UPI Exploits Death Again - This Time it's a Little Girl

I’m quick to grow painfully tired of media buzzwords. Their overuse tends to strip them of all legitimate meaning. It takes a small-scale breaking point for the public to realize this in individual cases, but it will take a major breaking point for the media to recognize the counterproductive effects of their attention-seeking repetition.

I’ve noticed this recently with the word “bullying.” Frequently, when there are stories about children or teenagers who were victims of violence, harassment, or suicide, or who were subject to practically any interactions on the internet, the news media leverages in some sort of comment about bullying, seemingly in an effort to give unifying context to virtually every such story. That wouldn’t be objectionable, but it seems to me that “bullying” is a descriptive term that we apply to a situation only after we’ve identified it as such. If a child is being systematically harassed by a person or group of people, we say that he’s being bullied because that’s simply what the word means.

But that’s not the way the media uses it. Instead, they tend to talk about bullying like it is some kind of disease, which has a very specific set of symptoms and can be identified at any stage in its life cycle by a trained professional. Indeed, the disease corollary may be quite intentional, designed to make modern bullying seem less like an ordinary phenomenon and more like an epidemic, and thus something about which to feel a certain sense of panic. Applying it as a buzzword reframes bullying so that it’s no longer a term that concisely identifies a set of similar situations; instead it is the situation.

Never has the manipulative use of the term been clearer than in the UPI news brief about the death of ten year-old Joanna Ramos after a fight at a Southern California elementary school. The article summarizes the story in a few brief paragraphs, explaining that she and another girl had fought, that she suffered blunt force trauma that resulted in a blood clot in her brain, that her death has been ruled a homicide and that prosecutors have yet to determine whether charges will be filed. Then, after all the details of the actual case have been conclusively stated, UPI adds this as a concluding sentence: “There have been no allegations that Ramos was being bullied, KTLA reported Friday.”

If there have been no such allegations, then why on Earth is that relevant to the tragic story of a young girl being killed? Does her being or not being bullied affect the seriousness of the loss? Does it make her any more or less dead? Does it make the girl with whom she fought any more or less guilty of manslaughter? The only reason there ever could be for pointing out the absence of a particular charge or connection is if that piece of information would have been relevant. In this case, it just isn’t. It might have mattered, for the sake of complete coverage, if the girl was being bullied, but there’s no need to specifically dispel that possibility every time a child is killed. To do so is to suggest that bullying is typically a precursor to death among children and that the absence of bullying in this case is anomalous and therefore noteworthy.

Again, I’m sure that’s intentional. Actual relevance is the only legitimate reason for addressing the absence of allegations, but the media has reasons for that behavior that aren’t legitimate. If it’s a chance to leverage in a buzzword that they think their audience is expecting, that’s evidently good enough for them.

Bullying is a problem. It’s always been a problem. Using it as this catchall term in the media, though, cheapens that problem. It broadens awareness of the issue to the point of obfuscating recognition of actual instances of it. Isolated acts of violence constitute their own problem. And using a girl’s death from such an act in order to push your narrow media narrative is cheap, tactless and unethical. But considering that UPI is the same outlet that exploited Andrew Embiricos’ death back in December, cheap, tactless and unethical is evidently par for the course for them. They don’t set the overall media narratives, though. Everybody’s culpable for that.

I Hope His Obituary Mentions His Name First

It’s always a risk to engage in commentary that might be viewed as trivializing suicide or untimely death, but I have something to say that I worry some will construe that way, and still I think it is worth saying.

Sometimes my eye catches sight of top trending web searches, and when something strikes me as interesting or unusual I feel compelled to click through to see why that particular item is in the news. That was the case just before 9:00 tonight when I saw that Rita Hayworth was the most popular topic on Bing. Why on earth, I wondered, would Rita Hayworth, now long dead be suddenly so newsworthy. When I clicked on her name I saw that the relevant headline didn’t refer to her specifically, but to “Rita Hayworth’s grandson” who was found dead in an apparent suicide.

Note that that was the headline exactly: “Rita Hayworth’s grandson found dead in NYC.” His actual name, Andrew Embiricos, was secondary because, after all, who would recognize it. Embiricos was not famous, Hayworth was. Over thirty years ago. Consequently, no one who didn’t know him personally would have recognized his picture either, which is presumably why UPI accompanied the story with his a picture of his grandmother, in her prime, seated beside William Randolph Hearst. The article even went so far as to conclude with a list of Hayworth’s film credits.

I honestly am not trivializing the young man’s death. It’s not as though I’m asserting that his death at twenty-five is any less tragic because he was not the sort of movie star for whom this sort of headline would usually be reserved. Nor am I saying that his life was not significant enough to be newsworthy, given that the article announcing his death mentions his involvement in several charities.

I don’t wish to trivialize anyone’s death, and that’s why it bothers me that news agencies choose to report on deaths such as these, as it effectively trivializes the untimely death of anyone who isn’t Hollywood royalty. Plenty of people die at early ages. Many of them are suicides. Many of the victims are wealthy and philanthropic. None of this is why Embiricos’ death became known in an instant to most of America. His death is common knowledge because he was Rita Hayworth’s grandson. That fact was right in the headline. People knew that Rita Hayworth’s grandson had died before they knew that Andrew Embiricos had died.

This story grabs my attention because it really seems to say something about the modern zeitgeist with respect to celebrity. I knew that our obsession with it had gotten particularly mindless. It has, of course, been a part of our culture for many decades now, but it is only quite recently that it has become commonplace to be famous just for being famous. It is only in the last decade or so that children have begun to report that they aspire to be famous not for doing anything in particular but just as an end in itself. I didn’t realize how far the trend had gotten until I saw this headline and realized that the fascination with inherited celebrity is not limited to the Lohans and Kardashians of the world, but now extends into history and seeks out the forgotten heirs of long-dead movie stars in order to give them a posthumous coronation as princes of American culture.

A man is dead. Let his family and friends remember him as he actually was, and come up with another occasion to rent a Rita Hayworth film and remember her as she was in her time, long ago.