Hilton an enormous amount of free publicity, but in that it does so without, ahem, actually exposing her to the public all that much. Paris Hilton herself as a celebrity product has a pretty short life: as I said, she’s not that interesting or good-looking. But Paris Hilton as the subject of an enigmatic porn video that can’t be shown on TV is enormously intriguing, and I predict success, at least in the short term, for the insipid TV show, premiering tonight, in which she has a starring role.

This isn’t what you’ll hear from the TV networks and the pulpier magazines, though (non-pulpy magazines choose, largely, not to notice Ms. Hilton at all). They’ve swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker, and, to the best of my knowledge, no one has suggested that they are all being played like a fiddle. I have to assume that this is because they have not noticed.