Cut to 1997, and Howard Stern, self-styled press critic, is on the air lambasting the media for shafting Mother Teresa. This wasn’t strictly true. Had she died in a different news cycle than Diana, Teresa would have received respectful coverage but nothing close to what she got last week. The networks would not have dropped anchor in Calcutta or hauled out all the color stories on India. Media executives know that religious stories are both undercovered and surprisingly salable–a happy confluence of editorial and business imperatives. But there’s no doubt that Mother Teresa’s legacy also got a cosmic boost from the shame felt at hyping an adulterous princess over a living saint. ““This was like God slapping the world in the face and saying, “What’s wrong with you?’ ’’ says Steve North, a producer of ““Rivera Live’’ on CNBC. Of course, in Geraldo’s case, God didn’t get much of an answer. For now, that show, like many others, is focused obsessively on the Diana death scene, hoping for a mini-O.J. in the making. Might Mother Teresa be a topic? ““Only if she had been run over by Prince Charles,’’ says North.
Ah! A bracing slap of tabloid truth, while the rest of us are practicing genuflect journalism. Viewers are on to this; they know electronic penance when they see it. But they still come out ahead, learning more about a saint’s life, Indian traditions and service to the poor than many of them ever knew before. After watching the funeral, hundreds–perhaps thousands–will be motivated to devote their lives to the destitute. Churches may feel some pressure to spend money on the needy instead of on more bricks and mortar for their comfortable congregations. We’ll all be subtly reminded that materialism–our civic religion–is at odds with the teaching of Christ. We’ll think again about the arguments against abortion and the death penalty. Not a bad day’s work for television.
Even so, an obit lover like me was unmoved by the funeral, and not just because of the audio problems at the service. It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t my fault. We can’t all be Mother Teresa, and we can’t all be Mother Teresa grievers. Did people feel guilty for not grieving more over the death of Albert Schweitzer, the last great friend of the Third World poor, when he died in 1965? Unlikely. Time magazine had put him on its cover earlier, but by the time he died he rated less than a page. Death has always been a ritual, and full of disputes about what constitutes proper respect. But only now has it become a global group grope.
““Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,’’ Tennyson wrote. He was talking about the mystery of grief. All the usual explanations of the impact of Diana’s death don’t fully account for the immensity of the response. To use a handy yardstick, NEWSWEEK’s Diana covers of the past two weeks were the best sellers not only of the year but of the entire decade. Among the other top sellers of the 1990s were covers on the deaths of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Kurt Cobain and Jerry Garcia. The phenomenon is the same at the local level. When a broadcaster and former baseball player named Richie Ashburn died last week, thousands of fans passed by his coffin lying in state in a Philadelphia park. A new Web site in his name (like a road shrine on the Information Superhighway) shows 40 articles already written about him.
Rituals of death have always loomed large in Roman Catholicism and other faiths, but the press in the past tended to focus more on life. Henry Luce, the founder of the Time Inc. empire, even had a policy that no dead person could appear on the cover of his magazines. After JFK was assassinated in 1963, NEWSWEEK ran the late president’s image on the cover, while Time featured the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson. After that, the policy changed, but slowly. When Elvis Presley died in 1977, neither magazine put him on the cover. This was clearly a mistake; his death touched a deep and newsworthy chord. But soon the commercial power of death became its own article of faith in the magazine marketplace. By 1987, People magazine, owned by the same company that stiffed JFK, was running a cover on the death of Liberace. From then on stars of long-canceled sitcoms could rate obituaries longer than those afforded heads of state.
So here we are with the morbid equivalent of war. News organizations that once mobilized to cover firefights now try to score tickets to hear a eulogy. The news business increasingly resembles the publishing and movie industries, which are built around blockbusters featuring people (actors, authors) the public already knows. Smaller movies, books and now news stories cannot easily survive against ““presold’’ events that guarantee a return from built-in audiences. In the glare, a person’s life gets judged in part by his or her death–by how the end measured up to expectations. Were the visuals and songs less moving in Calcutta than in London? Maybe so, but Henry Luce was on to something. Let’s give the death extravaganzas a decent burial and get on with the living.
