Giving Them What They Want
It's an entertaining rant, but I'm not buying it. Yes, the media's coverage of Anna Nicole was often tawdry and embarrassing. But it's not as if it was foisted on an unwilling American public. As Lisa de Moraes notes, when "The Situation Room" covered the Smith story last week, the show's audience tripled. The New York Post reported that "coverage of the death of Anna Nicole Smith boosted the ratings of celebrity newsmagazines like 'Access Hollywood' and 'Entertainment Tonight' last Thursday and Friday."
"I know a lot of people are complaining about [the coverage]," CNN's Wolf Blitzer said at one point. "But a lot of people are also watching."
There is a tendency for people to bemoan the media's obsession with stories like Anna Nicole while ignoring the fact that public interest is driving the coverage. The vast majority of reporters involved in the Anna Nicole coverage, I would wager, would surely like to have been covering something more significant. But they weren't because Anna Nicole drives ratings.
This isn't to say that the media doesn't deserve some blame for the way they cover stories like this. One could even argue that the press corps helps create our appetite for these kinds of stories by treating real human beings like characters in a soap opera. But there is a large audience for stories like this, and that fact can't entirely be laid at the feet of the media. This hand-wringing about the press corps doing a disservice to the American people by covering stories like this thus rings pretty hollow.