Undoubtedly there’ll be more keystrokes spent discussing the rise and fall of Ms. Goody over the next few months than have been spent discussing the collapse of the world banking system, but there is a common thread linking the two.
Media Hypocrisy.
Admittedly, media hypocrisy is on the same tautological level as ‘wet water‘, but the about turns taken by some media outlets have been tremendous.
Take good ol’ Auntie Beeb for example. The broadcaster has spent most of the 21st Century showing us how to make use of cheap credit to buy a battered house, do some creative botching with MDF for a couple of quid, and then sell it on to some poor unassuming punter for a hugely inflated price. Now the credit crunch has kicked in to full flow and we’re all living in skips, the Beeb has stopped showing “Artificial Inflation” and started showing screeching news bulletins where economy experts berate us all for taking out ridiculous loans in order to buy run-down houses after seeing some TV brainfart.
But even this “Get cheap credit – no – wait – why have you taken out a loan you moron!” backflip is put to shame by the way that the rags have decided ”RACIST BULLY JADE” (Daily Mirror 1/04/2007), the national disgrace is now BRAVE JADE (Daily Mirror 14/02/2009), the national heroine. In the bleak face of the facts, she’s neither. She’s an ill-educated boor who seized her fifteen minutes of fame and was then struck down by an awful illness. The black and white facts of Jade Goody’s story are more than enough to let anyone with a passing interest decide what they think of her, but the press insist on keeping her centre stage. Whether as a figure of hate or a figure of pity, Jade Goody shifts papers. The sad thing is that she doesn’t shift them because of talent – she shifts them for the same reason idiots spent money they never had on MDF and subsiding houses.
Jade Goody’s the credit crunch in reverse – she’s been thrust into our homes and taken from irrelevancy, to the villain, to a martyr. The legacy of her sad tale is that now the gutter press won’t just make you live in the glare of a camera – they’ll make you die there too. Be you a z-list celebrity or a system of world economics, they’ll gild your pedestal and then tear it down.
Posted by adnesq 
