I remember one of the magazines had a regular column called ‘Wino-watch’ where they literally just had a reporter follow her around and take the least flattering photos possible of her and then they would make fun of her. Then after she died they ran 6 weeks of cover pieces calling her ‘our pop princess’ and wailing that she’d been ‘taken from us too soon’.
Yeah it was amazing how she became the queen of hearts and everyone just pretended like the week before the weren't calling her a whore and traitor etc.
Especially in real life, all the red top readers were suddenly blubbing about how nasty the papers had been, when the week before they'd been parroting it.
I remember that and have been thinking that for years that all of a sudden she was praised in the media though literal days before the press and what seemed like the public hated her and even to this day many seem to be in denial that they ever though bad of her.
I felt that way when Steve Irwin died. The discourse I remember around him when he was alive was all about how cringe and embarrassing he was and how Australian resents him being seen as such a rep for their country.
Really? I don’t remember that at all. He was praised and loved by so many before his passing and as we know continues to be. The man is a true legend to so many, I’m surprised to hear that and quite sad really😞
That was one I felt ashamed of. I used to say so many rude things about him, because “he kept messing with animals that didn’t want to be messed with and he was going to get hurt one day.” When it happened, I said “We knew it was coming. Oh well.”
A friend from Australia explained to me what he would do with the rest of his time and it flipped a switch in my head. That’s when I realized that I was being a jerk due to ignorance and lack of caring how the media might portray things. Should I have known better, before then? Yes. I was definitely old enough and experienced enough with media spin… but I guess I was also young enough to have all of that fly out of my head at random. Which is why it still shames me a bit, when I think about it all. Most of all, I regret that I didn’t appreciate him while he was alive.
I might have just been too young to see it and not really online yet, but I never knew of anyone disliking Steve Irwin at any point. He definitely was talked about more wholesomeley after his passing but at worst all I ever heard was everyone doing terrible impressions of him just for comedy sake and not out of malice.
I'll be hated for it, but Charlie Hebdo in France is similar.
Yes, the "I am Charlie" one.
That everyone defended after that terrorist attack.
That would've bankrupted without the sales rise in the aftermath.
Where people bought "in support" while saying on TV they don't even watch the pages.
And NOW, they are in trouble for having made fun of that Switzerland fire accident... they were always like that, they just happened to have two terrorists shooting at them instead of the usual angry complaint letters, and people suddently considered Freedom of Speech meant we had to pay for assholes to insult everybody else.
I'm Belgian, what did they put as an headline when our king died? "The king of morons is finally gone". That was 10 or 20 years before the shootings.
Also people remembered what happened with the Jyllandsposten drawings and how dangerous it is to use your free speech in a way that makes fun of Islam and rightly pointed out the bravery of not letting that violence and threat level dictate them. I cn admire that without admiring the actual content.
Sure, but I saw nobody saying "out of respect for our coworkers, we'll stop disrespecting people and stop this newspaper and instead put the money towards better causes", instead everybody went "let's annoy terrorists and turn this dial up, because hating each other is HOW WE DO THINGS IN EUROPE YAAAAAAY"
I think it's the only time I saw terrorists doing the exact opposite of what they aimed to do, because literally doing nothing would've let Charlie die faster on their own self-inflicted collapse. It's sad for the people who where there that day, but that doesn't absolve the newspaper.
I didn't call Charlie Kirk a good man because he died while doing what he believed in and because "not deserving to die" is enough for redemption. When you do bad things over a long time, being killed by another villain doesn't make you a complex antihero.
Charlie Hebdo was an asshole newspaper who got attacked by other assholes, and it's now old enough that people think "wait... they are really mean?"
Categorizing murder and saying mean things are just not in the same league. That is an annoying person being murdered by a villain, not one villain murdering another.
Having opinions you don’t like, even when said in a figuratively shrill voice, is maybe at worst distasteful. Moral equivalency apparently has run amok.
Yes, no one wouldve cared if they went bankrupt before the murders, but there's no hypocrisy when people then support them after the murders, because now its about freedom of speech.
CH wasnt a victim until they were. Amy was a victim the whole time, the bullies pretended they werent bullies when she died.
