Overkill

[cloughie]

I don't really think it is such a new phenomenon, the main difference simply being that there is so much more media ( internet and 24 hour rolling news ) The media available at the time was pretty much flooded by the deaths of say Marilyn Monroe or Elvis Presley. And on a more localised level, the front pages were held for entertainers like Tony Hancock or Eric Morecambe.

Or indeed John Lennon.

[Petrushka]

24 hour rolling news seems to exist in a bubble of its own but then has to fill the time with stories to justify its existence. Moreover, the people who run the media outlets these days will be in their 30s and 40s, possibly early 50s, precisely the age when the celebrities now passing away would have been part of their formative years.

Fifty years ago was a different world. Notable deaths would have been merely noted on the news bulletins, though hands up those who can still vividly recall the footage of the death of Donald Campbell crashing on Coniston Water in an attempt to break the world water speed record 50 years ago next week?

Showing how completely detached I am from today's world, and having scant interest in either films or pop music, I'm afraid to say I had to look up George Michael, Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds to see who they actually were.

[jean]

I was trying to highlight the gap between the unnatural tragic deaths that happen on a daily basis, these being largely ignored...

How could it not be so? Our brains are not equipped to retain memories of the deaths of people we know nothing of, however tragic those deaths may be.

[Nick Armstrong]

How could it not be so? Our brains are not equipped to retain memories of the deaths of people we know nothing of, however tragic those deaths may be.

I remember discussing this at school in relation to the sonnet by Australian poet John Blight (1913-1995)

Death of a Whale

When the mouse died, there was a sort of pity;
The tiny, delicate creature made for grief.
Yesterday, instead, the dead whale on the reef
Drew an excited multitude to the jetty.
How must a whale die to wring a tear?
Lugubrious death of a whale; the big
Feast for the gulls and sharks; the tug
Of the tide simulating life still there,
Until the air, polluted, swings this way
Like a door ajar from a slaughterhouse.
Pooh! pooh! spare us, give us the death of a mouse
By its tiny hole; not this in our lovely bay.
-- Sorry, we are, too, when a child dies:
But at the immolation of a race, who cries?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

It's a mistake to compare newspaper coverage of such events today with those of even thirty years ago; as Pet says, the world of reported news is very, very different - papers are losing customers, and any that does not have the photograph and story of a celebrity death taking up the front page isn't going to sell as many as those which do. It's not so much "overkill" (which I've always found a little , erm ... y'know; tasteless in this context) as "undersell".


Artists/performers bring great joy and solace into people's lives - people feel grateful to them for that spot of pleasure that momentarily brightened up a grey evening. I am still feeling the loss of Elliott Carter; for more than thirty years, a new work of his was a real event to look forward to, and it's still a cause of sorrow that nothing new will appear again. But few people share such enthusiasm, so his death was reported in passing (at best) - his death did not significantly sell more copies. Millions of people were grateful for Carrie Fisher because of the repeated pleasure they repeatedly get from watching the Star Wars films - they are saddened that someone who brought them this pleasure has died - and they buy the newspapers to take the clippings to put in their Star Wars scrapbooks (or equivalent).

It's the economy, silly (as someone once didn't say)!

[Richard Tarleton]

Rudolph Valentino's death 90 years ago was greeted with mass hysteria, just imagine that scaled up by TV rolling news and social media....

[Lat-Literal]

It's a mistake to compare newspaper coverage of such events today with those of even thirty years ago; as Pet says, the world of reported news is very, very different - papers are losing customers, and any that does not have the photograph and story of a celebrity death taking up the front page isn't going to sell as many as those which do. It's not so much "overkill" (which I've always found a little , erm ... y'know; tasteless in this context) as "undersell".


Artists/performers bring great joy and solace into people's lives - people feel grateful to them for that spot of pleasure that momentarily brightened up a grey evening. I am still feeling the loss of Elliott Carter; for more than thirty years, a new work of his was a real event to look forward to, and it's still a cause of sorrow that nothing new will appear again. But few people share such enthusiasm, so his death was reported in passing (at best) - his death did not significantly sell more copies. Millions of people were grateful for Carrie Fisher because of the repeated pleasure they repeatedly get from watching the Star Wars films - they are saddened that someone who brought them this pleasure has died - and they buy the newspapers to take the clippings to put in their Star Wars scrapbooks (or equivalent).

