niche drama

The Hot New Celebrity Trend Is Being Furious at Bloggers

Blog haters. Photo: Getty Images

This week, several celebrities adopted a look that can best be described as “Terry Bollea chic” — getting extremely Mad at bloggers.

Celebrities hating the press is nothing new. Frank Zappa argued that rock journalism was “People who can’t write, doing interviews with people who can’t think, in order to prepare articles for people who can’t read.” Soren Kierkegaard said, “The lowest depth to which people can sink before God is defined by the word journalist.” Even Mahatma Gandhi once (might have) joked: “I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.”

And, of course, nobody loathes the press more, or more loudly, than this guy.

So, like the renaissance of low-rise jeans and those Steve Madden platform sandals, everything old is new again, and famous people are once more bashing the underpaid people who write about them, and time is a flat circle. Below, let us walk you through everyone who’s adopted the latest trend in the past week.

Lizzo

First, after a tough-but-generally-positive review of her new album, Cuz I Love You, was published on Pitchfork, Lizzo tweeted in all-caps that, “PEOPLE WHO ‘REVIEW’ ALBUMS AND DONT MAKE MUSIC THEMSELVES SHOULD BE UNEMPLOYED.”

Fans, particularly those who write about music and were just told they shouldn’t have a job, were disappointed, and Lizzo later walked back her claim.

Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande

Next up, Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande stepped forward to punch down.

Upset that E! host Morgan Stewart (who is not, technically, a blogger) made some rude but fairly harmless comments about Bieber lip-syncing during his performance with Grande at Coachella, Bieber tweeted at Stewart, asking her to “imagine if you spent even half the time you spend laughing at other peoples expense actually building people up and encouraging people how much positivity you could bring,” and wondering, “When are we gonna be the kind of people that find joy in adding value to one another and not tearing each other apart..”

Then, Ariana added:

people are so lost. one day everybody that works at all them blogs will realize how unfulfilled they are and purposeless what they’re doing is and hopefully shift their focus elsewhere. that’s gonna be a beautiful ass day for them! i can’t wait for them to feel lit inside. 

She later deleted the tweet, but not before bloggers across the internet were like, Purposeless? Um, yeah, tell us something we don’t know.

Olivia Munn

Yes, Olivia Munn jumped on the trend later than Lizzo, Justin, and Ariana, but to her credit, she has been vocally anti-blog since 2010, when Jezebel wrote that the Daily Show had “a woman problem,” and Munn, then a Daily Show correspondent, responded by telling Hollywood Life:

“I never tried to use anything besides my own sweat and blood and talent to get somewhere. I think that anyone who’s out there trying to bring down why any woman would get anywhere, or why we’re different, just needs to fucking turn her fucking computer off, take the sandwich out of her mouth and go for a goddamn walk, fucking walk. You know what? Just walk it off, bitch. Just walk it off, bitch.”

This week, her criticism was not lunch-based. Instead, she wrote a “short” two-page essay accusing the fashion bloggers Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, a.k.a. the Fug Girls, of “ugly behaviors” like body shaming and emotional abuse.

Many pointed out that Munn’s attack was misguided. Bitch Media co-founder Andi Zeisler responded in a tweet, “Will you also be writing essays on Vogue, Us Weekly, E!’s Fashion Police, Page Six, and the entire celebrity-industrial complex? Because this is punching down when you should be punching up.”

So … does anyone not hate bloggers?

Yes. Fortunately, internet writers have one ally:

The Hot New Celebrity Trend Is Being Furious at Bloggers