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| AGE OF CELEBRITY | |
 July 27, 1999 
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The NewsHour Media Unit is funded by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts.
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TERENCE SMITH: Richard Rodriguez referred to ours as the "Age of Celebrity," one that colors public attitudes and journalism today. To explore that further, we're joined by Richard Reeves, an author and syndicated columnist. He was an on-air commentator for CBS News during the coverage of the Kennedy plane crash. Richard Schickel is film critic for Time magazine. He has written about the beginning of he modern celebrity system. And Leo Braudy is a Professor of English at the University of Southern California and author of Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History. Gentlemen, welcome to you all. Richard Schickel, I wonder what you thought of the coverage of JFK, Jr.'s death and whether it seemed to you the sort of wretched excess that some people feel it is.
TERENCE SMITH: Professor Braudy, you're a student of fame. Is this age of celebrity different than others before it?
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| Virtual families on the screen | ||||||||||||||||||||
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TERENCE SMITH: But what goes on there, that watching over and over again? Is there this -- the word "closure" is sometimes used referring to the public. RICHARD SCHICKEL: That word makes my teeth ache. TERENCE SMITH: Richard Schickel. RICHARD SCHICKEL: We have really no right to closure with someone like JFK, Jr. We don't know him. I mean closure is something that we need to have if someone near and dear to us passes on. But it's a false connection. We are intimately involved with a stranger that we know only as Rodriguez says, through the pages of People or through television. And to me, it is an awful presumption on privacy, even though that person may not be, as this man was not, a private citizen. LEO BRAUDY: I'm not so upset about that, I don't think.
LEO BRAUDY: Yes. I'm not upset about that because I think, in fact, one of the things the media has done, the media world in which we live, has created numerous virtual families. And this is one of our families; that is, we have emotional relations, of course, with people who are nearest and dearest to us but we have other sorts of emotional relations with other kinds of people that we don't know at all. And so it's not so much "closure" as a kind of repeated ritual that happens to us again and again and that the media treats us to again and again that we participate in. |
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| Television as an environment | ||||||||||||||||||||
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TERENCE SMITH: All right. Richard Reeves, we've had a little technical problem getting through to you, but if you can hear me, I wonder what you think. You participated in this coverage on CBS News through much of this time. Did you feel that it was over the top?
RICHARD REEVES: Well, I wouldn't spend my day watching it. I suppose some people did, but in a way people getting as close to it as they could at that point, and if that's what they wanted to watch, and if in some way it was important to them, that's fine. I mean, they had the option to live in that part of the environment or go wash the car or do the other things that people do. TERENCE SMITH: All right. Richard Schickel, what do you think of that, of that defense of repetition and of the process? RICHARD SCHICKEL: Well, I mean, first of all we all know what the score was. And the score was really a very simple score. It seems to me that the second issue that's arisen out of this is this business of the public wishing to participate in the process of mourning, which is someone else's process -- you know -- the whole business of leaving flowers and teddy bears and the like at the doorstep of the deceased -- something that started, I think, with Princess Di, maybe it has earlier precedence -- but it is a process by which ordinary people attach themselves to the celebrity of celebrated people. The question of what kind of a celebrity JFK was is another nice question. I mean, you know, he was an obviously agreeable, intelligent young man full of promise that was as yet unfulfilled. So, you know, you have a peculiar creature, a creature who is, you know, basically had celebrity thrust upon him by history, was never able to escape it, but was never able to make it his own in the full sense of the word. And I think that creates a whole bunch of problems along the reality-fantasy continuum that -- you know -- cannot be addressed by the simple business of turning on cameras and letting people tune in and out on the drama. TERENCE SMITH: All right. Professor Braudy, what do you think is going on in terms of popular culture when people do leave flowers or teddy bears, as Richard Schickel says, at the site of some tragedy, be it Princess Di or JFK, Jr.?
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| Journalism and suspense | ||||||||||||||||||||
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TERENCE SMITH: And, Dick Reeves, if you can still hear me, does this seem to you a kind of redefinition of news of the notion of news?
TERENCE SMITH: Richard Schickel, supply-side history? Is that what we're getting here? RICHARD SCHICKEL: I think it is getting more and more important to cling to a traditional definition of reality. I think there are realities that are not photographable realities. They are realities in our daily lives, our real family lives, if you will. I think it's important to keep the emotions appropriate to those separate from these more inchoate virtual family emotions. Obviously one is sympathetic to those people. But I think there was something in this story that I think no one has mentioned here and that is the really marvelous way the Kennedys handled it -- burying him at sea, the private memorial services, the incredibly graceful eulogy of Ted Kennedy. There was a real sense on the part of the Kennedys, I felt, to defend themselves against these intrusions, without being rude about it. And I think that if there was anything hopeful in this death, it was in their response to this clawing into their privacy. TERENCE SMITH: Intrusion, clawing into privacy, Professor Braudy? Is that what's going on?
