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'Runaway' media has lost sight of what's real
By Renйe Graham, Globe Staff | May 3, 2005
Given the amount of coverage, one might have thought it was Osama bin Laden discovered in Albuquerque, N.M.
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It was, of course, a 32-year-old Duluth, Ga., woman -- the ''runaway bride" as newscasters have giddily dubbed her -- whose nasty case of pre-wedding willies has metastasized into the kind of media whirlwind once exclusively, but now rarely, reserved for actual news.
Ever since the revelation of Jennifer Wilbanks's stupid decision to duck out of her lavish wedding, scheduled for last Saturday, by pretending to have been kidnapped, there's been a dizzying parade of mental health professionals, criminal profilers, bridal counselors, and current and former prosecutors waltzing across TV screens to explain it all.
MSNBC had an hourlong special, hosted by that headache-inducing Dan Abrams, which aired throughout the weekend, and, no doubt, will clog up several more time slots in the coming days and weeks. ''Today" trumpeted its exclusive yesterday with one of Wilbanks's bridesmaids. CNN polled viewers as to whether stupefied groom-to-be John Mason should still marry Wilbanks.
(Even as the network was reporting the Wilbanks story, its ''news ticker" offered this accidental juxtaposition, in a promo for an upcoming topic on its weekend program, ''In the Money": ''Why isn't the US media covering the genocide in Sudan, very much, if at all?")
On ''Today," host Matt Lauer said of Wilbanks, ''As Ricky Ricardo would say, 'She's got some 'splainin' to do.' " All of the morning news shows yesterday had Georgia officials making the rounds to answer the same dull questions.
''We'll look back on how a case of bridal jitters turned into this kind of story," MSNBC's Abrams said with the kind of outraged incredulity one feels watching Abrams himself.
Yeah, Dan, why don't we just do that? It all began last week with an evergreen media favorite -- the disappearance of a young, attractive white woman. (How is it that media is collectively uninterested in missing women who are black, Asian, or Hispanic? Or average-looking? Or middle-aged?)
Even as newscasters and people like that awful Nancy Grace of CNN Headline News summoned up their best furrowed-brow gravitas, you almost see images of Laci Peterson dancing in their sharky little eyes. Here was another potential family tragedy they could exploit through the coming summer months. By Friday, they were already hinting -- with enough force to get the point across, but not so much that they could be later sued -- that Wilbanks's fiance could be a suspect.
Once the story was uncovered as a hoax, it should have been reported as such, and then dismissed. Instead, it was inflated into something of national importance, when really it concerns no more than family and friends of those involved, as well as the law enforcement officials who wasted time and energy looking for Wilbanks.
Yet like a big, dumb dog with more might than sense, the media just can't let this go. Scratching and clawing for new angles, they've interviewed other women who have skipped out on their nuptials, and, for no discernible reason, even Tom Smart, uncle of Utah teenager Elizabeth Smart, who was kidnapped in June 2002 and found and returned to her family nine months later.
Don't expect it to end any time soon. You can bet there's an unholy amount of jockeying -- will it be Katie? Barbara? Oprah? -- to score the hot ''get," the first interview with Wilbanks herself.
This is a golden moment for media hoaxes. First, there was the finger-in-the-Wendy's chili story, which garnered lots of airtime before the woman who made the accusation was arrested and charged with grand larceny. Then there was that quartet of mooks who convinced everyone -- except the Methuen police -- that they discovered more than $100,000 in old US currency while digging in a friend's backyard. Now, they're facing various charges, and police say they stole the money from the rafters of a Newbury barn.
As anyone who's ever pulled a practical joke knows, it always helps to have an gullible mark. These days, there's no greater dupe than the broadcast and cable news networks, which are more preoccupied with stories of water-cooler interest than those which are important or necessary. To wit, the misguided actions of one marriage-wary woman trumped coverage of the latest spike of violence in Iraq and North Korea's recent test of a short-range missile.
In an intense competition to top each other on the ''runaway bride" story, all that's been achieved is a dubious race to the bottom of journalistic standards by a runaway media, which, sadly again, has more than a little'splainin' to do.
http://www.boston.com/ae/media/artic...of_whats_real/
By Renйe Graham, Globe Staff | May 3, 2005
Given the amount of coverage, one might have thought it was Osama bin Laden discovered in Albuquerque, N.M.
