Why I Hate Perez Hilton

It’s all fun and games when you’re covering celebrities, when you’re reporting on gossip — essentially, when you’re saying shit that can’t be fact-checked, that can’t be proved or disproved, the kind of things you can chalk up to “an unnamed source.” That’s fine; that’s all well and good.

Where Perez exposes himself is posts like these; where unresearched bits of prose (namely, “the Dap-Kings and Sharon are releasing their own album”) reveal him as, well, not much of a journalist — he leaves his comfort zone, he covers topics he shouldn’t be covering, and in doing so, he looks foolish. Because, if you’re going to write about something, are you really (really) that busy drawing spooge on photographs of questionable original that you can’t look Sharon Jones up on le Internet and learn that this isn’t a first album — it isn’t like the Dap Kings sang backup for Amy Winehouse, got noticed, and got an album deal, which is how he makes it sound — but rather, this is the group’s third album? Third album.

Really, it’s not so hard. (That’s what she said.) And that kind of slapdash journalistic work — in front of an audience of millions — bothers me; with readership comes responsibility. Of course, maybe expecting a sense of responsibility from someone who generates pageviews from blatant clickbait is a mistake on my part; but people keep telling me he’s such a smart businessman. Shouldn’t he be a smart journalist, too? And even if he is one or the other or one but not the other, shouldn’t he be smart enough to Google “Sharon Jones Dap Kings” and do one quick fact check before publishing content?