What was that noise?
Ah, nothing to worry about. It was just the final dying gasp of decency in tabloid journalism..
In what is apparently a world first, a British D-list celebrity magazine has just hit the shops with it’s special memorial issue celebrating the life and death of former “Big Brother” contestant Jade Goody. The cover talks of her “final words” and highlights from her life beneath the years 1981-2009. The world first in all of this is that she’s not even dead yet. Yup, she might even have read it.
The media coverage of the build-up to her death has had me feeling decidedly grim for the last few weeks with the red-top tabloids leading with “Jade’s Final _____” (fill in the blank) on a daily basis. While part of me doesn’t blame her for cashing in on the events to raise money for her kids future, I can’t quite understand how people can print and read this stuff without feeling wretched. It’s voyeurism at the highest level.
While I can grumble and decry the death of journalism all I want, coincidence has decided to play a wonderful hand in the whole affair by marking this very magazine as the key moment when journalism changed for the worse; the issue number is 666.
I don’t know, I don’t think this is a new low or anything, tabloids have always dished up this kind of shit. You can read books from early last century, like The Fountainhead, where newspapers are pulling the same kind of crap they pull these days. The culture of celebrity is nothing new. What is a recent development perhaps is the number of those celebrities who are famous for being famous (and usually dumb as a bag of hammers).
It infuriates me, always has, but, as you mentioned, it’s hard to blame the celebrities or the tabloids, they are both part of a machine, an industry, the issue I have lies with the people who read these rags, devour these stories. It’s pathetic, I can’t think of a better word for it, just pathetic.
I understand the desire for escapism and fantasy but to take your head out of the mud and stick it into a tough of this swill isn’t just a desire to find a little titillation and fantasy. It’s wallowing in sensation and schadenfreude posing as compassionless empathy. There’s something so dirty and dishonest about it all.
I’m sure you will be glad to know that even over here in Canada and down in the US Goody’s death made the news. I don’t think anyone here had the faintest idea who she was, but the furore surrounding her death in the UK created such a vortex of attention that the media over here couldn’t help but get sucked into its black hole. You will be delighted to know that many – knowing no better and drawing conclusions from the English coverage – compared her death to that of Princess Diana.
In the end she was someone who died of in everyday tragedy and it’s hard not feel a little compassion, as one would for anyone. She was monumentally dumb, self-centered and ignorant. An archetype for a generation.