First and last words on the Jade Goody phenomenon.
Part of the reason I've abstained for the most part from commenting on the media/Jade Goody complex is that I've covered very similar examples here in the past ad nauseum. Goody is the latest continuation of what has been building in our media since the death of Diana: the perfect opportunity for the tabloid press to show they care while at the same exploiting the person for all they're worth, even if at the same time the person they're pretending to care about is also exploiting them. The line can be drawn fairly straight from Diana, through to Jill Dando, Sarah Payne, perhaps even Holly and Jessica, Madeleine McCann, Baby P at a stretch and now to Goody. The difference this time round is that Goody is still alive, for now; Madeleine technically is but was being treated as dead from almost as soon as she went missing. The fact that she was missing meant that she and her parents were fair game; to begin with they cooperated, then they were turned on, then they were rehabilitated. Remarkably like Goody, except she went through an initial process of vilification before being rehabilitated before once again being vilified.
The line of defence is that the media is expressing the public will, or the public mood: we too were grieving for Diana, we wanted the murderer of Jill Dando caught, we wanted to string paedophiles up by their testicles, we wanted to find Madeleine, and now we all feel the pain of Goody, of a life unjustly cut short by a disease that strikes us down at random. These moods can sometimes be fleeting, they can sometimes be lengthy, but the media will always be there to milk them to their full potential. Madeleine was only the most extreme example: a press which had lost all sense of its normal journalistic values, reduced to translating gossip in the local Portuguese rags, regardless of how heartless or defamatory, all because they believed that it was what their readers wanted, and that even if it wasn't, it was what they were going to get. Another justification increasingly cited is that the internet now allows constant, almost always unmoderated speculation and rumour, far beyond what even the Express published; the newspapers are only competing in a race to the bottom. It's wholly unconvincing, but expect it to be increasingly depended on as the recession deepens, advertising revenues fall further and circulations drop.
The case of Jade is however slightly different because it's the first real alignment between public relations and media which has dominated the tabloids for such a lengthy period of time. Most of the previous outbreaks of group-think were when those involved were either dead or missing, and when the only people who profited from it, apart from the media, if at all and hardly by much were the relatives. Jade is more comparable with those other individuals famous for no real reason, Jordan and Kerry Katona, the latter also previously handled by Max Clifford. Clifford is both a genius and probably the most shameless individual in the country, other than the tabloid editors themselves: his control and power are probably only comparable in the media world to, believe it or not, Sir Alex Ferguson, another person who can banish media organisations from his presence on the slightest of whims and with the same amount of accountability, namely next to none.
Clifford in fact didn't really devise the model of turning an individual into a brand; Jordan's people are probably those chiefly responsible. Jordan, or Katie Price is not just a perpetually surgically enhanced model, she's an underwear designer, a novelist, the modern equivalent of a diarist, a children's author, a singer, a horse rider, a perfume brand, even a porn star, if you're willing to count her amateur antics with Dwight Yorke which were released onto the net, while at one point she was even set to give birth live online. This edifice is of course a complete and utter sham: she no more writes a single word of her books than she does actively design the underwear sold under her name. Who knows, perhaps it isn't even really her riding a horse or on that TV show with her husband; everything else about her life is fake, why couldn't she herself be? The remarkable thing about all this is that in a world where the tabloids are prepared to scream at the slightest example of phoniness on BBC programmes, they completely indulge Jordan, Katona and Jade. Sure, they might occasionally run the odd article pointing out that Jordan doesn't actually write her books, but the Faustian pact between them is strong enough to ensure that it doesn't affect the next exclusives they've got lined up to keep the punters happy. The other thing is we honestly don't know whether those who buy the books or the garments actually care whether or not they're not getting the real deal: they probably don't. At any rate, the whole thing would be unlikely to come completely crumbling down even if the whole thing eventually turns out to be one long hoax to see just how low someone can go and get some of the general public to follow them.
