The Bleedin' Obvious

I was sitting in the Chicago Greyhound station today, trying without success to get their free wi-fi to work.  There was a TV tuned to CNN in my line of sight, showing their coverage of the royal parents showing their royal baby to the common media and then getting into their royal car to drive home to their royal apartment.  That unemployed girl who married a soldier from a welfare family (via) has done pretty well for herself.

The sound was off, but the closed-captioning was on.  The anchor kept saying something like "They're just like any family who've just had their first baby."  Why, yes, exactly.  What the anchor meant, of course, that it's amazing that royal people look deceptively like normal people, when they really aren't.  It could have been worse, of course.  I saw newspaper headlines -- and these were US newspapers -- like "The People's Prince."

So why are the media flocking to see them?  Why, for that matter, did they flock to see the royal wedding, when it wasn't certain that many people even in England cared?  It can't be because it's important news; as FAIR's Peter Hart remarked at the time of the wedding, "it's worth pointing out that there's very little news on the TV news anyway."  It probably isn't because they're giving the public what it wants.  My guess is that the media folks want to distract themselves from all the bad stuff in the world, by covering a story that makes them feel good, and the rest of us are supposed to get satisfaction from their feeling good.  Just a guess, though.