A one-way ticket to disaster: IHT reflects on Celebrity.

Two words that describe ample situations of 2007: Train Wreck.

From Spears to Lohan to Hilton, from bipolar attacks to coke binges to, well...jail.
Each celebutante had her own spiral downward - and oh, did they spiral.

If your taste in just desserts ran more esoteric, the displays of personal collapse available on the Internet were downright Dada-esque: you could watch the former television action hero David Hasselhoff splayed across the floor of his hotel room while eating a hamburger; see Vanessa Hudgens, the squeaky-clean star of "High School Musical 2," posing in the nude; or hear Alec Baldwin haranguing his 11-year-old daughter in a profane voice mail message that could have come straight out of "Glengarry Glen Ross."
Does this seem exessive? Have we gone too far in our adoration of these "stars"?
Or was it just that this year, gossip coverage has become so widespread — you could hardly pick up a magazine or newspaper, turn on a television or read a blog without encountering another tale of a celebrity who'd gone off the rails — that it made routine bad behavior seem even worse? Think of CNN, MSNBC, Fox in the wake of the Anna Nicole death...WALL TO WALL COVERAGE. Not for the war, not for the finance crisis, but for Anna Nicole. Is it because we care? Or do they force us to be unable to turn a blind eye?

All of these scandals were so appalling, Lisanti (of defamer.com) said, that they "fed this insatiable hunger to find out more and more and more, which pushed more outlets to keep revealing more details about these people."

Where larger media companies once considered gossip Web sites too untrustworthy to follow their lead on breaking stories, these same organizations began relying on the Web sites and blogs as if they were articles from The Associated Press. "When we broke a story," said Harvey Levin, the managing editor of TMZ.com, "it 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."

On the downside, it is unlikely that the audiences for these newly created outlets remain faithful to any of them for long. "Viewers and readers who like sensationalism are not necessarily loyal," said Tony Potts, a host of the television shows "Access Hollywood" and "Celebrity Exposé." "The titillating aspect of a story will always be superseded by something else, and they just want the next quick fix."

And who can forget semi-celebs like Larry Craig, Michael Vick, and Andrew "Don't Taze me" Meyer? Imus, The VTech shooter...all got absurdly bright spolights for generally unnewsworthy things (don't get me wrong, the VTech shootings Were ABSOLUTELY newsworthy...but Cho's plays were not. His short stories were not. That was a limelight on a character much less than worthy of the fame.)

"We live in a society where there are virtually no repercussions," said Min of Us Weekly. The repeat offenders who most often populate our gossip, she said, know full well they can "get arrested one day, walk a red carpet the next, and still have as many photographers shouting their names and wanting their pictures."

As Min recalled, it was hardly a year ago that she and her staff were assembling an astonishing story about Britney Spears. "We reported that she took her older son to a cosmetic dentist, to see if she could get his teeth whitened," Min said. "Which at that point seemed incredibly shocking. That seems very quaint and simple now."