Paparazzi have become an integral aspect of today’s media. If a celebrity’s trying to plan a private Santa Barbara wedding, there’s not doubt that there’ll be photographers there waiting. At every destination wedding photographers will have their cameras out and ready to take a million-dollar image of the celebrities. While the nature of invading ones privacy would come as morally questionable to many of us, those who are in the paparazzi are forever looking for images that can earn them millions. When this kind of money is in question, issues of morality and ethics tend to take a backseat.

While one might think that tabloid journalists would feel a pang of guilt for their behavior, most see themselves as fulfilling a desire from the public. This can’t be argued against, as the popularity of magazines that sell photographs of celebrities at their most vulnerable or, indeed, getting married is staggering. These photographs make it possible for readers to move past the heavily made-up, airbrushed and generally “fake” celebrities, and see the celebrities we think of as somehow above us are human after all.

The development of the worldwide web seems to have increased the popularity of tabloid journalism. While newspapers are slowly suffering an increasingly bleak loss in sales, many reporters of outside of the field of the paparazzi have been put out of work. For those who provide celebrity gossip and photos, however, there is still a lot of work available, and even renowned newspapers have tabloid images at the forefront of their websites. The question of why this is can be guessed without effort: The lives of celebrities get viewers to stay on that website.

Consider the popular weddings in recent years such as Brad and Angelina, Tom and Kate, Jennifer and Ben. The famous couple at each of these weddings took extreme care to control the media presence at these events. In fact, these celebrities decided to take control of the way their wedding is portrayed, agreeing to only chosen reporters having access to their wedding, and having these reporters agree to an agreed upon version of events to take back to the news desk.

This control of the media has become necessary due to the pressure famous people are put under to provide information to their fans. Each of the three couples mentioned above also took it upon themselves to release a few pre-approved images of their weddings to the media, in order to pacify their need for images of the event, and to lessen the value those in the paparazzi could get for the photos they took.

The nature of the paparazzi today has become alarmingly instrusive. The deeper issue that needs to be considered here, however, is why there is the need of “normal” individuals to look into the private lives of others. As long as this need is in place, the paparazzi will forever have people willing to pay for their services. So long as money can be made, someone will be willing to go into uncertain ethical territory, in order to get the massive payday on offer.

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