Why Report on the Iraq War When You Can Cover Anna Nicole Smith?
Memorandum:
To: ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC
Re: Anna Nicole Coverage
As you are certainly aware, Anna Nicole Smith is dead. She's been dead for two and a half weeks now. But all of you insist on beating this story to death. Along with diaper-wearing, cross-country driving, love triangle-participating astronaut Lisa Nowak, Anna Nicole has received a nauseating amount of coverage.
Anna Nicole died. She was a celebrity. Sounds like a good two-minute story for the cable news channels and maybe a 30-second piece for the nightly newscasts. But wall-to-wall coverage on all the cable stations and long pieces on the networks? Two weeks after her death?
Five different men are claiming to be the father of her child. Her son died recently. She is still involved in court battles with her former husband about his fortune. She was in a legal battle over a home in the Bahamas. All of this is nice to know, but if anything, it has a place in US Weekly and the other trashy tabloids, and not on television news.
On Thursday, Feb. 8, I was in the Atlanta airport getting ready to catch a flight when I saw CNN's Wolf Blitzer hosting nonstop coverage about her death, calling it "breaking news." CNN medical correspondent and Emory faculty member Sanjay Gupta was brought on the air constantly to talk about possible causes of death. A CNN reporter was on the scene where she died interviewing people. It was complete overkill. It wasn't a former president who just died. It was a stripper turned playmate turned diet pill spokeswoman turned tabloid favorite.
On that Thursday, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which monitors cable news channels, the story about Smith consumed half of all coverage on those channels and a fifth of the overall coverage for the week, even though the story didn't break until Thursday afternoon.
There are a few journalists who deserve to be praised for refusing to give in to this Anna Nicole Smith nonsense. CNN's Lou Dobbs refused to cover Anna Nicole at all, saying during a preview of his show during Wolf's Blitzer's blitzkrieg of coverage, "...And over the course of the next hour... there will be no reporting... beginning at the top of the hour... on the passing of Anna Nicole Smith. We hope you'll join us... Wolf, back to you." After initially covering it, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly and NBC's Brian Williams both stopped focusing on the story.
There is a war going on in Iraq. There is another war going on in Afghanistan. American troops are dying every day. Iran is getting closer to nuclear weapons. These are all very newsworthy topics. Meanwhile, American media are obsessed with Anna Nicole Smith.
If the coverage would have lasted a couple days, maybe I would be a bit more tolerant of it. But it has been going on nearly non-stop, and has picked up even more last week as the trial over who gets her body concluded. She's dead. I don't care who gets her body. It is not news.
MSNBC has been the worst offender of Anna Nicole overloading, mentioning her name 330 times last Thursday, according to transcript searches done by TVEyes.com. But Fox News and CNN Headline News have not been far behind. CNN has finally toned down its coverage a bit, even daring to air an interview with Condoleeza Rice last Wednesday rather than an Anna Nicole court hearing that was covered on the other channels.
This madness needs to stop. News channels need to cover news, not celebrities.
Benjamin van der Horst is a College sophomore from Cincinnati. He is executive director of the nonpartisan political organization CSAmerica and the managing editor of the Emory Political Review.
This ran on 2/27/07.
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