If a celebrity dies dramatically and publicly, you would expect the New York Times to cover it. But it urges us to avert our eyes:
Before television shined its warped light on her, Jade Goody was surely destined for a life of hardship and obscurity. Crude-talking, hard-drinking, overweight, barely educated, in debt, the child of drug addicts, she appeared on the reality show “Big Brother” in 2002 as a kind of token lowlife.
A token? She sounds like she came straight from central casting for reality TV, which claims its “reality” component by focusing on the trivial and dysfunctional – things too bizarre for scriptwriters. I suspect a lot of people watch reality TV to get some small comfort in seeing that their real life is not as ridiculous as the one they are watching.
But Jade Goody is destined for an early death from cervical cancer, and the media are wringing their hands over the potential for voyeurism and exploitation.
Voyeurism and exploitation are just fine, you see, when it’s all about making sport of a crude-talking, hard-drinking, overweight, barely educated, debt-ridden drug addict.
Death, however, is “grotesque” and must be hidden away:
This is reality television carried out to its most extreme, grotesque conclusion.
The media are nothing if not grotesque. It is a curious criticism coming from the New York Times, which has covered the Iraqi war with its own grotesque focus on body counts. All other realities of that conflict – goals, strategies, successes – were largely omitted.
The news media have a nose for the grotesque and few reservations about broadcasting it.
What do the media have to say when death is real and personal rather than statistical? Like much of modern culture, nothing.
Our culture is obsessed with attempts to manage death, to make it somehow elective. We assert a right to die and a right to choose in an attempt to soften death’s consequences. We politicize it. To buttress political arguments soldiers must die publicly, criminals must be executed privately, and babies are aborted clinically.
The media write easily about these collective deaths and the political implications of them, but individual death (which is what ultimately matters to us) leaves the media speechless and powerless.
No wonder they resort to calling the kettle black:
Now that she is dying, many of the same papers are now squirming with unease at their collusion in the endless building up, knocking down and exploitation of a woman they always counted on to increase their own sales.
I have no quarrel with Jade Goody dying on reality TV if she chooses. Her death is certainly not trivial and TV cannot make it so. Perhaps audiences will confront something consequential and palpable, for a change, and maybe some of them will be moved to greater understanding – to see that their own life is as fragile and transitory as Jane Goody’s.
The news media will cover it in their usual voyeuristic way and seek out a member of the audience with something grotesque to say.
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