It's only when someone makes a truly glorious mistake, such as that made by Goody when she bullied Shilpa Shetty that for a time they're sent to the dog house, awaiting their rehabilitation. In the most extreme examples this never happens: Michael Barrymore is one such case, and some of the other famous men accused of various crimes, both proved and disproved also come to mind. Some directly link Goody's subsequent living secular saint status to the fact she was diagnosed with cancer live on Indian Big Brother, but she had in fact been back in the tabloids and not been pilloried for some time before that. The cancer diagnosis though changed everything: sympathy will always win through, unless someone is either a paedophile or a murderer, as it ought to. This though has instead been taken to ludicrous extremes over the last few weeks, resembling a unending wake before she's even close to death's door, all the past insults forgotten, just as they were after Diana died, the harlot that betrayed the royal family turned into one of the greatest Britons to have ever lived, as Rosie Boycott so risibly argued (Interestingly, when Channel 4 did its equally unscientific 100 Worst Britons poll, Jordan came 2nd and Goody came 4th<, which was certainly unfair on Goody at the time). It has gone far, far beyond emotional pornography, instead evolving into the journalistic equivalent of an onanism obsessed teenager filling a whole drawer with spunk-laden tissues, not knowing what to do with them. The whole shallow, facile, revolting spectacle has been variously defended on the grounds that it's encouraging young women to get cervical check-ups, which is far from a compelling reason but a slight positive side-effect, to the completely baseless one that Goody is doing it so that her sons can have the life that she didn't. This is nonsense, not only because Goody was already more than well-off before she was diagnosed, but also because it seems to assume that you can't do well unless you're financially stable and go to a decent, presumably private school.
The real reason I was driven to write this drivel was Madeleine Bunting's even worse article in today's Grauniad, a similar act of masturbation, albeit a pretentious one, trying to explain the Goody phenomenon in terms of the economic calamity. This has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with "needing to restore our faith in human nature", "grieving for the death of a fantasy world we have all been living in" or wondering what "sacrifices will we have to make as a nation to pull ourselves out of this economic mess", even if not all of those are directly thinking about Goody's death in these terms but instead through "tap[ping] into vague inchoate emotional anxieties", but is instead all to do with how Jade has been marketed and branded: she is an everywoman, and to those that have followed her, her death is similar to someone they know dying. With Diana certain people felt they knew her, through constantly seeing her life played out in the newspapers; with Goody this has been increased ten-fold, to the point where some probably are on the point of grieving because of her death, or even harming her, as the woman found with the hammer in her room may have done if not disturbed. Goody and the media have signed up because it benefits them both, and to hell with the actual effect that this real-life soap opera has on some people.
This obscene voyeurism is the ultimate tabloidisation of our culture, the latest pinnacle of the celebration of the completely unremarkable individual, the obeisance to the know-nothing. The worst thing of all is that the majority are almost certainly completely unmoved by Goody's demise, sad and sympathetic certainly, but not to the point where they want her to stare out from every tabloid front page for getting on for a month. It is instead being imposed on them by those in on the joke, those personally profiting from it. It just isn't funny. The real tragedy is that the woman with the hammer didn't cave it into Goody's skull and put all of us out of our misery.
The line of defence is that the media is expressing the public will, or the public mood: we too were grieving for Diana, we wanted the murderer of Jill Dando caught, we wanted to string paedophiles up by their testicles, we wanted to find Madeleine, and now we all feel the pain of Goody, of a life unjustly cut short by a disease that strikes us down at random. These moods can sometimes be fleeting, they can sometimes be lengthy, but the media will always be there to milk them to their full potential. Madeleine was only the most extreme example: a press which had lost all sense of its normal journalistic values, reduced to translating gossip in the local Portuguese rags, regardless of how heartless or defamatory, all because they believed that it was what their readers wanted, and that even if it wasn't, it was what they were going to get. Another justification increasingly cited is that the internet now allows constant, almost always unmoderated speculation and rumour, far beyond what even the Express published; the newspapers are only competing in a race to the bottom. It's wholly unconvincing, but expect it to be increasingly depended on as the recession deepens, advertising revenues fall further and circulations drop.
The case of Jade is however slightly different because it's the first real alignment between public relations and media which has dominated the tabloids for such a lengthy period of time. Most of the previous outbreaks of group-think were when those involved were either dead or missing, and when the only people who profited from it, apart from the media, if at all and hardly by much were the relatives. Jade is more comparable with those other individuals famous for no real reason, Jordan and Kerry Katona, the latter also previously handled by Max Clifford. Clifford is both a genius and probably the most shameless individual in the country, other than the tabloid editors themselves: his control and power are probably only comparable in the media world to, believe it or not, Sir Alex Ferguson, another person who can banish media organisations from his presence on the slightest of whims and with the same amount of accountability, namely next to none.
