Dateline: New York, July 2000 -

aS the fun-with-facts crowd gather to shed new crockodile tears over the first anniversary of JFK Jr's death, I decided to re-visit ScreedMe's coverage of the the coverage of the original event. What was true last year remains true a year later - news people never met a death they couldn't turn to profit. And they're just as carfull as always to look appropriately sad turning it.

Dateline: Hyannis Port, July 1999 -

wITH nothing more to be said, we might now reflect on how we say it. It follows an old media pattern, more or less, with enough consistency to make me wonder if it's written somewhere in a how-to-book. John Kennedy's death was simply the latest installment. It seems to work something like this:

First - reports of "shock" at reports of the incident, quickly followed by thinly veiled anticipation of the worst, eventually followed by the worst's confirmation (the secret dream of ratings and circulation hungry news oligarchs) then immediate crocodile tears of media grief with lugubrious reflection on the victim's accomplishments, along-side lip-service supporting the privacy rights of loved ones left behind.

Next - predictable jealousy expressed through rhetorical questions like, "now if this were to happen to me, would I get burial at sea, a 21 gun salute, and a free subscription to People magazine?" The answer of course is always "no," because people who do get those things don't pose these rhetorical questions.

As days tick by and news of the incident runs dry, media mavens search for distance from their own silliness through the guise of critiquing their own performance, comenting without irony, for example, on the "frenzy" engulfing some hapless town, sometimes feigning disdain for unnamed colleagues carrying out the tasks they're paid to carry out, insisting that any repellent behavior is simply the lowly work of a sullied few.

A close cousin here, is media commentary feigning delight when media prey evades the bank of carnivorous cameras and atavistic hounds dispatched to capture them. In this case, the public kiss of death for news types seems to be public association with other news types.

Before the news runs dry, the conspiracies arrive, often galloping through town as the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse disguised as The Three Stooges, or vice versa. Their tales of chicanery and stealth emerge like eager snakes after a bad flood, and their message is never delicate ...

"Operating from a secret camp buried deep beneath Wayne Newton's Branson, Missouri tree-house, Queen Elisabeth worked with the late Shah of Iran's only living son to set up the Sting, originally constructed by Henry Kissinger and his long time lackey, Declan McManus, aka Elvis Costello. The plot took time and the beer bill was huge. That's where the IMF comes in."

Complementing this pattern, is a chronic case of video logorrhea. TV types, feeling the need to justify large paychecks in return for reading Teleprompters, snatch up corporate comped copies of this year's World Almanac of Facts. With it - and anything gleaned from Trivial Pursuit during an especially long snow storm - they launch a frightening verbal juggernaut of emptiness that runs rampant until the Nielsons fire a battery of crossbows tuned to "cancel."

As the field of news-observers leave to search for new fields of strife, we are collectively left with an outstanding observation: These electronic logorites taking human form are astonishing in their ability to yap, re-yap, then yap again, based on minutia gathered off everything from phonebooks and dictionaries to the content information found on gum wrappers.

Through it all, sits us.

As consumers, we like to play a similar game. It's sort of fun, admit it, to chew on all these various stages of trauma inflicted on others, repeating those electronically enhanced truisms that pass for keen observation, if spouted full time by part time TV faces and contributing by-lines.

When it's time to play our part, for downtown cameras, or Sunday lunch at grandma's, we obediently shake and/or hang our heads on cue, dab a tear if appropriate, and/or bark out some predictable contrarianism we've heard or read elsewhere.

Like the full-time observers for hire, we imagine we are beyond and above it all. Beyond and above. Beyond and above. Repeat enough, and it seems to come true. Then, just when we can slap our knee and stand straight, steeled by our emancipating revelation, we plunge back to earth, dropping into our chair, and therapeutically hammer out a little screed like this one.
 

Yours truly,
cOPY BOY-IN CHIEf

Xandor

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