It's the economy, silly (as someone once didn't say)!

I like this post because I agree with it in almost every respect. The death of Carrie Fisher is a memory of being invited to stay several times with a friend and his parents in Essex. They were a new life experience for me - very wealthy, very Conservative, very friendly and very generous - and part of what enabled me subsequently to accommodate an understanding of One Nation politics although that was coming to an end. The mate was "Star Wars" crazy and I really was not so he campaigned to get me to see the film - twice - by covering my bedroom door each morning with "Star Wars" stickers. At these times, it is that sort of thing one recalls and then remembers it was decades in the past.

Similarly, I am sure that "Careless Whisper" is for many a couple a candlelight dinner and even the beginnings of the birth of a child. I am not saying that is for them George Michael but it is probably more George Michael than George Michael was himself. That is not the case with me but there is many a record or series of records which feel linked emotionally, environmentally, spiritually, politically, conceptually. Van is never quite Van, is he, and Dylan is more than Dylan. Others are often postcards from or on our beaches.

As has been said, extensive coverage is brand new and as old as the hills. Re the new, many under 35 would find it quaint that so much criticism is focused on newspapers etc. It suggests news could be managed differently when social media has ensured it is unmanageable. Re the old, I recall a grumpy manager of mine saying that he had especially taken a dislike to Manchester United because the newspapers went overboard about their famous air crash and the club had always milked it. I thought it harsh but know that the recent air crash involving a Brazilian football team would not have had as much coverage if that event hadn't happened. And, of course, a comparison was made over and over again.

Finally, there is also a point about what it is to be young. 53 is now young. Fisher's 60 and Wood's 62 are now young. Parfitt at 68? What about 74? What is young? It isn't what it would have been in the 1960s and that change provides the newspapers with more scope to justify extensive coverage of celebrity death on the basis that someone wasn't old.

[teamsaint]

odd really.

If you need an in depth newspaper article ( with all that this entails) to remind you about the importance /value/legacy/choose own word as appropriate/ of a particular person in the public eye, then they probably weren't that important to you really.

I went back to Wiki to remind me of the chronology of Wham and George Michael, and mostly all this achieved was to remind me of the fact that his music mattered little to me, other than that it seemed to me at the time that it was possibly keeping other music from having the public attention that it deserved. But that was , and is , just an opinion.

The important things, IMO, are to ask the question, ( every time, of every news story) " Why is this being presented to me this way,", and to examine our own reaction, since our own response is all we can control.


Apart from the "off" button, of course.

[Serial_Apologist]

If society and the world were organised differently to respond to human need and potential instead of divide and waste, there arguably wouldn't be the need for these celebrities or events focussed on them to act as pegs on which for us to hang our scarcely articulated grievings.

[eighthobstruction]

I went back to Wiki to remind me of the chronology of Wham and George Michael, and mostly all this achieved was to remind me of the fact that his music mattered little to me, other than that it seemed to me at the time that it was possibly keeping other music from having the public attention that it deserved. But that was , and is , just an opinion.


.

If I remember correctly these are the words of an XTC fan....Yep Wham and the like helped to stop both XTC and Comsat Angels becoming the megabands they should have been....<true thought but knowing it's laughable emotgi>

[french frank]

Our brains are not equipped to retain memories of the deaths of people we know nothing of, however tragic those deaths may be.

But it isn't a question of 'retaining' memories, since these are news items. People of 90 can die and people will say, 'How sad'. Yes, it is rather sad that human beings grow old and die; it is sad when those we love die; it is sad when those who are not so old die of illness; it is sad when people who are not so old die unexpectedly, in some sudden or violent circumstances.

But how sad it is seems now to depend on how much value we put on the loss to ourselves individually, how much it means to me, when people who we don't know personally, neither friends nor family, die. But to miss a film or TV star, or a singer, or a musician - are these things in our lives that are so overwhelmingly important? But the media turn these people into 'stars' while they're living; so what else can they do but make their deaths headline stories?

