Today is the one year anniversary of BNN!
Well technically the one year anniversary of what became BNN since this thread was originally instant release reports and eventually morphed into the weekly bulletin we now have.
Can you believe we’ve gone through twelve months of Justin Bieber news? It’s been a journey that was sometimes humorous, sometimes annoying, and sometimes just plain bizarre.
To commemorate this occasion let’s go back an revisit some of the most memorable stories BNN has covered.
This is the Bieber News Network Year in Review:
Obviously we have to start with the story that started it all.
February 24th, the internet is completely flooded with reports on what is apparently the biggest thing to ever happen in the history of the world. Justin Bieber has cut his hair!
People are outraged. How could he part with his iconic look?
As photos emerge some say they like the new style, but not enough. Justin loses
80,000 Twitter followers because his fans can’t stand to read updates from someone that changed his look on them.
When asked why he made such a drastic change, Justin simply said he had
gotten sick of the old style.
It seems that during an appearance on Ellen she made a joke about wanting a lock of his hair. At a following appearance,
he gave her one. That turned out to be fake, but the next time he was on he came through for real. He presented her with an autographed container of hair from the infamous cut and requested that she
auction it for charity.
After a week of intense bidding the auction closed with $40,668 as
the winning bid.
It was revealed that the winner wasn’t actually a person, but an organization. A casino bought the hair to
raise money for charity by sending it around
with its own guards.
February, word came out of an upcoming addition to Justin Bieber merchandise.
Beliebers had complained about a line of Justin Bieber dolls because
the hair was plastic, so a new series was coming out with
hair you can comb. Just what everyone needs! You can get yours
here.
Early March, Justin shocked his fans with another incident concerning hair. This time not hair on his head, but hair on his face. He revealed that he
was going to grow a mustache.
Selena
wasn’t happy with the news, but he went ahead with it anyway. Nothing much came of it immediately. It’s unclear if he gave up the idea or it just didn’t work out. But in November he did show off
one he managed to grow.
Early March, police force Justin to remain in his Liverpool hotel because they fear
his fans would riot if he came out.
March 14th, Rebecca Black becomes (in)famous for her
Friday music video and uses her newfound fame to express her
fondness of Justin Bieber. She
requested a duet with him and her fans
started a Twitter petition to make it happen.
Justin
tweeted a reaction to her song, but never responds to the collaboration plea. However he did sing
a few lines of Friday at one of his own concerts.
Late March, Justin and Selena are just beginning to make public comments about their relationship. Up until now they’ve kept it very secretive. Probably not a bad idea since Selena was
receiving death threats from jealous Beliebers.
As time goes on of course they become more and more open, eventually leading to a flood of public kissing incidents that
concerned Justin’s parents. A complete turn around from when it all began. They’ve come a long way from when Selena was on Ellen and seemed
ashamed to admit they were dating.
April 2nd, Justin’s mom celebrates her 35th birthday by going onstage with Justin and
lighting her hair on fire.
Mid April, a Belieber mistook some girl for Selena Gomez and mugged her. Not because she was excited to see Selena, because she wanted
to call Justin with her cell phone.
Mid April, word comes out of some new Bieber merchandise in the works.
Justin Bieber singing toothbrushes! The idea is that kids will brush longer because they want to hear the whole song. They come in ‘Somebody to Love & Love Me’ or ‘Baby & U Smile’ and
were finally released in October. You can get yours
here.
April 22nd, Justin reaches
9 million Twitter followers.
Late April, Justin goes on tour in Australia and seems to have a rough time. First
someone throws eggs at him while he’s on stage, and then he
got in trouble on the airplane. The egg thrower was arrested a week later
on unrelated charges.
Early May, Marg Helgenberger of CSI says
Justin was “a brat” when he was on the show and
he punched a cake.
Justin
called her comments “lame” and Beliebers agreed, saying cake punching is just part of “being a teenager” apparently.
