According to a report by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press in 1997:
"In an era in which virtually all Americans share very few things, the story of Princess Diana's death captivated the nation. . . Modern communications have spawned an ever increasing diversity of tastes and interests and decidedly smaller audiences for everything from news stories to sit-coms. Add to this growing public cynicism and distrust, and the consequence is that there are very few things to which everyone pays attention. . . Jessica McClure is the only other individual to have ranked with Diana in news interest."
One of the most interesting conversations I had with D. Lance Lunsford in Midland was about how the Jessica McClure rescue was the first story that all the networks covered at the same time. I don't have all the research to back this up, but apparently it was when CNN's 24-hour coverage was still new (CNN started in 1980 but wasn't profitable until 1985.), and the other networks discovered that when they didn't continuously cover the rescue, their ratings went down and CNN's went up, so the other networks had to cover the story incessantly in order to compete. As Lunsford put it to me, the Jessica McClure rescue was the "proving ground for the 24-hours news medium as a conduit to the masses."
I know that nothing exists in a vacuum and no one person could be a single contributing factor to the insanity surrounding us today. BUT, I also wonder if, in a very broad sense, the Jessica McClure rescue was a catalyst (perhaps even a partial genesis) of our modern Us Weekly mentality? Did the coverage of the rescue help to feed the frenzy that led to things like the O.J. Simpson Bronco chase, and even more tragically, to the paparazzi chase that ended Diana's life? It's a rolling stone that only gathers more moss when you think that coverage of Diana's death further fueled our culture's demand for incessant media coverage, the kind of coverage that leads publishers to introduce to the world the "gift" of the Britney Spears crotch shot?
If Baby Jessica and Britney Spears are both All-American Girls, America's-sweetheart types, how did we get from rescuing a baby to publishing pictures of a pop idol's snatch?
Did Baby Jessica, in a metaphorical sense, grow up to be Britney Spears?*
*more on this later. I've got a billion Baby Jessica=Britney Spears theories.
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1 comment:
Good point on how this was the star of freedom of the press, or abuse of the press.
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