It fascinates me the way people are lauded in death. The furore over the Chaser's song the year before last about all the dead celebs was a great example. Is it because we're confronted by our own mortality in a world obsessed by 24/7 media coverage and celebrity? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Jade Goody, the young British woman who tragically died from cervical cancer on the weekend. In anyone's language, it's a tragedy. She was only 27 and she had two young sons. The unusual thing about it is that her death was reported by the BBC World service as an actual news item. You may well ask why, I certainly did. Apparently her death was newsworthy because she was on Big Brother in the UK where she thought the region of England called East Anglia (or East Angular as she pronounced it) was in another country. Her fame grew for the wrong reasons when she was on Celebrity Big Brother and made racist remarks to one of her housemates.
Why oh why are people captivated by this? The grotesque thing, which is probably fitting really, considering she lived by reality TV, she also died by it, with her final days managed by PR "guru" Max Clifford. She said she did this to ensure her children were provided for. But what is that going to do to them when they grow up, and even now? Not only do they have to deal with their mother's untimely death, but what is normally an intensely private situation has been played out in the full glare of the media. People have compared it with the death of Princess Diana. And it's true. There was misplaced, mass hysteria then, and now too.
And if people in the public dare call it for what it is, they're lambasted. Noel Gallagher of all people actually put it the best I have seen:
"I mean, I've got fuck all against Jade Goody, that's nothing to do with me," Gallagher continued. "But it bends my head. That, to me, sums up, in one tiny five-minute thing on the news, what an embarrassing place Britain is right now. You might as well shut Number 10 Downing Street down and get Max Clifford to run the country"
Monday, March 23, 2009
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Fuckby League
Sorry about that last post. It was a bit vociferous and self indulgent. Oh hang on, that's what blogs are for isn't it?
I've had a shitty 24 hours, so you'll have to excuse me once again because it seems I have at least one leg in my cranky pants today. A lack of sleep and chasing small, screaming children has a way of doing that to a body. Luckily I have a lot of good TV series on DVD that keep me just enough in a fantasy world to make all this a little more bearable.
It's such a middle class whinge, isn't it? As soon as I typed all these complaints I thought of all the other people in the world doing it so much tougher than me. And that would be most of them, really. As if I have anything to complain about.
Today, I'd like to rant about the abhorrent way in which the Manly Rugby League club went about its tawdry little smear campaign to try and discredit the alleged victim in the sexual assault case against Brett Stewart. Media Watch did some great coverage of it. You can see it here on their website.
I can believe the club would do this because they seem to operate in a boozy misogynistic bubble (actually, I do worry it's more wide spread than that), what I can't believe is that it made it to air on Channel 9. Surely there was someone in the newsroom who voiced concerns over running "news" which wasn't actually new, and which has no relevance to the case at hand. Trying to discredit the victim in this situation is what the defence counsel always does and even they have been asked not to do this kind of thing in court, but we all know TV journalists are above the law (hello Ben Fordham). Watching Peter Overton reading the story I thought to myself "you have a daughter, how would you feel if she was in this situation and someone tried to use something you'd done to discredit her claims of assault". It's just appalling.
What I wonder is if it's just isolated left wing housewives like me who think this kind of shit is wrong, or can most people see it for what it is? I hope so.
I've had a shitty 24 hours, so you'll have to excuse me once again because it seems I have at least one leg in my cranky pants today. A lack of sleep and chasing small, screaming children has a way of doing that to a body. Luckily I have a lot of good TV series on DVD that keep me just enough in a fantasy world to make all this a little more bearable.
It's such a middle class whinge, isn't it? As soon as I typed all these complaints I thought of all the other people in the world doing it so much tougher than me. And that would be most of them, really. As if I have anything to complain about.
Today, I'd like to rant about the abhorrent way in which the Manly Rugby League club went about its tawdry little smear campaign to try and discredit the alleged victim in the sexual assault case against Brett Stewart. Media Watch did some great coverage of it. You can see it here on their website.
I can believe the club would do this because they seem to operate in a boozy misogynistic bubble (actually, I do worry it's more wide spread than that), what I can't believe is that it made it to air on Channel 9. Surely there was someone in the newsroom who voiced concerns over running "news" which wasn't actually new, and which has no relevance to the case at hand. Trying to discredit the victim in this situation is what the defence counsel always does and even they have been asked not to do this kind of thing in court, but we all know TV journalists are above the law (hello Ben Fordham). Watching Peter Overton reading the story I thought to myself "you have a daughter, how would you feel if she was in this situation and someone tried to use something you'd done to discredit her claims of assault". It's just appalling.
What I wonder is if it's just isolated left wing housewives like me who think this kind of shit is wrong, or can most people see it for what it is? I hope so.
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