By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 4, 2005
8:18 AM
The runaway bride has turned into a runaway television embarrassment.
I mean, come on! A woman gets cold feet about a wedding, takes a powder for a few days and producers turn it into the new national obsession?
The lead interview on the morning shows yesterday was the father of the temporarily jilted husband, John Mason. Mason himself gave an exclusive to Sean Hannity on Monday night. Every talk show I've flipped to has been leading with the saga of Jennifer Wilbanks.
First the media pump up the story (bride missing for a couple of days) with all kinds of sinister overtones (Maybe she's been kidnapped! Maybe she's dead! Call our Laci Peterson experts!). Then they revel in the plot twist when it turns out SHE REALLY JUST RAN AWAY and made up the kidnapping story. But NOW we can bring on all kinds of experts, profilers, psychologists and other talking heads to yammer about why a woman WOULD DO SUCH A THING. Thus are great national controversies created.
Lost in the cacophony is any mention of the media's overcoverage--and how anchors and reporters suggested there must be foul play involved, and even cast doubt on Mason and his reluctance to take a polygraph. Some excerpts:
Fox's Bill O'Reilly: "Woman goes out for a jog and boom, she's gone. Do you think there's an epidemic going on here?" And: "This young woman -- it's almost like Laci Peterson. She just disappears from a place that's Mainstream, USA."
Fox's Sean Hannity: "I agree with the father-in-law-to-be."
Geraldo Rivera: "That there's foul play."
Hannity: "Yes."
Rivera: "So do I."
Nancy Grace of Headline News, interviewing Wilbanks's dad: "Mr. Wilbanks, this sounds completely unlike Jennifer to just disappear. I just don't believe it`s a case of cold feet."
MSNBC's Keith Olbermann was one of the few anchors to wonder if Wilbanks fled: "I don't mean to judge a book by its cover, but those photos of this woman -- I don't know how recent they are. There`s just a feeling about those shots, with her eyes sort of bugging out, that you look at that and say, Is she going to run or do something?" (Still, he led with the story again last night.)
Television has developed an addiction to these murder/abduction/missing women melodramas, which a decade ago would have been purely local stories, and takes them national in a matter of minutes.
Now, of course, we're destined to meet everyone in the family, as in the Terri Schiavo case and the Elian extravaganza and the other TV soaps of recent years. How long before Ms. Wilbanks herself, who forced law enforcement to spend tens of thousands of dollars to search for her, is amiably chatting it up with Katie and Diane and Larry and touting her forthcoming book?
While the Wilbanks story may have produced a modest ratings bump, don't underestimate the degree to which it's turning lots of people off. Some excerpts from my chat the other day:
Minneapolis, Minn.: "I didn't think we could get any lower, than "The Runaway Bride." Please. Make it stop."
New York, N.Y.: "Why do I know about this runaway bride story when I don't live in Georgia? This is - at most - a local story."
Washington, D.C.: "I found the behavior of the cable news media this weekend so disgusting. Their emphasis on a missing adult case-- there are hundreds of adults that go missing in a given week-- that happened to involve soap opera-like drama was incredible. Is it just me, or is the tabloid-like cable news media getting worse? Or have they always been like this? The panel of experts that were commenting on the "runaway bride's mental state, the anchors who seemed upset that this story ended up with the woman ALIVE-- the best possible scenario-- it was just unbelievable."
New York, N.Y.: "Every once in a short while, the media collectively decide that out of the thousands of missing persons cases, one is more important than the others. As annoying as this is, why is it that the one case invariably involves a white female?"
Kansas City, Mo.: "On the Damsel in Distress story. On Friday (?) I was switching channels and saw FOX discussing the value of the lie detector test the groom took and was thinking "is there nothing else going on in the world." But once it was discovered that she was a runaway, why didn't the networks drop the story? To me, I would have been embarrassed to keep following a non-story."
Bethesda, Md.: "I got so upset at the runaway bride coverage this weekend. Endless interviews with "experts" that "know" what the bride was thinking and tell us why she acted the way she did. It's disgusting and really makes me angry that they're not covering more important and relevant news that affects the lives of Americans. "
Charlotte, N.C.: "The 'Runaway Bride' non-story filled the TV media space Saturday morning on CNN, MSNBC and Fox. Do you think it's fair to say that each net's news directors honestly thought there was no bigger story in the nation than that, at the moment? Or was it a matter of pursuing the story because that's what viewers reward with their viewership? Or because they're all watching each other, and nobody wanted to dump out of it while the other nets were all over it? Or because they had already devoted the equipment to covering the possible abduction and murder, so they had to stick with it to justify paying for the satellite time? It was shameful."