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| Redundant news | ||||||||||||||||||||
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TERENCE SMITH: A final word, Richard Reeves, if you can still hear me. I have the feeling that as you went through this process, you were more sympathetic to it than when you started out. Is that correct? RICHARD REEVES: Well, in terms -- I was working for CBS, yes I did become more sympathetic to it. TERENCE SMITH: Why? RICHARD REEVES: Because, one, these people have checks out there all the time and as soon as they went away from the story, half the audience tuned to other channels which were still covering it. And second, I had never really understood -- I was sitting next to Dan Rather for hour after hour -- why the redundancy existed and it was because you had to assume that people were coming on who had not been on before and you did have to catch up to do that. So I did -- I became sympathetic enough to think television is here. It's our environment, get used to it. TERENCE SMITH: Dick Reeves, Professor Braudy, Richard Schickel, thank you all three very much. |
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RICHARD
SCHICKEL: It's now ritualized wretched excess. It seems to me that the
media, most especially led by the all-news networks, but then inevitably
followed by all the other networks, really are asking the public to
take part in what amounted to the old-fashioned death watch. But that
was a function of journalism in those days of, you know, a few representatives
of the public distilled the essence of the experience and reported it
to the public. Now the public is part of that entire process. And I
think that makes for an exquisite and tortured mix of public and private
experience.
LEO
BRAUDY: Well, it's certainly different in the quantity and the available
media and the kind of penetration of imagery that washes over us everyday
and the inescapability of it. It's possible now to keep watching the
same story again and again 24 hours a day, and it gets that kind of
drumbeat in the blood that there are certainly precedents for in the
past but never so extensively.
TERENCE
SMITH: Professor Braudy, go ahead. 
RICHARD
REEVES: No, I think it was over-covered. I think it was over covered,
but it was a real story in terms that there were beautiful people there,
was suspense, there's the great back story of the Kennedys, everything
that entertainment is built on. But I think we have to grow up about
television. It's not a media. It's an environment. People are living
their lives in interaction with television, and also the question of
it -- the same things being repeated over and over again, a lot of that
has to do with of course people switch televisions on and off. And just
as when they watch a baseball game, the first thing they want to see
when they turn on is the score. And, in effect, some of the over and
over again is repeating the score for people who, as it were, have just
joined the game. My feeling is that that's what journalism is. I think
the great problem that comes out of this is the fact that what is done
visually now is going to be history. If it's on television, people ten
years, fifty years from now, will be watching it. And I also like to
say that the business of an age of celebrity, which it certainly is,
part of that is the way television has democratized our lives. Everyone
is the same size on television. A person going down Demoore Street in
Tribeca, or the President of the United States, are the same size on
television, and sometimes they sound better than the President does,
but there is nothing we can do about all of this. This is the environment
in which we live. It's not buying a newspaper. 
TERENCE
SMITH: Dick Reeves, while we still have you on the phone there, what
did you think when you saw, and perhaps participated, as the coverage
went on during the burial at sea? Nothing visible was happening, other
than a ship off in the mist, and yet it went on, on some channels all
day long. What did you think of that? 
RICHARD
SCHICKEL: Well, I think it's something that's very much connected to
the way in which the media works these days in and our relationship
to the media, and particularly to television. It's not just as Richard
Reeves was saying that everybody is the same size on television. They
are also in our living rooms. They are part of some kind of extended
family. And we feel that they are somehow, at least emotionally, I mean,
never have met them in the three dimensional flesh, but they are somehow
part of our emotional family. And so we bring them gifts; we bring them
flowers when they are gone. We feel upset. And the Kennedy's particularly,
I think, are that kind of family. I mean, look at all the sitcoms on
TV. The premise is the "Cheers" syndrome almost -- the place
where everybody knows your name. Well, it's not that everybody knows
your name, you know their name, too. The Kennedy's may not know your
name but you certainly know their name. They're part of your family.
They are certainly probably the prime American family in this way for
our participation in the events of their lives. And so that virtual
family, that virtual kind of emotion -- I don't mean to denigrate it
by saying it's virtual. It's a different kind of emotion -- we exploit,
we feel good about when we see that ship floating out there, it's about
the emotional place of that ship, rather than the factual place of that
ship.
RICHARD
REEVES: I tend to think that the news is the same. This was an interesting
story by any measure in popular media. Again it had people we knew.
There was suspense and part of it was the government and airline people
were - just refused to admit at the beginning that they knew what had
happened. It took more than 24-48 hours for that to play out. So that
I think it's legitimate news - news is what's happening at the moment.
You get a report, let's say, Dallas, the President has been shot. Oh,
my God. Someone has shot at the President. Oh, my God, has he been hit?
Yes, he's been hit. Oh, my God, is it serious? Yes, it's serious. Is
it life threatening? Yes. That's the suspense of journalism that goes
on. The bigger problem, I think, is how we will deal with the kind of
supply side history. That is, whatever there are pictures of are going
to live in some sort of digital future of history while extraordinarily
important things that were not photographed or were not on film may
die out or just be the property of an elite of people who do old-fashioned
things like read books.
LEO
BRAUDY: Well, one of the most interesting things that's happened certainly
over the last ten years or so, let's say in the intensification of the
age of celebrity is this continued erasure of the line between the public
and the private, and certainly the idea that there is a virtual family
and a real family encourages the fuzzing over of that line. And many
people do it. Now many people no matter -- perhaps closure is not a
very good word. I used to think it only had to do with the Senate --
but in fact for individuals, if somebody is feeling upset and they take
a bouquet of flowers and they drop it there and don't feel as upset
anymore and they feel they've made their statement, that's fine. If
they start stalking, if they start doing all the extreme kinds of celebrity
attacking, crossing the line between public and private behavior that
we're all too familiar with, then it moves into a kind of madness.