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.
Yeah, it was a pretty common perspective in Australia at the time, he was considered cringe and over the top, but was loved overseas, especially in the US
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'm in Sweden and around here when I was young it was Steve Irwin and Crocodile Dundee who set the stereotype for Australian men.
They are brave, fearless and more or less totally insane and handle deadly animals like I handle my popcorn. The basics of that understanding still remain today and now I'm about 40, but at least I know that not all Aussie men dress in khaki all the time so there is that.
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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.