Star magazine’s audience generally is middle-age women that are interested in keeping up with current entertainment news and especially gossip. The website even allows users to post rumors about their favorite celebrities on the website’s message boards. It is a near cross between to National Enquirer and Us Weekly. To appeal to such an audience, kairos must be always applied to whatever news is being sent out; the Charlie Sheen article is a perfect example of this. Charlie’s Sheen recent actions have been headline-grabbing and everyone in America seems to be interested in him. To create even more appeal, Star magazine also mentions Sheen’s children to create an emotional draw. The magazine then cites a completely random psycho-therapist to comment on how Sheen should not be allowed to see his children. There is a picture of a crazed Sheen holding his two children directly above the insert.
The article is completely slanted to make the reader’s believe Sheen is now, “Wild man Charlie” and has totally fallen off the deep end. Using wordings such as, “totally unhinged”, “running off the rails”, “bizarre” and “wild”, only helps to confirm the audience’s idea of Sheen as wild and crazy. The article’s main argument is that now with nothing more for Sheen to lose, he will now write a tell-all book that could potentially ruin many others’ careers. There is no actual proof for this notion, beyond a secret “insider” telling Star this information. This is very suspect due to the lack of credibility of the magazine. Using other interviews from other major TV networks though adds to the perceived legitimacy of this picture.
One of the most important aspects of this feature article is the fact that no positive connotation can be perceived from any of the images. The main image of Sheen and his two current girlfriends and an ex-wife seems somewhat eerie. The only mention of two girlfriends describes them as “pornstar Bree Olsen and Natalie Kenly who’s modeled fro a marijuana aficionado magazine called Cali Chronic X…” The only mention of the ex-wife, Brooke Mueller, is in the beginning in which she claims Sheen held a knife to her throat. The images and descriptions only allow for the negative connotations from the article to continue and grow in the readers’ minds. The other image of Sheen and Chuck Lorre shows Lorre looking pleasant and smiling and Sheen as mad and obviously pointing something wrong out to Lorre. Both the text and the images help to reaffirm Star magazine’s notion of Sheen as totally losing it, which only makes the tell-all book gossip idea even more appealing to the magazine’s readers.
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