Cheap similes make for lazy journalism.

• Author: Saltzman, Joe
• Position: Words Images - Taking potshots at celebrities - Editorial

IT HAS BECOME COMMONPLACE for journalists to take cheap potshots at celebrities when writing stories that have nothing to do with them. Derogatory and often mean-spirited, these seemingly minor offenses tarnish the profession of journalism and add to the public distrust of the media.

It doesn't seem to matter whether the writer works for The New York Times, Time magazine, or a one-person Internet newsletter, the practice is the same--out of nowhere, a reference is made to a personality, almost as if it is an inside joke. The writer is showing how clever he or she is by knocking a celebrity for no other reason than seeming fashionable. It's like a gross poke in the fibs. The reference is always unfair because the person in question has nothing to do with the article. It is one thing to criticize actors, musicians, writers, or any other personality when specifically reviewing their work. It is quite another to simply target someone for a cheap laugh.

Laying into Lewis and Lopez

For decades, it has been fashionable to throw in Jerry Lewis' name in a deprecating simile. One writer, doing a critique of a "punchy Peter Jennings," wrote that the audience stayed with him "hoping he would come apart at the seams like Jerry Lewis used to at the end of his muscular dystrophy telethons." A critic, writing a review of a new film, said the movie had "more dead spots than a Jerry Lewis telethon." In an analysis of a governor's race, another writer said that a candidate "makes the Grim Reaper look like Jerry Lewis." A senator was said to trip over "semantics like Jerry Lewis on an ether binge."

The only other personality getting more of this vicious kind of ink seems to be Jennifer Lopez or, more accurately, "J-Lo's butt." Most of the egregious examples come from automobile writers--one car was so expensive that it cost "somewhere in the neighborhood of the insurance value of Jennifer Lopez's butt." One journalist, writing about something called a guitar pedal preamp booster, used jargon for the most part, ending with "it does a fine job of boosting the guitar's signal ... it makes strat pickups sound as fat as Jennifer Lopez's butt." Lopez's lower anatomy has been used to compare everything from a beer bottle to a car's rear end.

There may be some reason to compare good TV programs and movies to bad TV programs and movies, but too often the references to a program's ineptness is listed as fact, not opinion. In one critique about "The West Wing," the...