There’s a scandal, a real scandal unfolding with politics, prostitution, presidential aspirations, a devoted and humiliated wife, upset children, the IRS and the FBI. It’s the stuff about which novels are written and movies are made and yet, the media coverage is quite tame.
It’s not a reflection of PR containment either, no crisis communication strategy here. The tragedy of New York governor Eliot Spitzer’s demise apparently is just not that interesting to viewers and readers outside of New York.
With staff cutbacks on newspapers and in TV news departments, the frequency with which unfolding stories are reported is now a reflection of audience response—and participation.
This answers the question of why this very important and intriguing story is reported on with less frequency than Britney’s trips to the pharmacy for diuretics and Anna Nicole’s autopsy report. Patrick Swayze’s unfortunate cancer diagnosis has had more continuous coverage.
The reason people aren’t interested is that Eliot Spitzer has not come into our homes singing and dancing, talking with Jay Leno or kidding with Regis. We really don’t know him, although he has made plenty of headlines himself as a New York attorney general tough on white collar crime.
Yet even his hypocrisy hasn’t captured imaginations enough to escalate the coverage, although the Washington Post website amazingly posed this question in their Post Global section: “New York State governor Eliot Spitzer admits he hired a prostitute. Should people care and why?” So asks Fareed Zakaria, a noted journalist often invited onto the Sunday morning political shows, who has been forced to get a worldwide audience take to get enough unique website visitors to justify advertising rates.
So what does this all mean in a Media/PR world? We’ll just have to wait and see if the articles of impeachment that have been drawn up against Spitzer will get the ratings they deserve. In the meantime, check out the outstanding and complete, real journalistic coverage in The New York Times, and at CNN.
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