I do feel sorry for Anna Nicole, I really do.

Contrary to popular belief, I�m not a coldhearted, mean-spirited person.

I really do feel bad for Anna Nicole Smith. I can only imagine what it must have been like for her to wake up every morning after her son died, all the while dealing with a paternity battle for her daughter.

However I would like to take this opportunity to bust out the media. For years Anna Nicole Smith was a has-been punch line, and the media has been gleefully televising every single aspect of her life in the past year or so. How would you deal with the paparazzi snapping pictures of you while you�re burying your son?

To put it simply, her death is not front-page news. It�s barely even page 12 news. From 1994 on she was famous for being famous, and that was it.

The fact that she has made front page for dying is enough to call the media�s short-term memory into question. She was a walking punch line until her son died, now all the media can do is cry about how talented she was and what a tragedy her death is.

Any death is a tragedy, but I can�t help but be annoyed when the media decides that certain people deserve round-the-clock coverage just because they did something that everybody has to do at some point.

Some celebrities are good, kind people, but there are a lot of them who are completely self-absorbed and didn�t lift a finger to make a stranger�s life better, yet they still receive the kind of coverage that used to be reserved only for a head of state. Being famous does not make you a god and it doesn�t make you immune to tragedy.

If the death of Anna Nicole Smith accomplishes anything, it should be to finally drive home the point that money and fame aren�t going to make your life perfect. You don�t get some kind of protective bubble put around you as soon as your bank account hits a million dollars.

Had she died a year ago I probably wouldn�t be writing this because the death of her son wouldn�t have happened and I wouldn�t have any reason to see her as anything but a wannabe Marilyn Monroe.

As I mentioned earlier, until her son died, she was the butt of every bad joke and in my opinion was a horrible role model for young girls. Even after all of those tragedies, the media still felt the need to poke fun at her, and a part of me didn�t blame them. By all appearances she did marry a much older man for his money (I doubt the sex was that great), and she was fading into obscurity until she became a weight-loss success story.

If it had been Tony Blair who died I could understand the coverage, but this was a vapid former model who had some very bad luck in the last few months. She wasn�t anyone important. If anything her life has only made things worse for a lot of girls who grew up seeing her and being convinced that life was all about how thin and rich you are. Once again, people bought into it so the message was allowed to propagate.

There is a difference between feeling sorry for someone and being honest, and I hope I�m not coming off as a vindictive jerk by tearing America�s latest sweetheart off of her pedestal. Yes, her life was tragic, but most of it was a tragedy of her own making. Just like anyone else, she was privy to horrible things in her life, but had the media to broadcast her pain to the rest of the world.

If she did kill herself, I would find it kind of hard to blame her in light of that.

> Comments