On the reporting of the death of the famous…
Posted on October 26th, 2002 by Shawn L.
Today, Glenn Reynolds was taken to task by one of his e-mailers, for failing to comment on the political implications of Senator Wellstone’s death yesterday in plane crash, in which everyone aboard was killed, including his wife, his daughter, and several campaign workers. [full story via CNN]
Glenn felt that the loss of the man’s life was more appropriate to focus on that the political implications. I agree.
Early morning I learned of the death of actor Richard Harris [again, full story on CNN], while watching the “E!” channel. During a show they had their news crawl come up with the story worded approximately as follows:
The role of Dumbledore will have to be recast for the upcoming filming of the third Harry Potter movie, with the death of Richard HarrisThis seemed all wrong to me, as my first impression was that I had missed news of his death some time ago. But no, they were simply putting the cart before the horse, making the secondary effects of Harris’ death more important than his actual death.
Admittedly it is “only” a news crawl on an entertainment based channel, but they still should have thought better of how they put that news story out. The same information could have been put out in a more respectful manner.
The aforementioned CNN.com story had this quote from Harris:
“I’m not interested in reputation or immortality or things like that,” he said. “I genuinely don’t care.”None the less, I’ll be raising a pint in his honor.