![]() ![]() This same strain of cynical, depersonalizing disdain helped Spears’s mental-health crisis become a gripping public spectacle-“the Britney Show,” as The Atlantic framed it in its 2008 cover story about the monstrous evolution of the paparazzi. Read: The hard lessons of Amanda Bynes’s comeback “But add a little show-business success to that package and top it with a potential half-billion dollars, and you’ve got a story.” ![]() I guess? After Smith’s death, Slate’s Jack Shafer analyzed the breadth of media coverage and found it not excessive: “Fat, no-talent, bleach blondes from Texas with breast implants aren’t rare,” he wrote. “I guess they just found the picture we chose unflattering,” the magazine’s editor, Kurt Andersen, said at the time. The headline was “White Trash Nation.” Smith sued: She’d been told that she was shooting an all-American look with glamour shots, and the chips photo was taken for fun during a break. In 1994, New York magazine put Smith on its cover, wearing a pink halter top and white cowboy boots, with her legs akimbo and a family-size bag of chips covering her crotch. Here was an audience so conditioned to seeing women in crisis as punch lines that even the death of one of them felt inevitably comical. To the people in that room, though, it had obviously felt like one. Ferguson interjects to stop them: “It’s not a joke.” ![]() “And I think we’re holding the camera,” Ferguson continues. “You know, you’d be laughing at the kid falling over and then you’d go, ‘Wait a minute, put down the damn camera and help your kid! What the hell is wrong with you?’” The audience splinters into laughter. He opens by invoking the media, and says that, lately, he’s had a similar feeling watching the news to when he used to watch America’s Funniest Home Videos. TV viewers have become accustomed over the past few years to talk-show hosts digesting difficult news and processing it for a nation to grasp, but in early 2007, when Spears’s erratic behavior and self-administered buzz cut consumed the public, Ferguson did something unexpected: He declared that he wouldn’t be making jokes about Spears. In a video that recently went viral after it was dug out of the aughts time capsule, the former late-night host Craig Ferguson brings up Britney Spears. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |