About That Anna Nicole Coverage…
OK, let's talk Anna Nicole. There has been nearly wall-to-wall coverage of her death on the cable networks, and all three nightly newscasts covered it as well. The "Evening News" did the story about 10 minutes into the show – you can see it by clicking on the video box at left.
Video: Smith came to be a symbol of our celebrity-saturated media landscape, something not lost on journalists. As TV Newser notes, Brian Williams introduced the NBC "Nightly News" coverage like this: "This may say a lot about our current culture of celebrity and media these days when all the major cable news networks switched over to nonstop live coverage this afternoon when word arrived that Anna Nicole Smith had died."
On CNN, however, anchor Don Lemon said the celebrity factor had little to do with his network's coverage, arguing it was a legal story. "With everything that's going on with Anna Nicole Smith, that's the reason we've covering it, because it sort of supersedes entertainment. There are a couple of lawsuits at stake here, and it's just been a very tumultuous time for her," he said. His colleague Lou Dobbs, meanwhile, gloated in a promo for his program that he wasn't covering the story.
Smith's death was undoubtedly news, and some level of coverage is certainly justifiable. I may be in the minority here, but the coverage doesn't bother me the way coverage of stories like the "runaway bride" did. Smith's life was deeply compelling, deeply weird, and deeply American – Gawker's snotty but not entirely unaffectionate obit illustrates that fairly nicely. And the legal situation her death presents is pretty interesting. Would I like to see the media spend more time on serious matters and less speculating about her death? Sure. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't care about the story at all.