Paul Thomas: Readers get what they ask for

The spectacle of self-promoting socialites has earned its place in our news agenda. Photo / Herald on Sunday

Our 16-year-old is academic, but there's little risk of her becoming serious to a fault.

She has acted in a short film and modelled at the Wearable Arts Awards. She likes music and dance and fashion.

Her idea of happiness is settling down in front of Glee or America's Next Top Model with a cappuccino and the latest Vogue, cell phone and laptop within easy reach.

So it was kind of interesting that the other day, as she flipped through the colour magazines and supplements that cascade out of the weekend papers, she had to ask: "Who's Aja Rock?"

I could partly answer this question because Aja Rock is the sort of name that's difficult to erase from the memory, which I guess is the whole point of the exercise.

Aja Rock, I said, is someone who regularly features in the colour magazines and supplements that cascade out of the weekend papers.

That invited a follow-up question but fortunately there was a photograph of Ms Rock: blonde, coquettish, tanned, displaying a swathe of toned midriff, and making a hand sign involving the index and little fingers which probably means different things to different people.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but in this case around 950 of them were superfluous.

Surprisingly the photograph was accompanied with the words "She's Baaack!" I say surprisingly because I could have sworn she'd never gone.

Ms Rock is a celebrity for the very reason that our pool of celebrities - recognisable faces who like dressing up, going out and standing around with a free drink in their hand until someone takes their photo - is as shallow as a birdbath, as Rob Muldoon used to say of his opponents.

It's easy to mock the gossip pages and party pics, with their PR puffery and obliging promotion of shameless self-promoters. They do, however, make a valuable contribution to national unity by bolstering the perception of Aucklanders as vain, vapid bludgers, too self-obsessed to be embarrassed by their vacuousness.

They validate the rest of the country's loathing of Auckland.

In an age without unifying beliefs or causes, hatred of the Auckland portrayed in the gossip pages (as mythical a place in its own way as Camelot) is one of the few bonds holding the country together. We should be grateful to those who keep the flame alive.

On a micro level, it's pointless to deny that there are certain pleasures, guilty and otherwise, to be derived from the gossip pages.

A personal favourite is the Herald on Sunday's "Guess who don't sue" section, a collection of cryptic paragraphs recording shameful behaviour of anonymous Auckland society archetypes: the trophy wife, the media blonde, the Rich Lister, the power couple.

There are two fairly obvious reasons why these people don't sue: first, they're not identified, historically the entry level requirement for anyone wishing to prove they've been defamed. Secondly, it's not like they're being accused of paedophilia or eating whale meat.

I can see that changing your mind on a purchase after it's been gift-wrapped could be vexing for a harried shop assistant, but it's hardly going to bring you into ridicule and contempt. Not in Newmarket in the 21st century.

When the charge does get more specific - for instance, "Which All Black is renowned for being a bit of an arrogant twat and popular with the ladies?" - the unwillingness to name names has the effect of tarring the entire group with the same brush.

Whenever I'm critical of the media I get emails pointing out that journalism is a commercial activity, as if there's something fundamentally dodgy about making money from publishing a newspaper. We eat food produced by people who are in it for the money; we take drugs produced by people who are in it for the money.

It's called capitalism and the consensus seems to be that it works a lot better than the alternative, which in this case is state censorship and propaganda.

My correspondents complain that profit-driven media outlets contain too much fluff - such as the gossip pages - and not enough hard news and in-depth analysis of the things that really matter, as if there's universal agreement on what those are.

Anyone who tried to publish a newspaper here specifically for earnest intellectuals would quickly go broke because there aren't enough of them.

Because of our size and geography, our papers have to be most things to most men, which means they must entertain as well as inform.

And let's not forget we have a choice. We can throw the gossip pages aside, we can study them and feel envious, or we can glance at them and feel superior.