Gazza
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Hadley Freeman
guardian.co.uk,
'What have we learned from the death of Amy Winehouse?" asked the hapless MSNBC news anchor. As this question was posed on Sunday morning when nothing was yet known about Winehouse's death other than the sad fact of it, the only answer to this question was, well, we seem to have learned that celebrities die.
Yet even though this is proved many times every year, certain elements of the media still get the reporting of these deaths very badly wrong. Which is remarkable, considering how eagerly some tabloid newspapers and websites wish for certain celebrities – Winehouse very much included – to die, judging by their tendency to harass them and laugh at them to a degree that would make a psychotic playground bully blush.
There is nothing a tabloid likes more than a predictable story arc, and by "predictable" I mean the one that they think would sell the most copies of their publication. Hence the ongoing obsession with the Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie trifecta, and the eternal insinuation in all stories about them that, one day, Brad'n'Jen will reunite. (SPOILER ALERT: They won't.) Jude Law and Sienna Miller played the same part in the UK until they did reunite and promptly broke up again, going disobediently off the Happily Ever After script that the weekly gossip magazines had mapped out for them. Didn't they know they were supposed to stay together for ever, if only so we could admire Sienna's wedding dress and see Jude married off before all of his hair disappears?
Winehouse, was, for a while, the female counterpart to Pete Doherty: the celebrity the British tabloids trailed around London (mysteriously, these tabloids always seemed to know where they'd be), cackling with glee at, simultaneously, their wild life ("Caner of the year!") and their visible decline. To read tabloid journalists berating the drug dealers for their part in Winehouse's death is to hear the sound of a pot calling the kettle, if not black exactly, then certainly kitchen-based.
But Doherty and Winehouse both seemed to go off-script by daring to survive, if not quite being fully alive. Until this weekend, when Winehouse at last gave the media a collective orgasm of prurient crocodile tears by dying. At last we can wheel out those pre-written columns as we photograph her body being wheeled out of her house!
Which returns us to the only thing to learn from Winehouse's far-too-early death: celebrities die and many people appear at a loss as to how to cover such events. So here is a handy guide about what not to do when a celebrity you've been tormenting for years dies.
1. Don't print unproven conjectures about how they died.
A certain downmarket British tabloid * had two theories about Winehouse's death on its front page on Sunday, one claiming she "drank herself to death" and the other claiming she'd bought a buffet of drugs the night before. Now, I know you want to give your readers voyeuristic if not necessarily factually based thrills but make sure your claims don't contradict each other, at least not on the front of your website.
2. Don't use their corpse to bang your own drum.
Melanie Phillips waited a whole 48 hours before using Winehouse's death to launch into her favourite subject: "Britain has degenerated." But the prize goes to the Huffington Post with its article, "Amy Winehouse's Untimely Death is a Wake Up Call for Small Business Owners." Yes, and what does it tell us about the importance of organic vegetables? Stay classy, Arianna.
3. Don't use it to promote yourself.
More for fellow celebrities, this. U2 dedicated Stuck in a Moment to Winehouse, a gesture that would be more touching if (a) Bono hadn't already claimed it was for Michael Hutchence (one dead singer is the same as the next, eh?) and (b) if Winehouse hadn't famously told Bono to shut up at an awards ceremony and therefore, presumably was not a U2 fan. As for you, MIA, releasing a song called 27 pegged to Winehouse's death makes the time you claimed Gaddafi was "one of my style icons" look relatively tasteful.
4. And speaking of 27, enough about 27.
Yes, Winehouse died at 27. And so did some other celebrities! But how many died in the month of March? Or at 10:19pm? This 27 Club nonsense awkwardly hoiks separate individuals together and insinuates that their deaths are part of a great rock'n'roll tradition.
5. And speaking of tradition, enough of the "death foretold" nonsense.
Yes, Winehouse had her troubles but there was nothing "inevitable" about her or anyone's tragically premature death. I interviewed her in 2004 and she was funny, confident and healthy. I next saw her three years later at Benicassim, emaciated, disoriented and literally falling down the steps of an outside toilet. That was not "foretold". That was shocking.
6. Don't print photos or details that you gleaned through possibly distasteful means.
It would be very interesting to know how certain tabloids attained such detailed knowledge of Winehouse's alleged final drug purchase *, say, or how they always knew where to find her to take photos of her.
7. No puns, please.
It is a de rigueur part of covering the death of a celebrity – you gotta pun on the title of one of their songs or films, right? Actually, you don't. The New York Post's "They Tried to Make Her Go To Rehab, She Said No No No" was as predictable as it was stupid. But it was an American breakfast TV show that really, hopefully, took this schtick to its nadir, punning, sorta, on Winehouse's song title You Know I'm No Good to You Know I'm Dead.
I'm sure we're all looking forward to the Back to Black headlines following her funeral.
* The Daily Mail - no fucking surprise there.
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