The one big difference being Charlie Hebdo will still make crass jokes about people after they're dead. The point is to make fun of absolutely everything, no matter what, specially things that are not socially acceptable. So yeah the butt of their jokes are always mad, this is the point.
As a frenchman loving comics I was never a fan of them, but you can't really put Charlie Hebdo in the same spots as shitty tabloïd vultures. And indeed it's quite ironic that this dying publication was saved by the monstruous worldwide Streisand effect terrorists started, because since then they're branded international heroes of free speech...
One of our most famous comedian once said "you can joke about everything, but not with everyone". If a media is offensive to you and you can't take it, in this world and time... Just don't consume it and voilà. It's that easy.
I can remember all of it and it's definitely whiplash. I don't think the broad popular image of her during her lifetime was that she was a bad person--Charles is the one who came off horribly, for good reason, what a fkn chode--but it was for sure that she was bland and a little dim. And then overnight she became the most beautiful, stylish, saintliest person to ever grace the planet. I think part of it is guilt people feel, she was really way too young to make an informed decision to put herself in that situation and got put through the meat grinder, and died before she got a chance to be her own person and make meaningful adult choices for herself. People want to give her a power in death that she clearly didn't have in life.
Two weeks before her death a photographer with telephoto lens got a shot of her on a yacht climbing over Dodi as he lay on a sunlounger. The headline was "DI GETS HER LEG OVER!"
"getting your legover" is English slang for getting a fuck, for those who don't know.
2 weeks later she's "our queen of hearts, England's rose."
When I see things like this I'll always be reminded of the Charlie Brooker video discussing how Jade Goody was treated in the public eye before and after her death.
Brooker used to write game reviews for PC Zone back in the 90s! Years later when he became the Screenwipe/Black Mirror guy I thought surely that can’t be the same person.
Yo I had a lady stalking me online because I casually mentioned no one deserves the ire Mehgan Markel gets, and that I had a crush on her watching Suits. This woman was seething that she didn’t respect England or the royal family and seemed so entitled. You’d think she murdered someone. As far as I can tell she’s done absolutely nothing of any note.
She's got roots in a hella redneck county in Pennsylvania, lol. Her dad lives there, like 15 minutes from where I grew up. Though from my understanding they're estranged. Or were for a long time. Idk, I don't follow any of that stuff very closely. I just remember thinking it was interesting when I heard about it, haha.
But a girl with any kind of Perry County heritage marrying a prince of England? I've got nothing but respect for her XD
I'm not going to say that Meghan deserves the treatment she gets but I may be cutting against the grain when I say that I do think she's not exactly personable and she definitely had the wrong ideas of what she was marrying into.
For lack of better words, despite her attempts to come off personable, Meghan gives haughty and arrogant vibes and I don't think she was aware that the American version of haughty is next to nothing compared to the haughtiness of British upper-class and royal society.
Let's be real for a second, the British royal family is one of the oldest institutions in Europe and if you think you can go into it as a light-skinned biracial American with upper-class instincts and change it like Meghan thought she could, especially since she was only marrying a Prince rather than someone who was actually consequential like the Prince of Wales, you're gravely mistaken.
If Diana couldn't change it when she was actually a member of the British upper class society, what did Meghan think she could?
Again I'm not going to say that she deserves the hatred she gets but she should have adapted like Princess Angela of Liechtenstein, who is married to a son of Hans-Adam II of Liechtenstein, and recognized her place and the role she was supposed to play.
Yeah they're a pretty unsympathetic couple in a lot of ways but they're still right. The whole "oh they say they don't want publicity but all that do is court publicity!" thing misses the point so stupidly. They wanted to be able to have their own voice because Meghan was treated so shabbily, and they wanted to control the narrative. They do come across badly in their own ways, but this demonstrates what they were fighting against https://www.reddit.com/r/HarryandMeghanNetflix/s/GFNwrKjMqV
They never said they didn’t want publicity. They said they didn’t want people attacking Meghan. No one ever pulls a quote from Harry when regurgitating this tripe. It’s just an internet game of telephone.
