Paris Hilton Did Not Exactly Claim to Have Invented the Selfie

By Bobby Finger  |  May 11, 2017 | 1:25pm
CelebritiesDirt Bag

Paris Hilton, long-time socialite and embodiment of the year 2005, was profiled by W magazine this week. The piece is more or less what you expect from a profile of Paris Hilton in W magazine, so I won’t get into much of its content here. (Read it later if you want, but please finish this first.) What I will get into is some FAKE NEWS being reported in response to the piece.

Look at this collection of headlines written since the W profile was published:

[Us Weekly]

[Elle]

[Glamour]

[People]

[The Washington Post]

[Daily Mail]

Hey, everyone? She didn’t say that. Let me quote the piece:

Despite Hilton’s longtime dependency on various cellular devices, it is perhaps visionaries like Steve Jobs who are indebted to her, seeing that it was Hilton who took their creations beyond their wildest expectations, inventing along the way the maligned but ubiquitous selfie.
“If a beeper had a camera, I would have taken a selfie with it,” said Hilton later, agreeing that she was truthfully the matriarch of the modern phenomenon. “I think I have a selfie from when I was a little kid, like on a disposable camera.”

Paris Hilton did not say she was the inventor of taking a photo of herself. That would be a ridiculous claim, as people have been photographing themselves with cameras for as long as there have been cameras.

The W writer asserted (and we’re to take that Paris agrees) that she was the “matriarch of the modern phenomenon,” which, first of all, barely means anything, but was probably intended to mean something closer to “she helped normalize the modern trend of shamelessly using your camera phone to photograph yourself, and was photographed taking selfies with Nicole Richie years before Kim Kardashian was photographed taking selfies of herself and her sisters” (which is hard to argue with) than something as extreme and hyperbolic as “she claims to have invented selfies.”

Give Paris a break! For once!

[W]

Is Kelly Ripa fine with Ryan Seacrest hosting the reboot of American Idol AND Live With Kelly & Ryan? That depends on whom you ask! Page Six’s headline suggests the former, but all the quotes from ABC sources suggest the latter. Just read these dueling statements:

Anonymous source:

“She doesn’t want a repeat of the Michael Strahan situation. It’s like ABC is once again diluting the attention on Live. She wants to make sure her show is Ryan’s first priority, not Idol.”

Seacrest’s rep:

“That’s untrue. He does not have a deal with Idol. He’s in conversations. His Live deal was made independent of any Idol discussions. His priority is Live With Kelly and Ryan and his radio show.”

Anonymous sources told Page Six, “It’s been a rough week for Ripa.”

An “insider” said, “Everyone is thrilled.”

Then, finally, ABC said, “Everything is categorically not true.”

So I guess the lesson here is to believe no one. Ever.

[Page Six]

God help us.