A FRIEND of mine recently stu- pefied me with a very pecu- liar question. He asked me, "Who is this Chandra Levy chick that everyone keeps talking about?" After asking him if he had lived the past few months under a rock, he explained that he had spent the summer in the Middle East in a study abroad program and obviously had been a little cut off from the ever-so-significant events of life back here.
So I told him The Levy Tales, and I could tell that his experiences of traveling in a region of the world where bombings and air raids are now covered in 20-second sound bites on the 6 p.m. news had left him apathetic toward our Hollywood media. What an anomaly, I thought to myself, "How can anyone not be interested in other people's sex lives and the rare phenomenon of a missing person?"
The coverage of the Chandra Levy murder mystery is rather amusing if you view it from the perception of someone who hasn't been in the country for a few months. It makes one realize that in a ratings-driven media, the importance attached to your life is proportional to how much drama you can stir or how rich and famous you are. Curiosity about the lives of anyone but the mediocre is not a new occurrence. However, we have taken that curiosity to a disgusting extreme.
Let's take a brief look at some of the more important news events, according to ratings, of the past few years. It's clear to see how fate has tried to show us that as much as we may hate people who watch daytime soap operas simply to drool over the famous and beautiful, we are our own soap opera. Unfortunately, soap operas don't care about the ordinary, and it looks like neither do we as a society.
A few years ago, the world was shocked by the death of an adored figure, Princess Diana. She was beautiful, charitable, charismatic and, to top it all off, she was a princess. Around the same time, Mother Teresa, a woman who had devoted her entire life to helping others, passed away in India. While Princess Diana traveled all around the world and was caught on tape donating a big check or feeding a hungry child in Somalia, Mother Teresa simply helped others as a part of her everyday life.
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For days after both tragedies, nothing but Princess Diana's death was the topic of conversation in cafes, gyms and local grocery stores. Princess Diana's funeral got coverage on all four major networks, and in "Cry for Di" parties hosted by people with way too much time on their hands. That very same day, Mother Teresa's funeral was briefly covered on C-Span. Because she was royalty, Princess Diana was consecrated for spending a few years apparently doing what Mother Teresa had done her entire life.
There is also the saga of Jon Benet Ramsey. If anyone is oblivious to the unnecessary amount of coverage the case was given in the media, just pick up a newspaper within the last few months and you will still find an article pertaining to the murder. Unfortunately, children are victims of such crimes every day. What makes the death of a 5-year-old beauty queen more worthy of news coverage and more important than the shooting of a 5-year-old girl in the Bronx? One involves stardom and money, the other is just another story for the local newspaper.
The coverage surrounding Chandra Levy's murder is another chapter in this long list of "famous people" stories. It's funny how you can walk into any grocery store and see "missing person" papers all across bulletin boards, but only Chandra Levy is on "Larry King Live." Maybe this story deserves a bit more attention because of the involvement of Capitol Hill and despite the fact that the Levy family was rather "ordinary" prior to the incident, but let's not get carried away here.
Cases such as Chandra Levy's are, unfortunately, not unique. This particular case is by itself no different than what local detectives investigate every day. However, the lesson we have learned from the past few months is simple: If you want people to care about a tragedy, throw in an extra-marital affair, a politician, maybe a car chase and some popcorn, and then watch the empathy flow from everyone's hearts.
It obviously would be impossible to give the sort of coverage that such incidents have received to every homicide, kidnapping or accident, and we definitely wouldn't want the ratings to drop. We can, however, adopt another novel idea that many people have trouble grasping: Let's try moving on.
(Faraz Rana's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at frana@cavalierdaily.com.)
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