Short on news
Days later, I’m still trying to figure out why this is newsworthy: Martin Short’s wife has died.
I mean no ill intent to her surviving family members, including Mr. Short, whom I had a very pleasant half-hour press interview with once. But why was this newsworthy enough to be covered by CNN, Entertainment Weekly, the Associated Press, The Los Angeles Times, and by my Google count at least 500 other news sources?
If I’m reading her biography correctly, her last and most noteworthy acting appearance, as a supporting player on the sitcom “Soap,” was in 1981, the year that Ronald Reagan became president. The year “Raiders of the Lost Ark” opened. The year Britney Spears was born. Since then, she’s been a housewife and mother. These are good and important things. But housewives die all the time, with little notice by the media.
The greatest clue we get is the headline from the LA Times: ” ‘Three Amigos’ and ‘Father of the Bride’ funnyman Martin Short’s wife dies.” So what we have is an obit in which the subject of the obit is mentioned after the names of two films in which she didn’t appear, and after her husband, an obit in which she is mentioned in the next-to-last word, and not by name, but by title: “wife.”
This has me asking:
When Phil Silvers’ wife died, whoever she was, was it reported?
Who is Jason Alexander’s wife? Wikipedia tells me they’ve been married almost 30 years, like the Shorts. If she dies, of natural causes, will there be an obit?
How is the health of Billy Crystal’s wife? Would she get an obit?
Small-town papers run obits of all the locals. (Or, at least, they used to. Now unless the local is notable, they run a death notice — which is a paid service offered to the family.) But with mainstream media, obits are restricted to notable people. The late Mrs. Short is notable solely for having been married to Mr. Short. While understandably, her demise is newsworthy to him and to their children, and perhaps to people in the entertainment industry who knew the couple, why is this important to outside mainstream media? I honestly can’t figure this out. She died of natural causes. What is the news angle? The fact that this is being reported at all makes me wonder if there’s some aspect that is not being reported (yet?). As it is, it seems to be a dog bites man story: a not-well-known person died after a lengthy illness.
I am sorry for the Short family’s loss.