oh, grow up

Yeah, yeah, I know—my mantra is that infotainment rules. Except that this is America, where we get new moral outrages every news cycle and where pundits can’t let go of our Puritan heritage and so more often than not these days, it is Puritanism that rules.

When the O.J. book scandal erupted a few weeks ago, I commented that Rupert “How Low Can You Go” Murdoch had finally discovered the limits of America’s tolerance for tabloid excess. (He was also, oddly, applauded for his moral rectitude when he pulled the plug on Judith Regan’s HarperCollins project—which Barbara Walters, of ABC, had also flirted with but got a pass on), and I said that the project would have flown in England.

In case you don’t believe me, feast your eyes on “Forget Paris,” by Rachel Shukert, about Britain’s tabloid trash queens:

Jade Goody is more than just a bundle of adorably illiterate malapropisms. She has amassed a fortune of roughly $7 million simply by presenting and appearing on reality shows — Celebrity Wife Swap, Celebrity Driving School, Back to Reality, Celebrity Stars in Their Eyes, and most recently Jade Goody’s Diary, which is sure to rival that of Samuel Pepys in capturing the zeitgeist of the British society of the time. In October, suffering the stomach pain that often accompanies a sudden dip in media coverage, Jade underwent emergency screening for colon cancer (in U.K. speak, “bowel cancer,” a term at once deliciously visceral yet vague). When the prevailing medical opinion was that her abdominal pain was probably the result of a few nasty kebabs, Jade let her anger out by slugging a grandmother in the face at the cinema, in a fracas possibly instigated by her nineteen-year-old lover, Jack Tweedy (she has since broke things off with him, after several tabloid photographs surfaced of him in the embrace of a naked blonde, speculated by some snarkier British gossip blogs to be celebrity chef Jamie Oliver.) The granny, surely the kind of woman who lives in a flat decorated with Royal Wedding memorabilia and serves her guests tea from charmingly mismatched floral china, had this to say about Goody: “She called me a fat cunt. I used to like her from the telly but now I think she’s a pig-faced thug.”

Meanwhile, back on the Puritan side of the Pond, Kelly Jane Torrance of the Washington Times is fulminating over the fact that the publishing industry’s cheerleader, the trade magazine Publishers Weekly, is celebrating HarperCollins exec Jane Friedman, who green-lit the O.J. project (and let her employees understand that they were to keep their mouths shut about it).

The president and chief executive of HarperCollins was one of those responsible for the O.J. fiasco — she approved the reported $2 million to $3.5 million paid to Mr. Simpson’s representatives for his participation. Instead of being chastised for her misreading of the public mood — not to mention a shocking lapse of taste — she’s being rewarded by the very industry she tainted.

[the industry was "pure" before this project? Gawd--ed.]

Honoring one of the people responsible for a tasteless idea born out of pure greed shows the industry hasn’t learned its lesson. There are some things Americans simply won’t buy, no matter how much marketing goes into them.

But perhaps no one expects anything more noble from the publishing industry anymore.

One would hope not.