Producers of the world, take note.
Columbia Journalism Review lists some of the people that CNN has interviewed since Saturday:
"The mayor of Duluth (Ga). A pastor from Wilbanks' Baptist church. A spokesperson from the Albuquerque police department. The Albuquerque police chief. Wilbanks' fiance. A friend of Wilbanks' fiance. An FBI investigator. An FBI spokesman. A mental health expert discussing how the family can 'heal.' A clinical psychologist speculating on why Wilbanks took off. Another clinical psychologist. A Georgia district attorney. A New York criminal defense attorney. A law professor and civil rights attorney. 'Another almost-bride,' who talked about 'getting cold feet.'
(I wonder if that's the same woman I saw on MSNBC, who apparently wrote a book on the subject.)
"This, of course, in addition to countless reports from CNN correspondents, some who were on the scene in Duluth, recapping the same information over and over again to the point of numbness. To spice things up, the network played the 911 call Wilbanks made to police."
Jeff Jarvis sees value in the story--to a point: "Aw, come on: The runaway bride story is great entertainment, to be sure. The pictures of that deer caught in the headlights are mesmerizing. The tale of a wedding from hell gone to hell is amusing. But, come on Today et al, is this really the top news story in the country?"
Observations can't get past the phony kidnapping tale:
"What was the purpose of this lie? This is no kid. If it was a 20-year-old girl, you might be able to excuse all of this as youthful stupidity. But Jennifer Wilbanks is 32; she's no immature little girl. And if she did indeed get cold feet, was it really necessary to put her fiancé, her family, and her friends, through days of hell wondering if she was alive or hurt? Efforts to locate Ms. Wilbanks must have cost thousands of dollars, and diverted some law enforcement resources away from real cases to look for this woman.
"So, some questions arise:
"Will sympathy take over, and she will be excused for her crimes and indiscretions? 'The poor little thing. She needs our understanding,' you can hear the apologists saying.
"Will she be charged with a misdemeanor? This is the very least she should get. A stiff fine to pay for the money she caused officials and family to spend looking for her.
"Will she be charged with a felony? This might be more appropriate. A fine, some jail time or probation might get the point across to others who might try the same thing."
The blog Eras End sounds like some of my chat participants:
"If this story is proof of anything, its that press likes to create stories out of nothing. Let's face it, the only reason this became national news is the press was hoping it would be another Peterson case or just as good a dead bride before her wedding...What's really bad is the media is clueless on how this behavior erodes the trust of the public in them."
And here's what looks like Jennifer's Match.com profile (!) Very amusing.
Moving right along, USA Today has more bad-news numbers for the White House:
"Support for the decision to go to war in Iraq has fallen to its lowest level since the campaign began in March 2003, according to a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll released Tuesday.
"The findings, made public on the same day that Iraq's first democratically elected government in 50 years was sworn in, show 41% say the war was worth it; 57% say it wasn't."
You know that unseemly, lobbyist-financed travel by DeLay? Turns out there were Democrats , too, says the New York Times
"Newly disclosed documents from an American territory in the Pacific show that the powerful Washington lobbyist at the center of federal corruption investigations here paid directly for travel to the islands by several members of Congress, Democrat and Republican, as well as two senior aides to Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, despite House rules that bar such payments.
"The lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, submitted bills to his law firm for more than $350,000 in expenses for several trips to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in 1996 and 1997 on behalf of the congressmen, as well as several others including Edwin Buckham, Mr. DeLay's former chief of staff, and Tony Rudy, his former deputy chief of staff. . . .
"One of them, Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, said in an interview on Tuesday that he had been assured that his trip was in full accordance with House travel rules and that the National Security Caucus Foundation had paid for it. . . . Lanier Avant, a spokesman for Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, said Mr. Thompson had understood that the caucus had paid for the trip."
And don't think the GOP hasn't noticed:
"House Republicans called Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi a hypocrite yesterday for not demanding investigations into new ethics questions that have arisen about the travel of her fellow Democrats," says the Washington Times . Moving along now, National Review Editor Rich Lowry punches back at the Dems on Social Security:
"In the congressional debate over repealing the estate (a.k.a. death) tax, Democrats routinely invoked Paris Hilton as an example of someone who wouldn't be hurt if the government confiscated part of her family's wealth upon her parents' death. This was a shrewd bit of class warfare in keeping with the Democratic impulse to tax the wealthy as much as possible. But the Social Security debate now features a new, perverse kind of Democratic class warfare -- a struggle to keep as many Social Security benefits as possible flowing into the hands of the well-off.
