Buried in newsprint

We are a great nation for celebrating life. Where other nationalities keep things sombre around the time of someone’s death, we tend throw a party. We drink until the wee hours and often lose a week, excusably, in memoriam. While others flagellate and wail for lost loves, we link arms and sing for the good times we shared with them.

But the party that some corners of the media have thrown in recent days is something more sinister, celebrating as it did the death of a young model as some of the juiciest column-fodder that Ireland has seen in years. It’s more like that type of wake that is ruined by relatives bickering over the will, or which turns to spiteful jibes when everyone’s had too much to drink. The sad tale of Katy French was held up as a cautionary tale in one corner, and put up on a pedestal in the other, leading to fights over who was right. The rare few managed to toe the line of factual reference, without deigning to offer an opinion.

Daring to review the coverage of Katy French’s untimely demise is stepping into the lion’s den, as passing any hint of judgement on how people choose to react can lead to a massive flare-up. This is the passion that Katy French managed to inspire in the short amount of time she graced newspapers, and proof that she was incredibly successful at creating a niche for herself in Ireland’s quirky modelling industry.

For this, she earned many critics, and as reported in the Indo she was well aware of the beast she had created, and could fight her own corner. From that report:

“I can understand how the rest of you might not see it as it is swamped by the tabloid image of me, that yes, I do have a part in orchestrating,” she admitted.
But she explained the necessity for an Irish model to do this, because of the nature of promotional work in this country.
“You see the fact is I’m not a high fashion model that will grace the pages of glossy magazines, my mainstream line of work in Ireland is promotion-type jobs, this is because it’s bread and butter to Irish models.
“If I or any other Irish model were to wait for an editorial in Vogue I probably wouldn’t be chatting to you now as I wouldn’t be able to afford the phone bill, or any other bills for that matter.”

The Tribune spun it slightly differently, with a piece that quoted others in the business who gushed about her professionality. It started with a snipe, but ended up as a compliment.

Katy French occupies that corner of the celebrity VIP lounge filled with those famous for doing nothing.
A PR representative who has worked with French agrees. “She’s very wheely and dealy in a professional way.
She’s brilliant at getting what she wants out and when she wants it out through the press. . .
She gets a big backlash, of course, but it’s all part of her game. It all works the way she wants it to.”

That she was self-aware wasn’t enough to dispel the begrudgers. Self-sustaining fame is a source of confusion for many who question its worth and that of people who seek it. I’ll put my hand up and say that I’m in that camp. As did the Tribune, with more venom, in this piece on the French phenomenon which appeared the weekend before her death.

If there were a prize for best public-relations campaign of the year, French would win it, for plotting her own sudden arrival into the consciousness of the nation (some of it, anyway). A year ago, hardly anybody had heard of her. This time next year she will have been forgotten. But for a few months in 2007, she successfully made the difficult transition from struggling wannabe to C-list celebrity. All sorts of prestigious awards were achieved, from being named as the 50th most invited socialite to coming fifth (or was it sixth? ) in a reality TV show. In an increasingly celebrity-obsesssed nation, 2007 has been the year of the French.

It continued, likening Bertie Ahern’s scrabble for dig-outs to Ms French’s extended entourage of associates, in one of the few pieces that expressed an understanding of the new internet culture and how, online, it’s not who you know, but who it appears you might know.

Not since Bertie Ahern appeared on the Six One News with Bryan Dobson last year had any Irish person laid claim to so many friends. Size matters in friendship these days. My 400 Facebook friends trump the piddly 262 you have acquired on Bebo. Look at all the friends who came to my 24th party.

They weren’t alone in slating her high-profile birthday party. Others happily joined in the fray, taking her down a notch with glee, then recanting when she became ill. Meanwhile, the Independent came under fire from Ireland’s blog and internet community for a piece which indirectly credited the Evening Herald with directing French fans to fashion site www.beaut.ie, collapsing its server with pure hate.

A high-profile beauty website which hosted negative comments about model Katy French is offline.
Just one day after the Evening Herald revealed some of the comments posted by bloggers on the website, it went offline.
Fans of the popular website are now greeted with a message from its creators explaining that it has been shut down due to a dispute between them and their hosting company

By failing to confirm whether or not this was the case, it left open the possibility that Beaut.ie felt they were in the wrong and were in hiding. The comments, as it happens, were left by third parties, not necessarily endorsed in any way by the blog’s owners. More inaccuracies followed:

Meanwhile, close friends have created a Bebo tribute page where friends, fans and colleagues can extend their best wishes and prayers.

Said Bebo page moderator, betraying sincere emotions but showing up the Indo’s lack of research:

As moderator of this page, I would like to offer my deepest heartfelt condolences to the family and friends of Katy French. I didn’t know this lady but admired her. But the media forgot was she was a human being first of all and a model then 2nd. I would have l would love for her to have seen this page and see the amount of support and beautiful comments left on this page.
Katy RIP

At the time of writing, the Bebo page (here) had been viewed more than 84,000 times, an incredible outpouring of grief from friends and followers.

