By MICHAEL LEVINE
Anna Nicole Smith was born Vickie Lynn Hogan an ordinary girl until Playboy magazine ran some extraordinary pictures. Like a butterfly, she became Anna Nicole, new media icon. Men soon lusted after her, the press hounded her, and she loved every minute of it because, in fact, she was living her dream: She had become A Celebrity.
Was Playboy alone responsible for her stardom? Absolutely not. Credit must be shared with a whole host of cable television channels and magazines whose essence lies in dogging celebrities to reveal their “inner-most secrets” through candid photos of their every waking moment.
Technology can certainly take much of the credit, or blame, for today’s culture of celebrity. We turn on the TV the minute we awake and frequently leave it on all day while surfing the ‘Net, emailing from BlackBerries, and downloading to our iPods.
But our love of technology and increasing worship of man-made devices erodes our sense of reverence and any connection with the sacred. We’re so busy recording the present for posterity that we often miss the magic of the moment the very mystery that links us with holiness.
Destroying the divine
What characterizes holiness? Any people would agree upon an inherent sense of mystery there must be something unknowable. To know everything there is to know about someone is to practically destroy the divine within them, and by default, within ourselves. We lose respect for others, ourselves, and for the very magic that is life.
Nowhere was this more apparent, and appalling, than during the recent media feeding frenzy that surrounded the tragic, premature death of Anna Nicole Smith. All three cable news networks used more airtime to cover her demise than the current race for the White House. The gap was greatest at Fox News, where the ratio of Smith to Campaign 2008 was 4 to 1.
What does this say about our priorities as a nation, as human beings and as a culture? Young men and women daily risk (and many lose) their lives soldiering in far off lands, yet our attention is riveted to the latest overdose? Still?
Celebrity deaths always cause a stir, but nothing signaled the dawn of a new (dead) day more than Elvis’s death in 1977. That night, CBS Evening News led with a story about the Panama Canal treaty, and it was pummeled in the overnight ratings. Ron Bonn, that evening’s news producer, conceded years later that his decision to open with hard news versus celebrity fare “may have been out of tune with the national consciousness.”
Twenty years later when Princess Diana died, Western news media had learned their lesson well and covered almost nothing else for days. Cable TV’s mantra may as well have been, “All Diana, Dead, All The Time.” Was she important? Perhaps. A celebrity? Like no one before or since. A good photo of Diana was potentially worth millions of dollars. So when she died, was that media frenzy overkill? Absolutely.
Whether we are preoccupied with celebrity lives or death, as the case may be, the question becomes, “What kind of society are we, or do we want to be, if we lose our sense of reverence if we lose our connection to, or quest for, the mysterious and sacred?”
With the increase in technology’s ubiquity has come an increase in our daily dependence on it. Yet, how many people live with increasing anxiety that stems from never turning technology off to reconnect with nature? With silence? With one’s true, inner self? Technology is the enemy of reverence because the worship of it has caused us to cease seeking the sacred, however we define it.
If we are to retain some spark of the divine within ourselves, then we in the media must pay attention to more than just the bottom line that our reporting brings in. Let us resolve to keep a healthy perspective on who and what we cover and why. Our reverence for life is evident not only in our coverage of here and now, but also how respectfully we address the hereafter.
Michael Levine is the founder of the public relations firm LCO-Levine Communications Office in Los Angeles and is the author of 18 books.
