If you're in any way insecure, the media's emphasis on bodily perfection becomes debilitating. As someone who embraces low self-esteem I can see the appeal of clawing the rich, visible and successful to pieces, so I can feel better about myself. But as a major cultural influence this - in my opinion - is horrendous.
A constant flow of gossip normalises nastiness. A generation has grown up being shown forcefully and repeatedly that verbal abuse and personal comments are the jolly, bantering norm. Online insults and the calculated use of sexual gossip to attack women can become more acceptable.
It's not just the tone of gossip that has affected our public discourse - it's corrupted our content. In an unpleasant self-fulfilling prophecy, gossip is seen as something which sells well and is therefore increasingly all we get, from news of royals walking about and wearing clothes, to reports on spats between entirely fictional characters in soaps.
And gossip is economical - it's supplied free by promoters, PR firms and amateur sources. This means it edges out real news and information, large and small, supplied more expensively by journalists and researchers.