Perhaps the most bizarre, poetic (?) and out-of-left-field piece of commentary came from John Waters of the Irish Times. The Times, until Waters spilt his column onto paper, had been fearfully reserved in its coverage, sticking solely to the facts of the case and offering little by way of commentary. Based on track record, you might expect Waters to start down the ‘worst excesses of the Celtic tiger’ route, but he, too, had been beguiled by French. The article is behind a pay wall, but Mongrel reproduced excerpts, including:

“I’m crying as I write this.

“[I]n the immediate past [Katy French] was perhaps the most spectacular light on the skyline, a meteorite of desire plummeting through the Irish zeitgeist.

and this:

“She did not, other than literally, die of whatever it will say on her death certificate. She died of desire, of being utterly human.

Waters’ grief-stricken wailings prompted some catty responses, amongst them one from journalism student Rob Hogan who said:

We read this in college today, copies were printed out for us to keep and everything though I reckon most of us will drop a steaming pile of our best work on it, leave it outside Waters’ house, light it on fire and ring his doorbell.
“She did not, other than literally, die of whatever it will say on her death certificate.”
No, of course she didn’t. Incidentally, can anyone recall if there’s ever been any recorded deaths from desire or deaths from being utterly human?

As Waters flowed, the Indo dragged things down a level, using the Katy French thread to continue the INM v Associated catfight. Among other personal attacks in a piece by Liam Collins comes this:

“That’s where Patrice Harrington of the Daily Mail comes in. She’s the reporter who took a scalpel to Katy French and her birthday party one day and then, when tragedy befell the young model, tried to make out that Katy would have understood it.
Her employers the Daily Mail have imported a cruel kind of cynical double standard that even the most hard-bitten must find slightly nauseating.
Miss Harrington proceeded to give us her view that the beautiful young model “must have the skin of a rhinoceros” to live her life so publicly.

Harrington’s crime was to take a cynical view of French’s birthday party, a ‘media event’ of her own creation, and highlight the lack of ‘actual’ celebs in attendance. At the same time as the Indo was taking the moral ground, it was mimicking Harrington’s actions. From the pen of Stephen Hill:

She booked the VIP area of Krystle nightclub for the big bash, and up to the last minute was telling anyone who would listen that members of top rock bands Snow Patrol and The Stereophonics were definitely coming.
In the end it turned out to be a decidedly star-free zone.
No superstars, no stars and not even a Z- list celebrity turned up. And to make matters worse, one of the papers the next day published a picture of Katy disembarking from the limo and suggesting that she was displaying some, gasp, cellulite.

Alongside the snippets mentioned here were profile pieces, interviews with friends and wrap-ups of French’s short life, one of the best and fairest coming from Una Mulally in the Tribune, (here).

But strangely, and fittingly, considering the bizarre amount and style of coverage her death has received, it is Kevin Myers who offers an appeal to reason, at the same time putting things in perspective. It won’t make pleasant reading for those who placed Katy French on a pedestal, but they should all read it, and ruminate on it, before coming to their final conclusion. In it, he questions why Bertie Ahern saw fit to send his aide-de-camp to her funeral, wondering aloud if it stamps approval on celebrity as the real insignia of importance. And then it goes on to discuss the media reaction. It reads:

“With the Katy French phenomenon, we got a genuinely new and very Irish slant on celebrity culture. The poor girl only became a national figure for being on the verge of death and then dying.

This seems harsh, but he continues to deliver squirming context with this hammer blow of real life:

“Where I live, the talk wasn’t so much of Katy French but of Tracy O’Brien, who was seven-months pregnant in her 4 x 4 when she was hit and killed around the same time Katy died. A caesarean did not save her baby, and on Monday, he, baptised Cameron, was buried in her young arms.

When Kevin Myers is the voice of reason, it truly is time to stop, think, and totally re-assess.

The media reaction to Katy French’s death has been a bizarre phenomenon. It could launch a thousand journalism dissertations and ethics papers and this post could well draw the ire of Ms French’s friends, followers and well-wishers who might, as did others before them, not read the links, or even fully understand my text and hence rush to crucify me for not joining them in propping up her pedestal.

To them I say this. I’m not judging Katy French or the circumstances around her death. I didn’t know Katy French and she had no impact upon my life until her death became a massive media event. (As, I might point out, she made her birthday, break-up, etc). In what is written above, I’m attempting to look at how her death was covered, and trying not to offer too much opinion on that. (My op/ed features in Wednesday’s Echo, as it happens)  However you’ll read between the lines and probably draw your own conclusions from how I’ve chosen the quotes and the light in which I’ve portrayed them. Some material wasn’t available, and there was simply so much of it that to include it all would take, as I said above, an entire dissertation. It rumbles on still, with the apologists, party-hoppers and letter-writers all having their say, not to mention the extensive comment in the blogosphere. So this is incomplete and constrained by time and access. I have a job, after all.

Comment on the media treatement of Ms French’s death below as you see fit. I’ll make no apologies for deleting comments that stray off-topic to make unnecessary personal attacks on me, Katy French herself, or are tangential, libellous, or plainly ridiculous.

And to her friends and family, my condolences.