ADVERTISEMENT
It was, of course, a 32-year-old Duluth, Ga., woman -- the ''runaway bride" as newscasters have giddily dubbed her -- whose nasty case of pre-wedding willies has metastasized into the kind of media whirlwind once exclusively, but now rarely, reserved for actual news.
Ever since the revelation of Jennifer Wilbanks's stupid decision to duck out of her lavish wedding, scheduled for last Saturday, by pretending to have been kidnapped, there's been a dizzying parade of mental health professionals, criminal profilers, bridal counselors, and current and former prosecutors waltzing across TV screens to explain it all.
MSNBC had an hourlong special, hosted by that headache-inducing Dan Abrams, which aired throughout the weekend, and, no doubt, will clog up several more time slots in the coming days and weeks. ''Today" trumpeted its exclusive yesterday with one of Wilbanks's bridesmaids. CNN polled viewers as to whether stupefied groom-to-be John Mason should still marry Wilbanks.
(Even as the network was reporting the Wilbanks story, its ''news ticker" offered this accidental juxtaposition, in a promo for an upcoming topic on its weekend program, ''In the Money": ''Why isn't the US media covering the genocide in Sudan, very much, if at all?")
On ''Today," host Matt Lauer said of Wilbanks, ''As Ricky Ricardo would say, 'She's got some 'splainin' to do.' " All of the morning news shows yesterday had Georgia officials making the rounds to answer the same dull questions.
''We'll look back on how a case of bridal jitters turned into this kind of story," MSNBC's Abrams said with the kind of outraged incredulity one feels watching Abrams himself.
Yeah, Dan, why don't we just do that? It all began last week with an evergreen media favorite -- the disappearance of a young, attractive white woman. (How is it that media is collectively uninterested in missing women who are black, Asian, or Hispanic? Or average-looking? Or middle-aged?)
Even as newscasters and people like that awful Nancy Grace of CNN Headline News summoned up their best furrowed-brow gravitas, you almost see images of Laci Peterson dancing in their sharky little eyes. Here was another potential family tragedy they could exploit through the coming summer months. By Friday, they were already hinting -- with enough force to get the point across, but not so much that they could be later sued -- that Wilbanks's fiance could be a suspect.
Once the story was uncovered as a hoax, it should have been reported as such, and then dismissed. Instead, it was inflated into something of national importance, when really it concerns no more than family and friends of those involved, as well as the law enforcement officials who wasted time and energy looking for Wilbanks.
Yet like a big, dumb dog with more might than sense, the media just can't let this go. Scratching and clawing for new angles, they've interviewed other women who have skipped out on their nuptials, and, for no discernible reason, even Tom Smart, uncle of Utah teenager Elizabeth Smart, who was kidnapped in June 2002 and found and returned to her family nine months later.
Don't expect it to end any time soon. You can bet there's an unholy amount of jockeying -- will it be Katie? Barbara? Oprah? -- to score the hot ''get," the first interview with Wilbanks herself.
This is a golden moment for media hoaxes. First, there was the finger-in-the-Wendy's chili story, which garnered lots of airtime before the woman who made the accusation was arrested and charged with grand larceny. Then there was that quartet of mooks who convinced everyone -- except the Methuen police -- that they discovered more than $100,000 in old US currency while digging in a friend's backyard. Now, they're facing various charges, and police say they stole the money from the rafters of a Newbury barn.
As anyone who's ever pulled a practical joke knows, it always helps to have an gullible mark. These days, there's no greater dupe than the broadcast and cable news networks, which are more preoccupied with stories of water-cooler interest than those which are important or necessary. To wit, the misguided actions of one marriage-wary woman trumped coverage of the latest spike of violence in Iraq and North Korea's recent test of a short-range missile.
In an intense competition to top each other on the ''runaway bride" story, all that's been achieved is a dubious race to the bottom of journalistic standards by a runaway media, which, sadly again, has more than a little'splainin' to do.
http://www.boston.com/ae/media/artic...of_whats_real/
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