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April 15, 2008
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We have a fascination with mug shots.
By "we," I don't just mean the news media, though we do have quite the affinity for them. Many a day has passed in the newsroom when I was asked "Do we have a mug of them? Can we make sure we get a mug?"
In general, mug shots help readers know what City Manager Roy Otto, for instance, looks like so when you see him in the grocery store buying his Wheaties (the Breakfast of Champions) you can complain to him about speed bumps or traffic lights.
We typically run mug shots small in the paper, usually near a quote from the person. It breaks the page up, doesn't leave it nearly as gray and gives us a sense of accomplishment.
But mug shots aren't always used to identify, sometimes they're used to embarrass. News media around the country recently latched on to one such mug shot of Carmelo Anthony, the Denver Nuggets star small forward who was arrested for DUI early Monday morning. (I've attached the mug to this blog for illustrative purposes.)
It shouldn't be surprising that there are entire Web sites devoted to archiving celebrity mug shots. They've done it with Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and even Rosa Parks — whose name should never ever be in the same sentence as Hilton's and Lohan's.
Using mugs for identification purposes in the news when it involves a celebrity serves only to show the state of mind — often fragile and overcome with emotion — of the famous, those larger-than-life figures that sit high in their castles while the rest of us sputter like ants below; there's a sense of voyeurism when we see a mug shot in a paper or a newspaper of a celebrity. It humanizes them, but it also degrades them. We're apparently OK with this.
Of course, I don't know how many papers wrestle with the idea of celebrity mug shots. We show mug shots of people who are accused of committing certain crimes, but we wouldn't typically show a mug shot of someone who was arrested (and pardon the word that may make DUI sound like a non-serious crime here) JUST for DUI.
To include the mug simply because Carmelo is a celebrity for a relatively minor crime (compared to murders, rapes, etc.), well that's just obsession.
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