SALT actress Angelina Jolie is considered the world’s most powerful celebrity right now for controlling the media, Joanna Hunkin of TV NZ points out. Hunkin reveals, Jolie, is among the very few celebs who do not employ a publicist – and that’s because she prefers to handle all matters of public image herself, with an iron fist nonetheless. Because she only gives out interviews to outlets who run favorable stories on her, she literally forbids them from covering anything even remotely negative – like Morton’s book.
Thus, she controls the media. “You won’t hear a peep of it through Hollywood’s entertainment news network. Extra, Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight and The Insider have all chosen to ignore the scandalous tome, despite it earning instant best-seller status. And despite the fact they whole-heartedly embraced Morton’s last book – a similarly unauthorized biography of Tom Cruise. [...] Morton’s publishers, St Martin’s Press, claim Hollywood is being intimidated into ignoring the story. Publicity director John Murphy told the Hollywood Reporter the shows are worried about losing access to Jolie and Brad Pitt. ‘The feat that might have been imposed on these so-called entertainment news shows by the Brangelina PR machine has got them running scared from the story’,” Hunkin writes.
According to the report, it’s the media’s fault for being thusly controlled by Jolie. Presumably, flexibility and competition among media outlets allows the actress to have the final say in negotiations for an exclusive, and thus to impose her own terms for the coverage she gets. That is to say, if publications in the US were all to say no to her from the start, eventually she would have to give in and play the game by the same rules as every other celebrity out there. Of course that would also mean that they’d lose their exclusives. With exclusives, they’d also lose millions and millions of dollars in advertising – and, clearly, none is willing to risk that.
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