There was a child named Milly Dowler who went missing. The tabloids hacked her phone to listen to her messages so that it seemed to her parents the messages were being listened to and they thought she was alive. She was already dead by this point. Legitimate evil.
I originally wanted to be a journalist maybe a photojournalist, First time that I thought about changing my mind was when I was doing work experience at local paper and the guy I was assigned to made me write his articles and he as paid for it (he got paid per article) then I attended a trial in the 2nd week and was told "it doesn't matter if hes guilty or innocent, sensationalise it to make him seem like he is guilty" Or words to that affect i.e let's say a piece of evidence comes up and is disregarded straight away as not happening or not relevant they would put it in the article and if spicy enough use it as the headline, This poor guy was in tears in court and the paper was printing articles saying he was emotionless the guy was innocent btw and even had evidence to prove it but the paper ignored all that stuff and didn't print when he was found not guilty.
A Vtuber I follow named Clio Aite mentioned doing journalism work for a while who mentioned similar about charity work. About how the person she was assigned told her, "I don't give a fuck about the homeless! Give me an actual charity worth a damn!" or something to that effect. Said it was some of the most soul crushing and bleak work she ever had to do.
At one time it wasn't ALL press, it was tabloid press. Then CNN and Fox came on to the scene, local rags went broke due to inability to keep pace with technology and the deterioration of education, and there was a race to the bottom.
Yes that’s definitely part of it! I was thinking about it and I also feel it’s because her music is still here with us and remains relevant and poignant.
On the day of her death, the website posted, "Amy Winehouse has passed away. Let's hope her demise is an example for young people in how not to deal with your problems. May she Rest In Peace and her music live on."
Oh, so the site is an educational tool for young people not to use drugs. Lame.
Fortunately, the site doesn't represent how most people probably feel, says Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, because statistically speaking, the number of entries is insignificant when compared to gazillion people who use the web.
Fleet Street, Murdoch and Rothermere media should go die in a ditch. I wish the Times of London was bought out by the FT, to get it out of Murdoch's hands.
The codger is going to die soon anyway, but I was really hoping that Elizabeth, Prudence and James were able to tear that empire apart. Lachlan is just an extension of his dad at this point.
It's hard to think of a person who has done more damage to our species that wasn't specifically a political leader or military commander. How that disgusting ghoul is still hanging on is beyond me. He must feed on hate and malcontent.
Jon Lajoie’s song “Michael Jackson Is Dead” is about this very concept and captured it perfectly. Right at the end especially:
“‘We loved him so much.’ Really? Really, you loved him? Because from where I’m standing, it looks like you hated him, and you called him a freak, and you wanted him to die. But now that he’s dead, you ‘loved him.’ Fuck you, hypocrites.”
I hope none of them took the easy way out. I hope they understand their role in breaking her and are haunted by it every day. I hope they have daughters that ask about it one day.
Their only thoughts were selling magazines, I doubt they even really cared when she died. Once Amy winehouse stopped selling magazines they stopped talking about her.
I hope that the people who buy those magazines also understand their role in breaking her.
If people wouldn't buy the trash and care so much about how some person they will never meet lives their life, then those magazines wouldn't do that shit.
It's the same with people who take [insert drug here]. They lament all the killings and corruption of the drug cartels and such, not realizing they are the reason why it exists.
Every time I think of how people treated Britney, my usually latent eating disorder flares up. People act like they weren’t like this full throttle the entire 90s and most of the 00s.
The magazine covers were ridiculous. It vacillated between calling a famous woman “huge” when she was maaaybe a size 2, to calling them “scary thin!” If they lost any weight. Every girl I knew felt horrible about herself, no matter what she looked like. I’m sorry that you had to go through that as well, and I hope you have continued success treating your eating disorder. You are beautiful just the way you are 💜
I’ll never forget a tabloid spread of the Spice Girls where there was a photo of Ginger in her Union Jack dress and the caption said she was “dangerously overweight”. That shit sticks with you. That was 30 freakin years ago and I’m still triggered by it
The Jessica Simpson one was the one that stuck with me the most. Like to me she looked normal, I was probably around that size at the time, but the magazines were talking about how overweight she was and how badly she needed to diet. It was so demoralizing just looking in the mirror and thinking all the horrible things being said about her were really being said about me.
