Our society is very good at calling out people's wrongdoings. We are very good, collectively, at pointing out mistakes that people make and holding them accountable.
With the ever-increasing ability to pay attention to others, especially celebrities and politicians in the public eye, it is easier to monitor the actions of the people whose lives we follow to the minute. Not only do we expect popular media figures to be transparent with their actions, we also expect those actions to be morally absolute. We expect our favorite actors and singers, senators and presidential candidates, to always have the best intentions, to always make the best choices, and to never have secrets from their adoring fans.
We consistently treat celebrities as idols and gods instead of human beings, and the constant portrayal as such is neither realistic nor healthy.
The more a person is caught either lying, cheating, or abusing their power, the more their moral character goes down. A person has a greater chance of being caught in one of these three offenses the more they are paid attention to, which points to the media as a catalyst. A celebrity who is well liked but is in the public eye will have a greater, more impactful fall if their moral character is compromised.
Take Taylor Swift, for example, and how Kim Kardashian-West exposed her of lying in her SnapChat video. Swift and Kardashian-West are both in the public eye all the time, but the difference in the public's opinion of their moral character is that Swift is more considered to be a "good girl," who also pushes a socio-political agenda, yet Kardashian-West is more socially and politically neutral. So, when Swift was accused of lying--one of the major moral offenses in the world of celebrities and public figures--her moral character was more severely compromised because of her existing reputation and her public persona.
In the political sphere, it has become a norm for male politicians to cheat on their wives. However, not every sex scandal can bring down a politician's career. The higher the opinion of a person + the more they are covered by the press = the more they have to fall. Take Bernie Sanders as an example of a person who is praised by his supporters for his never-wavering moral character and who's life has been covered by the media, especially during the last few months. Next, imagine if he were to be accused of embezzling money or cheating on his wife. Then, if his supporters found out. If they did, his moral character would be ripped to shreds, because he was trusted and put on a moral pedestal. The moment that kind of image is cracked, it is irrevocably shattered. The public has seen this happen with former president Nixon, Watergate, and Monica Lewinsky.
The mass coverage of celebrities causes changes in the public eye. When we see the intimate details of their lives, we feel closer to them, and if we approve of them as people, we like and trust them. The public forms these mental portraits of public figures, and we think of the person we see in the news to be the person they really are. But at the end of the day, those images aren't real people, they are the portraits carefully painted by public relations teams, managers, and employees whose job is to make a person look good. That is the image the public sees.
After days, weeks, and months of seeing those image, we start to think of those perfectly crafted personas as perfect people. In a way, mass media helps celebrities lose their humanity, in exchange for stardom. The public no longer sees them as individuals, but as gods: powerful individuals with a greater moral compass than mere mortals.
If by some chance that persona breaks, and the individual behind the god makes a mistake, as humans do, the public feels hurt, betrayed, or let down. We call them out, and we bring them down for it. When a public figure screws up, we don't see it as a person doing something completely human, we see the being we put fall on their pedestal shattering our own image of them, so they eventually fall from grace.