A month later Helgenberger changes her assessment of Justin,
saying he is very talented.
I think the Belieber rage got to her. Pretty bad too it seems, as she was
still apologizing six months later.
Mid May, Justin unveils his Someday perfume.
It joins the
line of nail polish and the
scented dog tags and bracelets in his stock of fashion accessories.
He said he got into perfume because
how girls smell is very important, they should smell
flowery and fruity. If they do
then he’ll smell their necks. And according to the commercial
he’ll also take them flying.
He was almost
sued over the bottle design, but wasn’t.
On June 23rd it premiers at Macys in New York
which was mobbed by Beliebers.
In less than a month
Someday sales exceed $3 million.
It even gets its own ice cream flavor that smells like the perfume and has edible glitter. It’s called the Bieber Bocker Glory and costs
$32 for a little scoop. That’s just two dollars less than an ounce of the actual perfume. Here’s
a picture of each, not posted in the original bulletin.
The perfume was named
product of the year.
Justin tried a new marketing angle,
directing it at fathers.
Here are some
more statistics and information on it.
Mid May, it’s noticed that Justin had the Hebrew name for Jesus
tattooed on his chest. It was later discovered that
his dad did too.
May 28th, Justin reaches
10 million Twitter followers.
Early July, Justin and Selena go out for ice cream. Despite just having come from a $700 shopping spree, they find themselves out of money and have to
borrow from another customer.
July 14th, Justin reaches
11 million Twitter followers.
August 6th, for the second year in a row Justin comes in second in the
Celebrity Bowling Hall of Fame. This year he loses to Miley Cyrus.
August 16th, an 11 year old girl becomes mayor of Forney, Texas for a day. Her first official act is to
rename Main Street “Justin Bieber Way” for 24 hours.
Here’s an update on this that wasn’t posted in the original bulletin: There was such a reaction to the new name that city officials decided to keep the change for at least a week. Apparently this was too long for at least one citizen because
someone stole the sign. A replacement was donated and a security camera was installed so it didn’t happen again.
August 18th, Justin reaches
12 million Twitter followers.
Late September, tickets for Justin’s Mexico concert sell out, causing many young girls to cry uncontrollably. One girl in particular
completely loses it on the sidewalk. Justin sees a video of the incident and asks his Twitter followers to
help track the girl down. The Beliebers display FBIlike dragnet abilities, producing the girl’s identity within hours. Justin
gives her tickets to the show and calls her up to
sing to her on stage.
October 1st, Justin reaches
13 million Twitter followers.
Mid October, Beliebers are out of control. Within the span of a week they
ambush his hotel in Argentina by
breaking through barricades, then
swarm his hotel in Chile putting it
completely under siege, and then
mob his vehicle in Peru.
October 31st, Justin becomes the first musician to reach
2 billion Youtube views.
November 2nd, the biggest story since the haircut. The Yeater baby scandal.
A 20 year old named Mariah Yeater announces that Justin is the father of her 3 month old son.
At first the Bieber camp tried to ignore the claims, but when it became clear the story wasn’t going away they issued denials of everything saying Justin never even met Yeater.
While all this is unfolding, a whole different aspect comes into play. If Yeater’s story is true, Justin would have been underage at the time, meaning she could be charged with rape. Some see this as support for her claim, some see it as evidence that she’s just an attention seeker and didn’t think it through.
Beliebers send Yeater death threats.
As time goes on Justin denies all of Yeater’s claims more and more firmly, but she sticks to them and demands Justin take a paternity test.
It’s then found out that roughly a year ago Yeater had claimed her boyfriend was the baby’s father. She was so adamant that she assaulted him and broke a car window. The boyfriend’s grandmother was the one that brought this information forward. According to the police report, Yeater was due in court for the battery charges the next month.
Justin agrees to take a paternity test and promises to sure Yeater when it comes back negative.
