For the past few weeks I was hit with curious headlines while going through supermarkets. I would see covers of US Weekly talking about teen moms. It had bright headlines about “inside the struggle” and had pictures of teenagers that I had no idea who they were. I thought maybe it was some investigative look into teen motherhood across the country, meaning some reporter instead of focusing on some celebrity actually talked to real people about teenage pregnancy.

I was partially right.

It turns out that Teen Moms is actually an MTV show that is a spinoff from the show 16 and Pregnant. Apparently the new show has done well in the ratings and, if I’m to understand the article I read correctly, because a lot of editors at US Weekly liked the show and found it compelling, there was a push to put this show front and center. From the article I read because of the sales received by US Weekly, other weekly magazines are now hopping on the Teen Moms bandwagon, so now it seems the women from this show now have been placed in that realm of reality celebrities.

I’m not going to get into the ethical land mine of talking pregnant teenagers and making them stars, thus giving the possibility of other pregnant teens without the MTV or magazine support system to think they too can become stars. That’s a discussion for another day. What I am concerned about, on a general level, is the gatekeeper mentality still in the press and the effect it can have on us.

Here’s what I mean; it struck me that the article I read said there were editors at US Weekly that watched the show and because of this they fought hard to get the story on the cover. Once it was on the cover sales rose, because sales rose other magazines put the Teen Moms on the cover and a few months later there is a hot show that ‘everyone’s talking about.’ Like The Bachelor and the whole Real Housewives series, you have a set of reality shows where I think there are less people that care about it than the press coverage would indicate. Because of the guilty pleasure of a few editors the shows became ‘hits’ because coverage of the shows have been non-stop. I can go to a number of friends of mine and they wouldn’t know Pam from Jane from Janet on any of the Housewives shows. They wouldn’t know which bachelor broke up with which woman. We don’t watch the shows yet many weekly magazines show us these one named people as if they are friends we talk to every day. The sad part of this constant bombardment is there are people who might know more about Snookie and The Situation than they do about their Congress representative.

A true story; when Jan Brewer made her gaffe and it went national, I was surprised at the number of people I knew, all very astute people, who didn’t know who Jan Brewer was. They knew about the bill SB1070 in Arizona, they knew about the female governor but they didn’t put together that the woman making the gaffe was the same governor. The same people did know that Snookie was called a Lindsay Lohan wannabe by the judge in her case. While the Jan Brewer incident got a lot of press, more press and more recognition was given to Snookie, a woman who has no sway politically, intellectually or culturally to us.

Gate keepers are forcing trends on us, because they think it is a trend. Glee is supposedly this great show, yet I don’t know anyone who has watched it, knows what it is about and I’m not sure if they would care if they saw it. I’ve heard my circle of friends talk more about Lost than of Glee but the supposed trendsetters have moved away from that. How long will we allow magazine editors, who are far away from the real lives we live, dictate what is a trend or not? How long will we have them force Housewives, pregnant teens and preening gilded man boys upon us and try to convince us this is the norm?