In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve been doing our best to ignore Jon and Kate Gosselin, who have managed to penetrate our lives over the past few months — despite our best efforts to keep them out — in a way we haven’t seen since, well, somebody found an extra baby squished up in the back of Nadya Suleman’s uterus. But today’s “Page Six” lead item, cribbed from yesterday’s Gatecrasher item, is such a perfect example of the celebrity-media complex that it deserves a moment of our time. Let’s walk through this story, in which the pair is snapped going to dinner at Accademia di Vino on the Upper East Side.
Kate Major, Star reporter, invites philandering reality star Jon Gosselin to dinner. This is because she’s a reporter and wants to be friendly with him in order to get scoops, which will obviously be skewed in his direction, but that doesn’t matter.
Jon Gosselin accepts. This is because he knows full well she is a reporter, and wants to get his side of the story out as much as possible. (Note, this invitation could have happened in the reverse and it would have been the same.)
Somebody calls the paparazzi. The pair were photographed posing for pictures, and overheard thanking cameramen. If Kate called them, it was probably to boost her cred at work, and to heighten intrigue in the story she herself was reporting. If Jon called them, it was because he’s addicted to tabloid attention and any picture with a blonde is a good thing. Probably, they both called.
“Gatecrasher” picks up on the story. Head reporter Laura Schreffler probably calls a friend at Star, who says: “Kate has a tendency to blur the lines between ‘work’ and ‘friendship,’” as though it’s a bad thing, when actually that’s exactly what Star reporters are supposed to do. Said source, who might actually be Major herself, supplies other examples of her reporting prowess, like the time she was hanging out with Lindsay Lohan.
Someone (again, probably Major) calls “Page Six” to make sure the story lasts two days. Another day goes by with the pair in the headlines, this time with an allegation that Major once went to rehab, which really no one cares about or will remember after tomorrow, so it’s no loss for her. Gosselin has the chance to say they didn’t date, and “reps” say they were actually out with “four other people” and are “only friends,” duh.
So basically, what’s happened here is that a person who is famous for being famous teamed up with a person who helps such people stay famous, and they decided to do something famous together to help each other out. The symbiosis could only be more icky if money were being exchanged. Which, frankly, we haven’t ruled out.
