At least let us hear no more about the “cynicism” of the media. Miss Jade Goody, the British reality-TV superstar of whose approaching demise I wrote last month in this space, has now died; a nation has mourned her passing; and, in what David Aaronovitch of The Times of London rather hyperbolically calls “the war between Jade and the jaded,” I find myself unhappily classed among the latter group. “Cynicism,” claims Mr. Aaronovitch, “comes as easily to a journalist as hyperbole—sometimes even in the same article. There is a small media industry to build a Goody-type phenomenon up and a slightly smaller one to lament that such a vulgarity exists at all.” I would have thought that we lamenters form a much smaller “industry,” but let that pass. It’s true enough that the lamentations can become, willy-nilly, part of the phenomenal build-up he mentions on the principle—which is perhaps more true, as Miss Goody’s own career demonstrated, for reality TV stars than anyone else—that all publicity is good publicity. It’s also true that the emotion generated by TV-reality and its coverage by the other media is itself no less real for that.

But it seems to me inarguable that this emotion is not the same as the emotion we would feel for the death of someone we knew in real life, let alone a loved one, at least not in the way either love or grief used to be understood. Mr. Aaronovitch, on his way