Articles

Ravenous Media Ate Up Bride's Tale

By Mike Buffington
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
May 4, 2005

So a woman in metro Atlanta gets wedding jitters and runs off to New Mexico. A search ensues until she calls home to confess her gambit.

Then all hell really breaks loose as the big media have a field day chasing this "runaway bride" story.

But from where I sit, it looks more like a "runaway media" story.

This is important national news? A runaway bride can cause Fox and CNN to air hours of breathless reporting? Radio stations discuss and debate the event? The Atlanta Journal-Constitution runs war-size headlines about the woman on its front page?

Either it's been a slow news week, or we in the media really have our priorities messed up.

The truth is, we're feeding at the trough of a shallow celebrity culture. It's all around us. We're inundated with it. Real issues that require thought and reflection have been replaced by fluff profiles of the famous or infamous.

Maybe the only good thing about the "runaway bride" is that she bumped the sordid Michael Jackson trial off the air for a while.

It used to be that only the broadcast media was guilty of this cult of celebrity. But now even my own business, newspapers, is trotting down this muddy road of celebrity overkill.

On a recent flight, I picked up a copy of The New York Times. Among newspaper folks, the Times is regarded as THE standard in reporting serious news.

And yet, as I read through the "old gray lady," it struck me how much of that newspaper's content was also based on celebrities.

From sports to movies to books to fashion, the paper focused on celebrities at the turn of every page.

Has our culture become so shallow that we have to surround ourselves with celebrity gossip on every issue in every medium?

There was a time when only teenagers and college students cared about celebrity pop culture. Teen heartthrobs have long been the staple of TV, music and movie culture.

What has changed is that now even adults are caught up in this cult of celebrity. Go to any newsstand and look at the covers of magazines — nearly every one has a celebrity of some kind on it.

Much of this pap is, of course, harmless. But when the mainstream media begin exploiting runaway brides as "real news," it's a sign that we've lost our bearings.

That the woman was missing, seemingly for no reason at first, was legitimate news. But we'd already been fed such a diet of Scott Peterson-type events that we were ready to convict this poor woman's fiancé of a heinous crime.

Reporters who were camped in his yard fed America nonstop speculation from an assorted (perhaps even sordid) group of talking heads.

But when she called home, it wasn't the end of the story. Now the airwaves and print media are debating whether she should be charged with a crime. What should have been a family matter has become water cooler gossip for all of us. (As one radio station gleefully put it, "This is what your co-workers will be talking about at the office today!")

Enough, already! I don't want to know what various "experts" think about this woman's psychological state. I don't care whether she and the prospective bridegroom get together and tie the knot.

Why is any of that on the radar of national news?

A woman in Atlanta got cold feet and ran away before her wedding.

I wish some of my colleagues in the news media would take a cold shower and run away from this non-news event.

Mike Buffington is the editor of The Jackson Herald in Jefferson, Georgia, and president of the National Newspaper Association.

Copyright 2005. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

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