A Newsday column lamenting “floating celebrities” — people famous for being famous — emits the following:
In this, Hilton is one of a laundry list of not-so-illustrious examples. Kato Kaelin and Jessica Hahn, Monica Lewinsky and Joey Buttafuoco, Darva Conger and “Bachelorette” Trista Rehn – it’s a short-lived conga line of names who captured our attention because … well, we don’t quite know why, other than they are – or were, in their time – everywhere.
This is an otherwise worthy column about celebrity culture, but this paragraph has what I’ll call a stopper: Something that seems so wrong it makes you want to stop reading. All these people were involved in actual news — they are not the “famous for being famous” phenomenon at all. Sure, the coverage of them was excessive, but they do not fit in the scheme of the point the writer’s trying to make.
Editors are supposed to catch stuff like this.