How 2007 Separates Celebrity Wheat from Chaff

Whoa! It seems the Style staff at the Times are wholly unimpressed with the way things turned out in 2007—a year they already deemed a disaster in fashion. Yesterday’s paper featured an article proclaiming 2007 the year when an overwhelming number of celebrity careers hit the skids.

To be sure, over the last 12 months we witnessed—mouth often agape, eyes yet wider—some doozeys coming out of Celebrityville. Specifically, the Times points to the following Hollywood hiccups: Britney Spears lost her mind, hair and much of her credibility; Donald Trump and Rosie O’Donnell waged war over the airwaves; Lindsay Lohan was arrested and sent to rehab; Paris Hilton went to prison; Don Imus spat racist slurs and was fired; Anna Nicole Smith died after eating lots of pills; David Hasselhoff fell from basking in Baywatch glory to drunken bathroom embarrassment; Jamie Lynn Spears, 16, got knocked up; and, of course, 2007 was the year when Alec Baldwin left his daughter that scary, violent voicemail heard ‘round the world.

And they don’t even mention eight people on the Top Ten Celebrity Meltdowns of 2007, crafted exclusively for The Daily Transom by celebrity life coach Patrick Wanis, PhD. What about Owen Wilson’s attempted suicide? Ellen DeGeneres’ Iggy disaster? O.J. Simpson’s armed robbery fiasco? Boy George’s alleged kidnapping of a male model?

This messy mayhem brought changes in the structure of the media, too. Whereas in the past, major news outlets would vet the sources of gossip blogs before picking up any breaking items, that’s apparently no longer the case. “[I]t used to be we’d get a call from CNN and they’d say, ‘Who are your sources?’ Two days later they’d realize we were right. And like Pavlov’s dog, you train them,” Harvey Levin, managing editor of TMZ.com, told the paper.

Oh, and this was also the year, according to the article, when “the Internet simply coughed up homemade celebrities, like Chris (“Leave Britney Alone!”) Crocker.” Yes, it was indeed. But we think such digital deities are actually called “CeWebrities.”