Amid Heath Ledger Fallout, Has Media Ignored Young Male Stars in Crisis?

By Eric Deggans, Huffington Post. Posted January 26, 2008.

Who knew the next blond starlet in crisis would be a man?

As I write this, actor Heath Ledger's death hasn't been attributed to Hollywood excess -- though police have said his room was filled with sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication.

But when I heard the 28-year-old actor had been found dead just months after splitting from his fiancee and the mother of his 2-year-old daughter, I wondered: Why hadn't we heard much about his problems before now?

At a time when we're drowning in dispatches about the various debilitations of Britney, Lindsay, Amy and Paris, news about the death of Oscar-nominated actor Ledger seemed to hit us from a pop culture blind spot.

Let's be clear about an important point: Because Ledger's death hasn't been explained, we don't yet know if he died from deteriorating personal circumstances. Friends and colleagues have said one reason his death is so shocking is because he wasn't the kind of party animal targeted by tabloid headlines.

But if addiction or suicide played a role, Ledger wouldn't be the only underreported male celebrity in crisis. Actor Brad Renfro, who nailed roles in the films Apt Pupil and The Client, struggled with substance abuse for years before his death Jan. 15. Wedding Crashers co-star Owen Wilson offered a clown's smile to the world before his suicide attempt in August.

And I've already written about how 24 star Kiefer Sutherland hasn't received one-tenth the media attention of Paris Hilton for his 48-day stay in the slammer over drunken driving charges in December. Hollywood lore says episodes of Fox's action adventure show may have been rewritten to cover Sutherland's injuries from drinking escapades, yet he escapes the caustic press attention lavished on young women self-destructing in Hollywood.

Even '80s TV icon Michael J. Fox sounded a sympathetic note in Esquire magazine: "I have such empathy for all these young women. I was there, and I did all that crap. We'd rip it up, y'know? And we never got busted on any of that stuff."

"I do think the celebrity news industry pays considerably more attention to the bad girls of the business," said Mark Jurkowitz of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which found coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's death and Hilton's incarceration were the only tabloid celebrity stories to draw huge amounts of coverage in mainstream media.

"Let's look at obvious factors: three including Lohan extremely attractive blond women with sex and sexuality as part of their larger story," said Jurkowitz. "There's a level of voyeurism which has to do with basic sex and sex appeal which makes these women ripe for more press coverage."

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Eric Deggans is the first-ever full time Media Critic employed by the St. Petersburg Times. Now serving as president of the Tampa Bay area chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists, he has also served on the board of directors for the national Television Critics Association and on the board of the Mid-Florida Society of Professional Journalists.

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