I love reading blogs, especially political blogs. Two of my all-time favorite blogs have to be Gawker, a media blog, and Wonkette, a political blog written by the hilarious Alex Pareene. Both blogs are part of the Gawker blog network, and both report news in the most hilarious, laugh-out-loud fashion possible, which is why I love them. Wonkette also live-blogs political debates with great commentary, which, if you're anything like me, is the best idea ever.

Anyways, very recently, the Gawker Media network started up Jezebel. I usually stay away from celebrity gossip blogs and the like; I feel some of them are kind of crazy and besides, celebrities don't deserve that much attention from us. Why give them the attention? It just inflates their egos and make them think they're important, when hardly any of them have done anything considered important (Bono and Angelina Jolie are good exceptions to this rule). BUT Jezebel changed that. Despite my very public rejection of celebrity gossip, I find myself drawn to Jezebel. It's witty, it's well-written, and often times their commentary goes beyond just reporting the minute details of celebrities' lives and actually has some significant insight on pop culture and media today in American society. They also gossip about political figures sometimes too, and they mock those celebrities whose actions deserve to be mocked --rather than putting them on a pedestal and worshipping. The team at Jezebel is not afraid to tell it like it is, at the risk of hurting hundreds of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton fans the world over.

For instance, Jezebel recently became notorious for exposing just how airbrushed Faith Hill really was on the new Redbook cover, and wrote a great, honest piece about how airbrushing celebrity photos is wrong and promotes a false ideal to young women:

"So why do women's magazines continue to insist on providing readers just the opposite? Is it stubbornness? The selling of fantasy? Or the selling of other things, i.e. advertising revenue? And if so, is it really necessary to shave 10-15 pounds off a woman and erase exactly what it is (the freckles, the moles, the laugh lines) about her that makes her human and accessible and interesting in order to sell a bit of fucking soap? Look at the picture above, and tell us that Faith Hill is not fucking gorgeous and vibrant just the way God -- not Photoshop -- made her....Magazine-retouching may not be a lie on par with, you know, "Iraq has weapons of mass destruction," but in a world where girls as young as eight are going on the South Beach Diet, teenagers are getting breast implants as graduation gifts, professional women are almost required to fetishize handbags, and everyone is spending way too much goddamn time figuring out how to pose in a way that will look as good as that friend with the really popular MySpace profile, it's fucking wrong. And we're glad you agreed."

Dare I say it's...an intellectual celebrity blog?

Labels: blogs, jezebel, media, pop culture