Yeater adamantly sticks to her story, insisting that she has “credible evidence” that she’s telling the truth and that she would take a lie detector test.
Yeater goes on The Insider to talk about her claims, but instead gets shaken up. Maybe the reality of the situation finally sunk in. When shown a clip of Justin explaining why her claims were impossible she broke down and sobbed, then when the interviewer tried to talk to her she just stared blankly. When she was asked about ways she could substantiate her story, she got up and left.
A court date was set for the paternity suit for December 15th, just three days after Yeater’s court date for those battery charges.
Two of Yeater’s lawyers withdraw from her case for undisclosed reasons.
On November 9th, Yeater drops her paternity suit but continues to insist Justin take the test. According to her lawyer they aren’t giving up, they just want to settle this out of court. They also want a nondisclosure agreement put on the test so the results aren’t revealed to the public.
One of Yeater’s friends comes forward with text messages Yeater sent them which cast even more suspicion on her claims. The texts requested that the friend delete any messages where Yeater had claimed anyone but Justin was her son’s father and included an apparent bride saying “I’ll kick u when we get paid.”
Justin takes a paternity test but Yeater’s lawyer insists that he take another one because he wasn’t satisfied with the conditions.
A new character enters into all this. A 23 year old man insists he is the father of Yeater’s son and desires to submit a paternity test to prove it. Shortly after this he is arrested on drug and burglary charges. Yeater acknowledges that she does know the man, but denies his claim saying he’s just a liar that wants money.
After a period of stalling Yeater agrees to have her son tested and compare the results with Justin’s, but never does. Her lawyers won’t return calls from Justin’s people.
And that’s where we still stand to this day. It’s obvious now that Yeater has been lying, but the story has not had an official resolution yet.
November 3rd, Justin reaches
14 million Twitter followers.
November 30th, Justin reaches
15 million Twitter followers.
Late November and early December, as search engine statistics for the year come out, Justin dominates the lists. He was the number one
search on Bing, number two
search on AOL, and number one
search on Google.
January 1st, Justin reaches
16 million Twitter followers.
Early January, Justin gets an image of Jesus
tattooed on his calf.
Late January, Justin is touched by the story of a young woman who needed a lung transplant. He takes to Twitter to encourage people to become organ donors. There are
over 1,000 new registrations within a week.
February 1st, Justin reaches
17 million Twitter followers.
There it is, a year’s worth of Bieber!
Through this constant observation we’ve been able to follow a couple of distinct transformations.
When this thread started the attention was more on how people reacted to things Justin did, but as it progressed it changed its focus to more on Justin himself because Justin himself changed. We saw him go from a nice kid singer, someone we thought might finally be a decent role model for kids, to someone who we’re now thinking might not. He is far from terrible, but he’s definitely not the same person he once was. It’s hard to single out exactly what and when the change was, but since we’ve been watching him through it all we can tell it happened. Somewhere Justin changed from someone you felt was probably okay for kids to admire to someone who definitely could be a lot worse but you now feel like you should keep an eye on.
Justin and Selena have changed a lot about their relationship too. When it started it was kept very private. In fact we don’t know when it really started because it was a secret. After a while people started to have an idea something was going on, but they refused to confirm it. Even when it became pretty certain that they were together, they were very hesitant to talk about it. Eventually they finally came out and confirmed they were a couple, but still kept much to themselves. But then skip forward a few months and suddenly they don’t care who knows what’s going on. Every time you see them they’re kissing, sometimes very passionately. Big public dates, showy displays of affection, vocally announcing their feelings for one another. It’s a complete turn around from when it began.
As we enter a new year of Bieber news, we will continue to watch these and other situations unfold. It will certainly make for a fascinating study of the development of a young celebrity, but it’s uncertain what it will show. Personally, I hope we see Justin continue on a more or less decent path. Enough celebrities end up in the deep end, must they all? Time will tell.
The Bieber News Network is made possible by Views Like You.
BNN is not responsible for third party content.