The New Criterion

At least let us hear no more about the “cynicism” of the media. Miss Jade Goody, the British reality-TV superstar of whose approaching demise I wrote last month in this space, has now died; a nation has mourned her passing; and, in what David Aaronovitch of The Times of London rather hyperbolically calls “the war between Jade and the jaded,” I find myself unhappily classed among the latter group. “Cynicism,” claims Mr. Aaronovitch, “comes as easily to a journalist as hyperbole—sometimes even in the same article. There is a small media industry to build a Goody-type phenomenon up and a slightly smaller one to lament that such a vulgarity exists at all.” I would have thought that we lamenters form a much smaller “industry,” but let that pass. It’s true enough that the lamentations can become, willy-nil ...

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