I almost never follow celebrity news (what some actor is wearing or eats for breakfast has never interested me). That said, Charlie Sheen is definitely going over the edge in his recent interviews with the media.
It's almost like he's taking a page out of the Lindsay Lohan playbook of celebrity PR.
The problem though is that the old saying "any PR is good PR" is not true. Celebrities, just like companies, have brands to manage. For a celebrity, appearing nearly delusional (as opposed to irrational, which is common for celebrities) doesn't help your brand. It may garner you attention (as the public tends to have a sick fascination with seeing celebrities implode and self destruct) but it destroys the image the public use to have of you, which means after all the drama stops at some point they will no longer connect with your brand.
What you create is a state of cognitive dissonance where the different brands you have presented them with clash and they no longer know which one they should refer to. Some celebrities manage to create a 'third act' and create a whole new brand after they recover and get their life back on track (but for every one that succeeds in this, 10 others fail, never really regaining the public's interest).
It's also important to note that just because Sheen appears to be clean doesn't mean the affects of his drug abuse in the past aren't impacting his behaviors today. You can't ingest that many drugs and alcohol for decades and not run the risk of affecting your neuro-chemistry in the long run.
This is the dark side of the media. They do not hold back on what they cover. Their threshold for whether something is news worthy or not is simply whether people want to hear about it. Which in cases like this is sad because in all probability they are giving a forum to someone who is dealing with mental health issues.
Ali Veshi, the CNN anchor, even says "I want to never cover this story again, but every time he says something you have to because it's so crazy."
Ummmm, that's the whole reason you shouldn't cover it because you are giving a platform to someone who most likely is not in their right mind. If a celebrity was suddenly diagnosed with schizophrenia would you put them on-air and publicize their ramblings to the world?
Probably not because audience viewers would see that as inhumane and taking advantage of someone with a mental illness who was not in their right mind.
Yet, when it comes to substance abuse there seems to be the view that capturing someones implosion is acceptable.
Now, reporters aren't psychologists, so they don't have the ability to assess whether someone they are interviewing is merely eccentric or if they have a mental health issue, but at some point it becomes fairly obvious even to the untrained that someone is having a mental split with reality.
It's clear that there are no PR folks managing what's happening here. If there was (and I'm assuming Sheen's publicist is basically being told to just shut up and let Sheen do whatever he wants) at the very least CNN should have been pushed to run a back-end interview with a psychologist to explain the mental health stresses someone would undergo from detoxing.
Anyway, just like they say you should never defend yourself in a court of law (always get a lawyer), similarly you should never engage with the media without a PR person assisting you (and if your PR person is telling you it's a bad idea, it's wise to listen to them).
Oh well, hopefully Sheen stops doing interviews, gets some help and gets his life on track.
I still remember him from the 1994 movie The Chase and his scene with Henry Rollins (how cool is it that you can find YouTube clips of movies from 17 years ago!)
It's almost like he's taking a page out of the Lindsay Lohan playbook of celebrity PR.
The problem though is that the old saying "any PR is good PR" is not true. Celebrities, just like companies, have brands to manage. For a celebrity, appearing nearly delusional (as opposed to irrational, which is common for celebrities) doesn't help your brand. It may garner you attention (as the public tends to have a sick fascination with seeing celebrities implode and self destruct) but it destroys the image the public use to have of you, which means after all the drama stops at some point they will no longer connect with your brand.
What you create is a state of cognitive dissonance where the different brands you have presented them with clash and they no longer know which one they should refer to. Some celebrities manage to create a 'third act' and create a whole new brand after they recover and get their life back on track (but for every one that succeeds in this, 10 others fail, never really regaining the public's interest).
It's also important to note that just because Sheen appears to be clean doesn't mean the affects of his drug abuse in the past aren't impacting his behaviors today. You can't ingest that many drugs and alcohol for decades and not run the risk of affecting your neuro-chemistry in the long run.
This is the dark side of the media. They do not hold back on what they cover. Their threshold for whether something is news worthy or not is simply whether people want to hear about it. Which in cases like this is sad because in all probability they are giving a forum to someone who is dealing with mental health issues.
Ali Veshi, the CNN anchor, even says "I want to never cover this story again, but every time he says something you have to because it's so crazy."
Ummmm, that's the whole reason you shouldn't cover it because you are giving a platform to someone who most likely is not in their right mind. If a celebrity was suddenly diagnosed with schizophrenia would you put them on-air and publicize their ramblings to the world?
Probably not because audience viewers would see that as inhumane and taking advantage of someone with a mental illness who was not in their right mind.
Yet, when it comes to substance abuse there seems to be the view that capturing someones implosion is acceptable.
Now, reporters aren't psychologists, so they don't have the ability to assess whether someone they are interviewing is merely eccentric or if they have a mental health issue, but at some point it becomes fairly obvious even to the untrained that someone is having a mental split with reality.
It's clear that there are no PR folks managing what's happening here. If there was (and I'm assuming Sheen's publicist is basically being told to just shut up and let Sheen do whatever he wants) at the very least CNN should have been pushed to run a back-end interview with a psychologist to explain the mental health stresses someone would undergo from detoxing.
Anyway, just like they say you should never defend yourself in a court of law (always get a lawyer), similarly you should never engage with the media without a PR person assisting you (and if your PR person is telling you it's a bad idea, it's wise to listen to them).
Oh well, hopefully Sheen stops doing interviews, gets some help and gets his life on track.
I still remember him from the 1994 movie The Chase and his scene with Henry Rollins (how cool is it that you can find YouTube clips of movies from 17 years ago!)
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