Jade Goody

It’s a few weeks now since Jade Goody’s death and the media coverage is pretty much nonexistent; it’s as though she has been forgotten as quickly as she gained fame, which is strange as just a couple of months ago she was all over the news, you couldn’t go turn on any channel without a story about her being on the air. It was as though the media were waiting anxiously for her death, “OK magazine” bringing out a “tribute edition” before she had even died. The way that her death was being publicised as some kind of great event just shows us the voyeuristic attitude of newspapers and their readers today. Do people really want to see pictures of a dying woman in their newspapers everyday?
I know that a lot of people hated Jade Goody, they thought of her as an unnecessary celebrity, and her “racist” behaviour to Shilpa Shetty in Celebrity Big Brother didn’t help her image; but she was still a young woman who died leaving behind two young sons who will have to grow up without their mom. I think that the main reason why people disliked her is because they thought that they were somehow better than her; she was poor, came from an estate and lacked a great education. This was the view of her seen by Michael Parkinson
, he said after her death “Jade Goody…is…a woman who came to represent all that's paltry and wretched about Britain today. She was brought up on a sink estate, as a child came to know both drugs and crime, was barely educated, ignorant and puerile.” (Source )
I guess this annoys me as he seems to be looking down on the lower class people; since when did wealth and education equal worth? So I guess what he’s saying is that if you don’t come from great beginnings and don’t get the best education you are “wretched”. Is being a good person and caring for your family not worth anything if you aren’t educated?
The issue of “being bad” here lies mostly with the press, not just as she was dying but throughout her entire career in the media. Almost every aspect of her life has been publicised, beginning with Big Brother, “Jade’s Salon,” “Just Jade” and probably a whole lot more which I don’t know about, and people have watched her rises and falls, and enjoyed seeing it. Even though she and her family have made an incredible amount of money from her exploits and then her death I think the voyeurism and money-making in the media went too far and even the most watched people in the world deserve privacy and dignity at some points in their life.

References
http://entertainment.uk.msn.com/celebrity/PhotoGalleries/gallery.aspx?cp-documentid=15897099&imageindex=1

http://parkinson.itv.com/