"Maybe Paris Hilton doesn't deserve her inheritance, but her astronomically wealthy father, Rick, apparently deserves every last penny he can wring from the Social Security Administration when he retires.
"Democrats have been twisted into this position by their reflexive opposition to President Bush's latest Social Security proposal. It would make the system more progressive by continuing to allow benefits for lower-income workers to grow generously, while gradually restraining the growth in benefits (by roughly one percent a year beginning around 2016) for higher-income people. This move would solve most of the shortfall in the popular program's long-term financing.
"Shouldn't a liberal welcome a proposal demanding sacrifice from the wealthy? Yes, but the two sides in the Social Security debate have different priorities. Bush wants to save (and improve) Social Security. Democrats want to save Social Security's dishonesty."
The Nation's John Nichols says the U.K. is having the kind of election debate we should have had last year:
"George W. Bush's closest ally, Prime Minister Tony Blair, is taking a battering on the issue that should have been central to last year's U.S. presidential election: the lies that led to the war in Iraq.
"Blair's Labour party is unlikely to be voted out of office in Thursday's voting, in part because the main opposition party -- the Conservatives -- also supported the war, and in part because a third of the Labour Party's members of parliament opposed Blair's efforts to sign Britain on for Bush's war.
"But, while his party remains viable, the prime minister's personal approval ratings have tanked. A number of recent polls show that a majority of British voters believe Blair lied to the British people -- and his own Cabinet -- in order to get Britain on board for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. And when Britain's MORI polling agency asked voters whether they approve of how Blair is handling the current situation with Iraq, 63 percent of those surveyed indicated that their disapproved while only 28 percent supported the approach of the man who is derisively referred to as 'Bush's poodle.'
"And as elction day draws near, the headlines in the British press, which unlike U.S. media does not take its cues from the spin machines of the various campaigns, has kept the focus firmly on Iraq.
"The headline in Tuesday morning's Independent newspaper dismissed Blair's attempts to dismiss the war as a primary issue: '48 hours to go: Iraq, the issue that won't go away.' Other headlines read: 'Widow of soldier says Prime Minister to blame for his death.' 'Mother plans court action over Blair's 'war crimes.' 'Iraq war "will haunt Blair's legacy like Suez."' 'Revealed: documents show Blair's secret plans for war.'"
Excuse me, but wasn't Iraq a pretty big issue in Bush vs. Kerry (at least when the press wasn't obsessing on Vietnam)? And to the extent it was muted, wasn't that because Kerry had voted to authorize the war and spent much of the campaign trying to explain that away? (Blair's Conservative opponent, Michael Howard, also backed the war.)
Talk about blowing big bucks: "Michael Jackson had a deteriorating financial condition for years that left him with just $38,000 in cash when he had to cope with an avalanche of bad publicity, jurors at the star's molestation trial heard Tuesday," says the Los Angeles Times . "John Duross O'Bryan, a forensic accountant testifying as an expert witness for the prosecution, painted a grim picture of Jackson's finances, estimating that from 1999 to early 2003 the pop singer spent $20 million to $30 million a year more than was coming in." Kind of the same model that the federal government uses.
Finally, the Wilkes Barre Times Leader wants some answers from a Pennsylvania congressman about a back rub:
"The constituents of U.S. Rep. Don Sherwood deserve to know what's going on.
"On Saturday, the Times Leader reported that last fall, Washington D.C. police were called to Sherwood's apartment in response to a 911 call from a woman who was visiting there. Cynthia Ore, 29, told the police Sherwood choked her.
"Defenders of the representative say there's much that diffuses this story. The incident happened seven months ago and only came to the attention of the media through one of Sherwood's past opponents. The woman who called 911 backed off of her claims when police arrived and no charges were filed. Sherwood says the accusations are false and that it's a political smear.
"But it's not that simple. In the police report, Sherwood says he was giving the woman a back rub. Sherwood has been married for 33 years, according to his own congressional Web site.
"When Sherwood spoke to Times Leader reporters, he called the woman an acquaintance. He said he didn't invite her. But then, why let her into his apartment?"
He's 64. She's 29.