Clifford in fact didn't really devise the model of turning an individual into a brand; Jordan's people are probably those chiefly responsible. Jordan, or Katie Price is not just a perpetually surgically enhanced model, she's an underwear designer, a novelist, the modern equivalent of a diarist, a children's author, a singer, a horse rider, a perfume brand, even a porn star, if you're willing to count her amateur antics with Dwight Yorke which were released onto the net, while at one point she was even set to give birth live online. This edifice is of course a complete and utter sham: she no more writes a single word of her books than she does actively design the underwear sold under her name. Who knows, perhaps it isn't even really her riding a horse or on that TV show with her husband; everything else about her life is fake, why couldn't she herself be? The remarkable thing about all this is that in a world where the tabloids are prepared to scream at the slightest example of phoniness on BBC programmes, they completely indulge Jordan, Katona and Jade. Sure, they might occasionally run the odd article pointing out that Jordan doesn't actually write her books, but the Faustian pact between them is strong enough to ensure that it doesn't affect the next exclusives they've got lined up to keep the punters happy. The other thing is we honestly don't know whether those who buy the books or the garments actually care whether or not they're not getting the real deal: they probably don't. At any rate, the whole thing would be unlikely to come completely crumbling down even if the whole thing eventually turns out to be one long hoax to see just how low someone can go and get some of the general public to follow them.
It's only when someone makes a truly glorious mistake, such as that made by Goody when she bullied Shilpa Shetty that for a time they're sent to the dog house, awaiting their rehabilitation. In the most extreme examples this never happens: Michael Barrymore is one such case, and some of the other famous men accused of various crimes, both proved and disproved also come to mind. Some directly link Goody's subsequent living secular saint status to the fact she was diagnosed with cancer live on Indian Big Brother, but she had in fact been back in the tabloids and not been pilloried for some time before that. The cancer diagnosis though changed everything: sympathy will always win through, unless someone is either a paedophile or a murderer, as it ought to. This though has instead been taken to ludicrous extremes over the last few weeks, resembling a unending wake before she's even close to death's door, all the past insults forgotten, just as they were after Diana died, the harlot that betrayed the royal family turned into one of the greatest Britons to have ever lived, as Rosie Boycott so risibly argued (Interestingly, when Channel 4 did its equally unscientific 100 Worst Britons poll, Jordan came 2nd and Goody came 4th<, which was certainly unfair on Goody at the time). It has gone far, far beyond emotional pornography, instead evolving into the journalistic equivalent of an onanism obsessed teenager filling a whole drawer with spunk-laden tissues, not knowing what to do with them. The whole shallow, facile, revolting spectacle has been variously defended on the grounds that it's encouraging young women to get cervical check-ups, which is far from a compelling reason but a slight positive side-effect, to the completely baseless one that Goody is doing it so that her sons can have the life that she didn't. This is nonsense, not only because Goody was already more than well-off before she was diagnosed, but also because it seems to assume that you can't do well unless you're financially stable and go to a decent, presumably private school.
The real reason I was driven to write this drivel was Madeleine Bunting's even worse article in today's Grauniad, a similar act of masturbation, albeit a pretentious one, trying to explain the Goody phenomenon in terms of the economic calamity. This has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with "needing to restore our faith in human nature", "grieving for the death of a fantasy world we have all been living in" or wondering what "sacrifices will we have to make as a nation to pull ourselves out of this economic mess", even if not all of those are directly thinking about Goody's death in these terms but instead through "tap[ping] into vague inchoate emotional anxieties", but is instead all to do with how Jade has been marketed and branded: she is an everywoman, and to those that have followed her, her death is similar to someone they know dying. With Diana certain people felt they knew her, through constantly seeing her life played out in the newspapers; with Goody this has been increased ten-fold, to the point where some probably are on the point of grieving because of her death, or even harming her, as the woman found with the hammer in her room may have done if not disturbed. Goody and the media have signed up because it benefits them both, and to hell with the actual effect that this real-life soap opera has on some people.
This obscene voyeurism is the ultimate tabloidisation of our culture, the latest pinnacle of the celebration of the completely unremarkable individual, the obeisance to the know-nothing. The worst thing of all is that the majority are almost certainly completely unmoved by Goody's demise, sad and sympathetic certainly, but not to the point where they want her to stare out from every tabloid front page for getting on for a month. It is instead being imposed on them by those in on the joke, those personally profiting from it. It just isn't funny. The real tragedy is that the woman with the hammer didn't cave it into Goody's skull and put all of us out of our misery.
Labels: celebrity culture, emotional pornography, Jade Goody, Madeleine Bunting, rise of the idiots, tabloid analysis, tabloid junk
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