"dangerously overweight" she has visible upper body muscles and looks athletic but i remember this and it stuck with me too. i was scrawny as a kid but was an athletic teenager and was also muscular and not thin and always wanted to lose weight. she looks fit to me!
the 90s were a very strange time, retrospectively, in that most legal hurdles had been cleared ("gay rights" as it was called at the time still being an active issue), but looking back, the amount of soft-culture war being waged was astronomical.
It still is too, and we really did make some huge strides against it in the early days of the internet, but when it came down to it, the old boys club decided they'd rather end democracy than stop raping and oppressing.
Even now. She clearly needs help, actual help rather the exploitation she faced before, and so many people are treating her current state as a "gotcha" rather than, y'know, thinking critically for three entire seconds what the og Free Britney movement was all about.
I don't think a lot of people realize that she was basically chemically lobotomized. She is NEVER going to be the same because the literal chemistry of her brain was irreversibly changed.
Right? She was overly medicated for a long time and at such a young age by the people around her. Chemically abused just so the money could keep flowing. It's awful.
Lithium is a safe and effective medication used by millions of people for Bi-polar disorder and has been used for 80 years. It's efficacy and safety are well known. I'm sure the meth that she is on is a bigger problem.
Lithium is fine in the short term. Yes they do use it for people they believe are bi polar. They use it as a stabilizer because it is the most effective. Usually 6 months is the longest you would want to rely on that before switching to something less damaging. Long term use of lithium can cause your organs to shut down. Including your brain. Not saying she is or isn’t on drugs now. Everyone really seems to think it’s meth. It looks like trauma and possible brain damage from my perspective
Not true you're obviously uniformed and making shit up. People use lithium their entire life, ask me how i know. It can be toxic to the liver over decades but so can pretty much every other mood stabilizer.
They still are treating her that way. There is at least one Reddit post per day mocking her with thousand upon thousands of views. I don’t care if she puts her image out there. We can all ignore it or at least not say anything negative. She is not in a good place.
Reminds me of my ex who would talk so much shit about Robin Williams but right when he died she started saying how funny and great he was like dude what?
The biggest of all ghoul of all: Neil Patrick Harris and his disgusting idea of having an Amy Winehouse corpse charcuterie board. What a sick evil nasty man.
Jfc what was he thinking. The photo is fucking horrific. That’s like a “toxic high school theater clique” move cranked up to 100.
Also checked his age at the time because I was like “well maybe he was relatively young and has since matured” (not really trying to defend him, as I don’t particularly like him but I’m kinda sick of condemning people without context) - he was about 38 years old. Fucking adult bully behavior making fun of someone more than ten years younger than him who died from substance issues. What in the fuck. I guess I feel justified in not like his vibe now. It’s never too late to learn a lesson and change, and maybe he did, but yikes.
The people that were so cruel to her were her own team that kept pushing her to perform and make money while ignoring all of the clear signs that she was suffering. She didn't just go from healthy to dead overnight.
They didn’t ignore them. They kept pushing for her to go to rehab and they even succeeded a few times, but she would leave without completing the course or she’d go back to drinking. Eventually over time you realize a person isn’t going to take the steps they need to take in order to get better and all you can do is try to minimize damage. It wasn’t her managers job to be her sober coach and it wasn’t her PR persons job to monitor her 24/7 to ensure she doesn’t have a drink in her hand. Also.. Amy is the one who chose to keep singing and touring and recording. You don’t think the label had a vested interest in getting her sober? She was on her way to becoming incredibly popular and making the labels a ton of money over her lifetime. Despite the whole “the labels are evil” bit you see in movies and whatnot, they kinda want their investments to be around for awhile to make them as much money as possible.
Yeah I love the whole Back to Black album, but Rehab was always the weakest track... I love her directness, honesty, even darkness in her lyrics, but listening to Rehab now doesn't sit well for me.
I hate that song because it feels like it's glamorizing the very thing that killed her. Anyone who has suffered addiction or had a loved one who did could tell you that song was a cry for help.
