Jade Goody – The Media Says Tearful Goodbye

Jade Goody has died, and with her goes one of the strangest times in media history – a death rattle that sounded for weeks, from a person so visible that it is, paradoxically, impossible to get a real handle on.

The weirdness began back when Jade was given the news that she had terminal cancer live on TV, and continued through a Max Clifford-augmented media storm that picked out every last detail of her waning existence. It was as complete a portrait of human demise as I can ever remember – strange, ogled details included “Jade’s dress is fitted with pain drugs” from the Evening Standard, or “Shuddering Jade’s lips turn blue” in the Sun. Every day, an everyday death on the front pages – no wonder people are pointing to it changing our attitudes about death. 

Sadly, she’s also become a medium for reflected glory, with Michael Jackson and Jordan shamelessly squeezing PR mileage out of her imminent death. And Clifford’s promise back in February that “we are very close to the end in terms of what we’re going to do media-wise”, the media still steamrollered in and over the end – the Sun recording her last hours (“Jade Goody was propped up in bed yesterday — to catch one last glimpse of the sun-kissed fields before she dies”), OK! promising exclusive access to her “last words”.

Equally nauseating were the opinion columns – Carole Malone saying we should quit the horrific voyeurism in horrifically voyeristic language (“she doesn’t look pretty any more. She looks sick. But most of all she looks hunted—like an animal”), and Harry Mount attacking her for her lack of intelligence. Today we’ve got Jan Moir’s confused thinkpiece, swinging between pettiness (“Jade and Jack wrote their wedding vows themselves, the kind of handcrafted homilies you might expect to see stamped on a mug or tattooed on a sailor’s bicep”) and judgemental conjecture (“she ignored the two follow-up letters from her cervical screening. If she had not, there is a very good chance that she would have lived”).

It’s tempting to attack Clifford, but the high profile was what Jade wanted, however much that fact was promoted by Clifford to absolve himself. And in his spinning of the story as creating awareness about cervical cancer, he’s created a blessedly positive message that neuters the bad taste that would be left by the scrutiny otherwise – without it, the story would have run anyway, nakedly voyeuristic and far more uncomfortable for everyone. 

And so we say goodbye to a woman who resembled less a person and more a media touchstone, a locus for all the mythologising and dreams the media get their biggest paydays from. We’re encouraged to see her as the mirror in which we see ourselves and our mortality – that sells papers – but we musn’t forget that we really don’t know her at all. Not like her husband, not like her children.

But now that that constant source of revenue has disappeared, where are the media going to turn their gaze next? Fred Goodwin! As a journo interviewed by the Guardian says: “Since he went to ground, pretty much every one of Goodwin’s addresses in the whole country and even in Spain is being staked out. If he breaks cover he’s going to have snappers and TV cameras following him as if he’s Michael Jackson”, while the picture ed of the Evening Standard said: ”He’s currently worth more than Britney, maybe hovering around the Brad and Angelina with kids price.” I think we’ve finally got ourselves our Greenspan!

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | March 23, 2009 3:41PM |