Crikey

It was a one fact story: a barely cold corpse in a New York apartment. A bed, an actor, some pills, a bored masseuse. Nothing more to know. There wouldn’t be for days, until the medical examiners had done their grisly work.

The morning ground on, past the fluttering, then ambitious recovery of the Australian stockmarket, the release of the latest inflation figure and George Clooney’s departure for Chad as a United Nations “messenger of peace”. Through it all — the vague presentiments of global economic chaos and so forth — mindless minute by mindless minute, the media tripped over itself, frozen in the spotlights of Heath Ledger’s sudden youthful death, seized by a desperate, frenzied, vacuous pursuit of nothing in particular, just the constant repetition of a single — admittedly sad — fact.

It was obsessive. It was manic. In the end it got kind of weird. The Prime Minister made a statement. Mel Gibson made a statement. Live news TV did what it always does in moments of urgent crisis, it talked to other journalists. No-one knew anything more. Radio took talkback from people who knew even less. It emerged that A Knight’s Tale was the favorite movie of “Evi” in Melbourne. Inflation rose by 0.9%. They’ll probably have to raise rates.