When people ask me what's happened to big-time, modern, daily journalism, I can now stop making speeches about large corporations buying out smaller, privately owned papers, the greed exhibited by those same folks as they cannibalized a once-great business and, along the way, too often standardized what they call "the product."
And I can quit talking about the decline of the smart everyday reader. I can also shelve my oration about how the news business, once a haven for mavericks, blue-collar, self-taught writer-radicals and some of the gutsiest women I ever met, has become one more yuppie career, peopled by folks who side with the bosses instead of the subjects of their crime and court stories.
I can stop all of that and simply point to the amount of space both of our local dailies gave to the death of Anna Nicole Smith.
The tabloids, as expected, treated the poor bimbo's collapse into eternity at a Hard Rock Hotel in Bungback, Fla., like the second passing of Princess Di. That would have happened in any age, but the regular media - God help them and us - did it, too.
This wasn't Meryl Streep or Helen Mirren passing on. This was a Texas gal whose sole claims to fame were her pneumatic breasts, exhibiting those same breasts in Playboy and marrying a rich man, old enough to be my father, and then, after the poor fogy passed on (soon after the wedding), spending years trying to get and keep all his money.
Oh yeah, and recently having a baby that five or six guys, all of whom must have some idea of the fortune she was fighting for, claim is theirs. All five or six are willing to be DNA tested, too, which must mean they think they got to home plate at least once. Even Zsa Zsa Gabor's husband claims he has been going to the ANS well for years while ZZ doddered.
This poor woman, this poor Smith, had no talent and no discernible wit. She didn't even have Pamela Anderson's perkiness.
She was a spectacle, willing to do anything, however blandly shameless, to keep her fluctuating fat/skinny/fat body in the public eye.
Dead at 39. Sad. But deserving of two lines in any publication not a Smith family house organ? No.
Daily newspapers have been giving up their true function - to bear witness to their cities and, more importantly, shine the light of truth or at least semi-truth on the deeds of the brigands running that same metropolitan area they are supposed to cover for the citizenry - for at least the past 30 years.
Every daily reporter within sight of this column has been forced to sit in meeting after meeting as the bean counters struggle to find a way to hold on to declining readerships.
Focus groups ad nauseum, folks knowing little or nothing about newspapering, work to turn the publications into still-life television.
Endless features about lousy tube reality shows the readers supposedly watched the night before.
Endless features about restaurants a la trendy, and "local" sports stars that play here and live elsewhere.
And of course, wire stories originating elsewhere ad nauseam (it is worth writing twice, if only to get the nauseous idea in again) about people as trivial and ephemeral as Anna Nicole Smith, God rest her poor dumb soul.
Newspapers have been under pressure, yeah, but they have aided in their own demise - the number of dailies keeps shrinking. Think of the folks owning and running the Times and P-I into the ground as assisted suiciders.
Or, if you have gone down the slide with them, wait breathlessly for the Anna N. autopsy results. Cause of death will not be too much reading of the classics.
But whatever it was won't be buried at the back of the paper.
Hey, it's news, baby.
Dennis Wilken's column appears periodically in the Capitol Hill Times. He can be reached at editor@capitolhilltimes.com o 461-1308.[[In-content Ad]]
