Media phenomenon: Coke-snorting beats Nazi-hunting to the front pages

MANY have noted it, but it was this column, in this paper, which named it.

The Princess Di/Mother Teresa Phenomenon. It manifests itself most frequently when two people die around about the same time, as did Di and Mother Theresa. It is rooted in unwritten media laws. Laws which hold that younger is more interesting than older, that the worthless, if pretty, outweighs the significant, if not pretty. Laws which decide that ineffective damaged goods trailing clouds of vicious vulnerabilities are more worthy of attention than focused achievers with a coherent ideology.

In the most recent case of the syndrome, one of the participants didn’t even have to die. All she had to do was be filmed snorting cocaine.