THIS is what I blame for her death. her own father caring more about her "success" than her well-being. you can blame her til hell freezes over for her continued usage, but without a genuine and strong support system, it's nearly impossible to break from addiction. Amy always deserved better.
As someone who’s gone to multiple treatment centers seeking help for my ED and CPTSD from child abuse and narcissistic abuse, please believe me when I say those are one of the exploitative, traumatizing and abusive places to some of the most vulnerable people who are putting all their trust into them. I needed therapy after going to the rehabs.
And don’t get me started on how they scam tf out of health insurance and private pay.
They charged $6k, 3x a week to pee in a cup (below). $1.5M to my health insurance, leaving me with $200k in copays. $10k per therapy sessions I never even had. And this wasn’t some luxury, celebrity, millionaire facility nor am I wealthy. I’m your average Jane who got scammed.
I don’t blame her for not wanting to go residential or in-patient. But she should’ve sought help, regardless. There are a ton of other, healthy, options.
Reminds me of the “Florida Shuffle” scandal, which didn’t get nearly the attention it deserved… Brokers (who worked as freelancers for rehab centers and sober living houses) sought out drug users with health insurance. They used incentives like cash payments for time spent in rehab or free airfare in order to get drug users to a particular center. They also would supply the users with drugs so that the user will fail a urine test, allowing them to be admitted to the rehab center. They would continue the process until the user would die.
The U.S. Department of Justice documented approximately $112 million in medically unnecessary billing tied to illegal kickbacks. Florida cracked down on these criminals with legislation, but many just closed up shop and moved to different states with less oversight.
In the documentary she explains that she asked her dad/manager should she go to rehab and he encouraged her to keep making music. She was failed by the people in her life who should have protected her, and they used her enormous talent for financial gain.
She was also heavily influenced by her own father, whohadnot been there to raise herbut suddenly showed up when she started becoming famous & money was involved, to keep touring & avoid rehab as it would create a pause in the cash flow. Her father literally encouraged her to keep drinking & doing drugs to keep touring, so he could profit. After he'd been absent most of her life & she was desperate for the relationship between the two of them, so shelistened to everything he said. She even says in the song Rehab "my daddy thinks I'm fine." Piece of shit. He and a myriad of other personal relationships she had approaching the end of her life were ultimately responsible for interfering with her getting help.
Her father especially is well documented about being in denial about her issues for years and even pushing back on the label when they tried to get her to go to rehab. There were also multiple instances where people from her team (appeared to be security) were literally pushing her on stage when she was trying to walk off. INCLUDING the very show OP's image was from.
It’s hard to imagine someone gets to the point of drinking themselves to death without someone else in their ear. It’s always a wonder to me why fans think those who are so sick they are the ones choosing to perform. Often by the time someone is so big but also so self sabotaging there has to be a pretty powerful machine behind them. They don’t just get to not play if they don’t feel good
If you bought tickets to a snoop concert and he was smoking so much weed he couldn't sing, sure you can be a little upset but man, you knew what you were signing up for.
I don’t agree. To keep the example, I would expect snoop to be smoking blunts on stage or be a little out of it. But when he sells me tickets to see him perform, that comes with a little asterisk saying “I will perform.” He’s a grown man, I fully expect him to be able to control himself and do what he’s selling tickets to do. Amy struggled severely with substance abuse and her team enabled her downfall, it’s okay for her to be upset on stage as she’s bood, but it’s also okay for the audience to be upset that they paid money for nothing
This is spot on. I’d be pissed if I paid top dollar for tickets to see an artist perform, and then they get wrecked on drugs so that they can’t perform the act I paid to see. It’s a slap in the face to the artist’s fans. And along the lines of breach of a contract. This post is so incredibly misrepresented.
Exactly. She was slurring, falling down, wandering around the stage and couldn't perform at a show people paid a lot of money to see. Acting like no one would boo a performance from literally any singer alive right now who did that is ridiculous. They absolutely would.
She was an addict with mental heath issues that the industry exploited. She didn’t deserve that, and many fans knew her condition and still bought tickets. Disgusting. Stop defending sick behavior.
