I don't know who to be madder at: The L.A. Times, TMZ, or Arnold Schwarzenegger, but for now, I pick Arnold.
I never believed the denials the governator and his wife made about his various escapades, and I wasn't surprised to find out this latest bit about the maid and the child.
But our fascination with celebrities and their foibles is such that media-savvy twerps like Arnold ought to know when to keeps their traps shut.
The Times had figured out the affair and the resulting child and asked the maid about the situation. She said the child was her husband's.
But when news outlets go to Arnold, he just chirps away, admitting the whole thing.
The Times refused to identify the woman or the child, enough information has now been given that TMZ, a scuzzy "entertainment news" outlet proceeds to identify the woman and where she lives, thus making continued secrecy about the child's identity a moot point.
Given TMZ's predilection for ferreting out this kind of information, they probably would have come up with all this on their own. Shoot, they were probably already on the story before Arnold opened his yap.
That doesn't mean he needed to say anything about it. He needn't have denied anything, adding another lie to the pile, but he could have said he wasn't going to talk about it. He knew that confirming any of the information would inevitably lead to the revelation of who the relevant parties were.
And that meant the child, who shouldn't have to be dragged into this mess, would be.
But as I think about it, as mad as I am with the Times and TMZ and Arnold, I now think I'm maddest with us, this society that we live in, because we believe we ought to know these so-called bits of news.
If there were no audience for the stupidities committed by Paris and Lindsay and Charlie and now Arnold, not to mention a host of other less recent bad boys and girls, TMZ wouldn't exist and major news outlets would go back to leaving that nonsense to the tabloids and seedy gossip rags.
Shame on Arnold. Shame on TMZ. Shame on the Times, but most of all, shame on us.
I think everyone knows way too much about everyone else. Anyone famous or political must constantly be "exposed." Then the story is copied all over TV, newspapers, the Internet, etc. Innocent family members get dragged through the mud because no one is allowed to make mistakes privately or have any private life at all. Granted, as you pointed out, some of these people bring it on themselves. It really disturbs me, though.
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