The "survivor" who wasn't

Why wring our hands over reality TV? We ate up the life and death of JFK Jr. -- and what's wrong with that?

By Joan Walsh

Jul 15, 2000 | As journalists wax ever more outraged about the blurred boundaries between news, entertainment and so-called reality TV, along comes the anniversary of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane crash to burst the bubble of self-righteousness -- if such a self-reinforcing echo chamber as the media's self-righteousness were burstable, that is.

For two weeks last July, the world of journalism went into a graveyard spiral, having judged the crash, the search for wreckage, the recovery of the bodies of Kennedy, Carolyn Bessette and her sister Lauren, and finally their funerals the world's biggest news. I know; I was there. No theory about the cause of the crash went unexamined, no Kennedy-Bessette neighbor went uninterviewed, no photo of JFK Jr. -- under a desk in the Oval Office, saluting his father's casket, posing nude in George -- went unseen.

Maybe that's why I find it hard to be scandalized now when CBS puts the latest "Survivor" castoff on its "Early Show" and dresses up the soulless Julie Chen and Ian O'Malley as "correspondents" on "Big Brother"; or when "real" journalists vie to be the one who reveals the real survivors before the shows do. Anyone with a shred of awareness knows that the line between news and entertainment was erased long ago by the genres of celebrity, culture and "lifestyle" reporting -- and despite all the hand-wringing, it's really not cause for culturewide self-loathing.

And anyone who thinks CBS invented reality TV -- or stole it from MTV or the Europeans -- missed the point of the Kennedy extravaganza last year. He may have been our first reality TV character, the "Survivor" who ultimately wasn't, his every developmental milestone captured by the cameras.

For 38 years, we watched it all: his birth, that salute, his Upper East Side childhood, the tousle-haired Brown University days, failing the bar, passing it, fighting with his girlfriend, marrying her, the George years and finally his demise. His greatest virtue, most eulogists agreed, was his grace and patience in the face of our unending curiosity about him, as if he understood, better than we did, how much we needed him, needed to watch him. He resisted the cruel retort of the fed-up celebrity to his relentless fans: Get a life.

Yet the fame took its toll, kept him caged and in some weird way wouldn't let him grow up or ultimately age. And let's be clear: Nothing conferred his "newsmaker" status besides his stunning looks and his father's presidency, which his father, by the way, attained thanks to wealth, looks, charm and a glamorous wife -- all of which seem more like the hallmarks of celebrity than democratic leadership. (I feel a harrumph coming on.)

So why is it worse that CBS creates celebrities out of real people -- people who volunteer for the curse/privilege -- and feeds them up for our consumption? (OK, one obvious reason it's worse: I'd rather look at Kennedy's beefcake than Richard's on "Survivor." Besides that.) And why are we surprised that we love to watch?

Next Page: Was Elian a more legitimate story than JFK Jr?

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