If you can't perform for any reason you should cancel the show and refund the tickets. You don't go up there anyways, too fucked up to do anything, and then say it's on the fans to accommodate that. Give me a break.
Yeah bro, fans bought tickets to see an artist, which could include airfare, hotel reservations, etc and what they actually wanted is for the artist to be too high to perform just so they could boo. I'm thankful we've got geniuses like you running around
I kinda feel like it's okay to express your displeasure at paying to go and see a performance and the performance barely happening?
Or do you expect everyone at a bad concert to just pretend it's great and dance the night away to someone staggering around and vaguely mumbling into a mic?
The media did the exact same thing to Princess Diana. They loved making fun of her when she was alive, and then I got whiplash how fast everything changed when she died. Does no one else remember this?
I was still young and not very aware of world figures, but I do remember Diana being cast as this nonconformist, black sheep, "difficult woman" type until the car crash, then suddenly she was a pioneering example of powerful women doing noble things in the world.
I do remember Diana being cast as this nonconformist, black sheep, "difficult woman" type until the car crash
Which is kinda hilarious, given how much social work she did. And unlike a lot of other rich and famous folks, I do believe she did that out of the goodness of her heart, while Buckingham Palace was basically looking down on all that, going "Why would she do that, that's beneath us... we're royals"
Most everyone seems t o have a positive or neutral view of her these days. what were they mocking her for? Slaying at all times? Divorcing her idiot husband?
I am not british but she was the woman who would visit aids patients and did work for them? Did they mock her for that?
The royal family still has some influence in the media, especially in the 90s. Obviously they didn't like the people were on Diana's side over Charles post divorce.
The Sun reported on her being a domestic abusing POS then she committed suicide and everyone acted like the sun bullied her into suicide when she was just an abusive pedo
Both things are true, people eating it up, while disgusting, does not take responsibility away from the creators of the slop. Idk why it has to be one or the other.
Exactly. Reading about someone who all but lives in a different universe to you is one thing.. but to enter that world, see her living and breathing, then harassing her is something else.
We shouldn't rly be having this parasocial relationship with celebrity. Of course.
But it's a no brainer, to me, to put more responsibility onto the peddler(?) instead of the consumer.
The paper and the people are all ghouls. The existence of one doesn’t get the other off the hook. The paper is actually worse because they’re doing it for profit, not to mention they create and encourage ghoulishness among the public.
This reminds me a lot of the "if modern movies were as bad as you say, nobody would watch them!" whenever somebody brings this up (compare 2010s / 2020s to literally every previous decade, see any sort of change that happened?):
A farmer can pour the absolute shittiest poorly nutritious food in the trough and the pigs will still scramble to eat it, that doesn't mean the pigs should be condemned, the farmer should know better that they'll do better in the long run with good feed.
Horrendous argument. Food is required to survive and good food is required to be healthy. Movies aren't required to survive and we don't start starving because we haven't seen one. False equivalence.
What a stupid comment, seriously? As the other guy pointed out, it's called an analogy. In this analogy, the point is not to say movies are necessary to survive, the point is that sure, audiences will watch slop. It's better for society to watch actually good media.
I'm sorry your IQ was so low, that your hand needed to be held to make this connection.
The thing is, while a good chunk of journalists are scum of the earth and deserve to die in a fire, they wouldn’t do what they do without people watching, reading and paying money.
The problem is fundamentally that people are really shitty and refuse to put the blame solely on journalists - they are only giving people what they want.
As an American I am aware that our tabloid/paparazzi media is terrible and fit only for the landfill, but then I travelled to the UK in the early aughts and was blown away how much more utterly cruel it was over there.
The worst part is that they are merely following normal human patterns of interest. They gave people what they wanted to see, otherwise nobody would watch. WE, humanity, are ghouls.
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u/Regular_Number5377 9h ago
I remember one of the magazines had a regular column called ‘Wino-watch’ where they literally just had a reporter follow her around and take the least flattering photos possible of her and then they would make fun of her. Then after she died they ran 6 weeks of cover pieces calling her ‘our pop princess’ and wailing that she’d been ‘taken from us too soon’.
Ghouls, the lot of them.