I remember Eddie Fisher, former husband of Debbie Reynolds, and who I now discover was the father of Carrie Fisher (whose name meant nothing to me other than I thought I'd heard of her). He died in 2010 and I don't recall much fuss being made about it.

[Serial_Apologist]

But it isn't a question of 'retaining' memories, since these are news items. People of 90 can die and people will say, 'How sad'. Yes, it is rather sad that human beings grow old and die; it is sad when those we love die; it is sad when those who are not so old die of illness; it is sad when people who are not so old die unexpectedly, in some sudden or violent circumstances.

But how sad it is seems now to depend on how much value we put on the loss to ourselves individually, how much it means to me, when people who we don't know personally, neither friends nor family, die. But to miss a film or TV star, or a singer, or a musician - are these things in our lives that are so overwhelmingly important? But the media turn these people into 'stars' while they're living; so what else can they do but make their deaths headline stories?

I remember Eddie Fisher, former husband of Debbie Reynolds, and who I now discover was the father of Carrie Fisher (whose name meant nothing to me other than I thought I'd heard of her). He died in 2010 and I don't recall much fuss being made about it.

Given that it is the media that turn these people into stars, and that stars once valued for their abilities/ capacities for conveying commonly experienced feelings and identifications are more and more reduced to celebrities in the sense of people whose artificially-inflated lives are intentionally constructed to be gawped at, I think the whole phenomenon of stardom with its aura of glamour is more there to act as embodiments of our own feelings of separation, isolation, alienation, unfulfilment. As such, while seemingly individualised in terms of the way the media is received in our individual boxes, each occasion become its own set piece; and as a by-product, as others have pointed out, it sells newspapers.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

But to miss a film or TV star, or a singer, or a musician - are these things in our lives that are so overwhelmingly important? But the media turn these people into 'stars' while they're living; so what else can they do but make their deaths headline stories?

I don't think they do - or, at least it's a two-way process. The news/telly media can't make a film star - no amount of publicity could make (for example) David van Day or Mike and Bernie Winters "stars"; the person has to have something which a large audience appreciates and responds to. Then the media latches onto this popularity, responding to the large audiences willingness to pay to discover more of the person's background and secrets. The more the public buys newspapers (or tunes into a news broadcast once they know that the person is going to feature) the more the papers/telly will include them prominently, because they know they will sell copy. And so a "star" is born - if the public isn't interested in the celebrity's work, they won't go out of their way to buy copy, and the moment of fame passes.

Star Wars is "important" to millions of people, and even "overwhelmingly important" to thousands - the media know this and they'll exploit the deaths of Carrie Fisher (as they will Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill when ... many years from now, I hope ... they die) because it gets readers/audiences. If economic historians and/or poets were what fascinated millions of people, they'd be the celebrities on the front page; but none of the media can make millions of people get excited by poets or economic history.

[jean]

But it isn't a question of 'retaining' memories...

Although I claimed to be replying to this post of Alpie's

I was trying to highlight the gap between the unnatural tragic deaths that happen on a daily basis, these being largely ignored, deaths of celebrities by natural causes.

it was really this one I was thinking of:

This is just one tragedy that will be forgotten by most people within a couple of days, because they aren't celebrities.

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.t...?client=safari

[Richard Tarleton]

I don't think they do - or, at least it's a two-way process. The news/telly media can't make a film star - no amount of publicity could make (for example) David van Day or Mike and Bernie Winters "stars"; the person has to have something which a large audience appreciates and responds to. Then the media latches onto this popularity, responding to the large audiences willingness to pay to discover more of the person's background and secrets. The more the public buys newspapers (or tunes into a news broadcast once they know that the person is going to feature) the more the papers/telly will include them prominently, because they know they will sell copy. And so a "star" is born - if the public isn't interested in the celebrity's work, they won't go out of their way to buy copy, and the moment of fame passes.

I mentioned Rudolph Valentino above - perhaps the first case of mass hysteria, and someone who'd actually done something people could relate to. The first person famous merely for being famous, and thus entirely a media construct, was apparently Zsa-Zsa Gabor (b. 1917-ish), who also died just the other day. My point being, it's not that new a phenomenon.

By a weird symmetry, Zsa-Zsa Gabor's son (whom I'm sure none of us has heard of) died just a few days after his mother.