Articles give me a lot of pain! Here is the latest one.
From the Yahoo! News page –
Have you seen Facebook posts claiming to link to a video message that actor Robin Williams made before his death earlier this week? Do not click on it — the video does not exist. The post was created by scammers looking to make a quick buck off the tragic death of a beloved entertainer.
…a beloved entertainer? Why not …the beloved entertainer? Especially when we are talking about the tragic death which surely talks about RW and no one else?
I remember when MJ died, all news read the pop singer inside their bodies because we are certainly taking about MJ, the pop singer and not anyone else.
This said, when the news is about the defined person, why would we use a to describe him by his profession/quality?
These pieces of news looks okay to me.
Obama, on holiday in Martha's Vineyard, referenced Williams' array of beloved performances as he led the tributes to the entertainer – i24news
It’s all just… sad, and it feels like a terrible waste. I guess there is a wider conversation to be had about mental health, but I’m really not qualified to take part in such a discussion. All I can do is mourn the entertainer – The Moderate Voice
Best Answer
It's a and not the because the phrase is part of an attributive clause describing scammers. Here, looking to make a quick buck off the tragic death of a beloved entertainer tells us what type of people the scammers are. It's very likely that, to them, the important bit is that this person is someone famous, not that it's Robin Williams specifically. They would be glad to use this ploy to make a quick buck off the tragic death of any celebrity who had died. Thus, the precise identity of the deceased (which is what using the would mean) is incidental; any beloved entertainer would do, hence a rather than the.
The case of MJ, the pop singer is different because the pop singer is an appositive clause serving to identify a particular, unique Michael Jackson among the various famous ones. If instead pop singer were being used to qualify rather than determine MJ (if he were much less famous and the reader needed some additional context to know who he was, say), then using a would be appropriate, and it would tell the reader a bit more about him. For example, consider this conversation: