Senior entertainment journalists believe Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown’s fightback against media “bullying” focused on her appearance will lead to a change in newsroom culture.
The 21-year-old actor posted an Instagram video earlier in March about what she described as the phenomenon of tearing young women down “for clicks” following articles about her own appearance.
She cited several Mail Online articles:
- Why are Gen Zers like Millie Bobby Brown ageing so badly?
- What HAS Millie Bobby Brown done to her face?
- Millie Bobby Brown mistaken for ‘someone’s mom’ as she guides younger sister Ava through LA crowd
- Little Britain’s Matt Lucas takes savage swipe at Millie Bobby Brown’s new ‘mommy makeover’ look
Brown said of the last article: “Amplifying an insult rather than questioning why a grown man is mocking a young woman’s appearance. This isn’t journalism. This is bullying.”
She added: “The fact that adult writers are spending their time dissecting my face, my body, my choices is disturbing and the fact that some of these articles are written by women makes it even worse.”
Senior showbiz journalists responded to the criticism on a panel at the Society of Editors Media Freedom Conference in London on Tuesday.
Chairing the panel, Telegraph associate editor Camilla Tominey said: “This has been a complaint particularly by female celebrities since the dawn of time,” citing Kate Winslet who has spoken about “appalling” body shaming she received while promoting Titanic in 1997/98.
Winslet said last year: “What kind of a person must they be to do something like that to a young actress who’s just trying to figure it out?”
Tominey suggested Mail Online is “probably the most critical of women’s appearance”.
Katie Hind, consultant editor showbusiness at the Mail, responded by referring to when she previously worked at The Sunday People and was told to write that Katy Perry looked fat, speculating that she was pregnant. Hind said she refused.
“You look at those women’s magazines as well, Closer, the circle of shame, it has been going a really long time.”
The “circle of shame” refers to magazines labelling female celebrities to point out cellulite, underarm sweat and other perceived imperfections.
Sun assistant editor Clemmie Moodie said she had previously done something similar while at the Daily Mail pointing out Madonna’s “old lady” hands and that she would not do this today.
Asked why this type of journalism is still happening, Moodie said: “It’s not so much the media that are instigating this and I think her [Millie’s] speech was amazing by the way and will probably change the way certain things are covered.
“I think it’s social media – I think it’s trolls… it’s speculation that then gets picked up on. So we are feeding the beast that is started by trolls or social media.”
Tominey echoed this, comparing it to the media having to “absorb a lot of criticisms” by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle “about what was happening in an unregulated social media space.
“Our counter-narrative was always well, at least we’re regulated by IPSO. At least people have a right of reply and if necessary, they can enforce the law. If somebody’s going to trash you in a Tiktok video, there’s very little, unfortunately… that you can do about it.”
Mirror associate editor and royal editor Russell Myers added that he thought what Brown said “will change things for the better” and that the media has a “responsibility to make sure that we’re governed by a moral code”.
Mail journalist receives ‘death threats’ after being called out by Millie Bobby Brown
In Brown’s video, she criticised several journalists by name. One of them, Femail writer Lydia Hawken, put out her own video apologising for what she wrote.
Hawken said the story had been assigned to her and was “not something that I proactively pitched… this is not an excuse or me asking for sympathy, because I still wrote it. But I want to be clear that this is something that I didn’t push to write and that I did not have editorial control over the headline.”
Hawken said Brown was “fully in the right” for calling out the story and that she was “sorry for writing the story and for not being brave enough to say no”.
The journalist added that she was “totally unprepared” for the consequences of being named by Brown. “Since being named, on an almost hourly basis I’ve received death threats, threats to my family and more… in the last 48 hours I’ve had a flavour of what it’s like to be scrutinised, and it’s been really difficult.”
Hawken said she resigned and will no longer write for the Mail. She added: “I hope that other young women in newsrooms can learn from my mistake and push back against these types of stories.”
Moodie at The Sun said editors “obviously have a duty of care for our reporters”.
She said a couple of members of her team were “really upset” recently because they were singled out by Katie Price on Instagram and trolled as a result.
At the Mirror, Myers said, there are monthly brand meetings “where people can share examples of stories that they might not be happy about and somebody might not have had the courage to speak up about at the time”.
Celebs tell journalists ‘your words have consequences’
The editors also spoke about how celebrities increasingly cite mental health issues “to stop stories running”, as Hind put it.
Celebrity agents get in touch to say it will “exacerbate” their clients’ mental health difficulties if a story is published, she said.
Hind said former Strictly Come Dancing professional Graziano Di Prima, who she revealed had been sacked for hitting and kicking his partner Zara McDermott, employed a crisis PR who told the Mail it should not write about him because “he’s very fragile”.
She said she received a letter on behalf of another celebrity not complaining about anything specific she had written but saying that “any time Katie Hind writes about our client, it affects his mental health”.
And she said a third unnamed celebrity sends frequent emails “saying your words have consequences”.
Tominey noted that it is “particularly difficult for tabloids” following the death in 2020 of Caroline Flack, whose inquest heard she was “hounded” by the press in the weeks before she killed herself.
Showbiz ‘lucrative’ for titles like Mail
Also in the panel, Hind noted that “showbiz is becoming a very lucrative part of journalism”.
She referred to Mail+, the partial paywall on Mail Online which has more than 163,000 paying subscribers since its January 2024 launch (initially in the UK, now also in Australia, the US and Canada).
Hind said “large amounts” of those subscribers convert from showbiz stories and that these are perhaps the same people who previously paid for a weekly celebrity magazine. They are proving to be prepared to pay for something in-depth, she added.
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