This isn't a post about Kobe, his accomplishments, etc. But it's about the "passengers."
When first reported yesterday the story was Kobe Bryant and 5 other passengers perished. Later it turned out there were more victims and their names slowly were revealed. And even then they were generally a footnote at the end of the story.
And the truth of course is that no life is more important just because the person is famous. And yet, that's how it's always been reported.
I almost was a victim of that myself.
I was broadcasting for the San Diego Padres. We were in New York to play the Mets. Superstar Tony Gwynn and I shared a cab out to Shea Stadium. At one point in Queens the driver hit an oil slick, lost control of the car and we spun into a 360 degree turn. He was finally able to bring the cab to a stop, no one was hurt, but we were all quite shaken up. (Tony was so rattled that he only went 3-5 that night).
As we resumed our commute I said to Tony, “You realize if we had crashed there would have been news bulletins breaking into every network, huge front page headlines the next day and they all would say, ‘Baseball star, Tony Gwynn and a passenger were killed in a auto accident’.
My entire life would be reduced to “passenger”.
Tony felt bad. And mind you, this was not a ploy to get him to pay the fare (although it worked). He felt it was wrong that one person should be valued over another just because they’re famous. It was sweet of him to say but I was still feeling bummed out. You can’t change the way the world operates, yes it’s unfair, but some people are special and others are just considered nothing. And I fell into the latter category.
We arrived at the stadium. Tony paid the fare and the driver said there was an additional charge. Why? Because he had a passenger. Yes! It turns out my life is not without value! It’s worth $3.50!
My blessings and deepest condolences to the passengers.
Or as the President puts it: "warmest condolences."
ReplyDeleteWhat’s wrong with that? How many ways can you offer condolences?
Delete*Cough*. ‘Baseball star Tony Gwynn and TWO others were killed in an auto accident'.
ReplyDeleteHow quickly the humble driver is forgotten.
This is the first celebrity death that affected my teenage boys. They told me that it’s so weird that you can die at any time. Um yeah. That’s why I worry everyday.
ReplyDeleteSimilarly, the tragic death of Farrah Fawcett was overshadowed by the death of Michael Jackson. It's sad that the passing of a good woman was ignored because a famous pedophile died the same day.
ReplyDeleteThree members from one family lost their lives. That's just crushing.
ReplyDeleteIf any of us were in a cab with you, we would be passengers. Great post, Ken. Your point is well taken!
ReplyDeleteYou and I in a cab together, it spins out, we die. Breaking news announces “Awarding winning writer, director, broadcaster, blogger dies tragically in a freak cab accident. Other passenger’s body insufficient to cushion the blow. News at 11:00.
ReplyDeleteVery sad.
ReplyDeleteVery complicated situation when flying in fog.
This is so sad for all.
Telly
Very sad.
ReplyDeleteVery complicated situation when flying in fog.
This is so sad for all.
Telly
Kobe seems to have been a decent guy, but the coverage is over the top.
ReplyDeleteIn the same vein as Princess Diana's, you think? (It's the only other sudden, tragic big name person I can think of/or was alive for.)
Delete--Orleanas
Can’t wait for your Grammys review. PIP for all those lives lost, including the pilot.
ReplyDeleteAmen, Ken. Too often celebrities are mourned disproportionately while "ordinary" people get no mention. I know it's "news" when somebody famous dies, but I feel much worse for the girl and her father who were along for the ride with Koby and his daughter. "Sure -- we'd love to come with you on the helicopter instead of driving." That's tragic. The least the news reports could do is mention their names.
ReplyDeleteI had the same reaction. Journalists can be especially insufferable when reporting these incidents. Of course it is utterly tragic that Kobe and his daughter passed away. But other families are also mourning. All of the dead deserve the same respect.
ReplyDeleteSometimes the principle you mentioned works to the detriment of famous people. C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley both died on the day that JFK was assassinated, so were (understandably) overlooked. Mother Teresa died a few days after Princess Di, and very few noticed it.
Ken
ReplyDeleteRe your cab story, my reaction if things had gone badly would have been "Oh no! Ken Levine's dead! Who's Tony Bryant?" Y'see I'm over in Britain where we got, and loved, M*A*S*H, Cheers and Frasier; American football though, that never really impinged upon my consciousness.
It would be like if Gary Lineker died: Britain would be in mourning, America would wonder who he was. (Ex soccer player, now TV pundit for same, who did a lot of adverts for what you guys call chips, but we call them crisps.)
I feel worse for the death of the daughter and the other kids on the helicopter who had full lives ahead of them that they will never live.
ReplyDeleteIt does make me wonder, though... we always hear about the death of celebrities. We never hear about their births. Why is that? ;-)
Am posting this on my FB page and my Twitter feed with the comment: "Just a reminder: There were others in that helicopter, too."
ReplyDeleteMaybe the reason that nobody seems to give a shit about the thousands of people killed in our adventures in the middle east is that none of them were famous.
ReplyDeleteYou say that your life would have been reduced to "passenger" but the truth is, if Tony Gwynn weren't in the cab, it probably wouldn't be reported at all.
ReplyDeleteThat is simply the reality of news coverage.
In fairness, the media won't release the names of victims until their families have been notified. Notification is easy if a victim is famous, but much harder if a victim isn't.
ReplyDeleteThat said, of course the names of non-famous people shouldn't be relegated to a footnote. That information should be added to one of the first few paragraphs of a story as it's updated.
Thanks for posting this. I also had to write about this story and made a point to mention all the names that had been released by my deadline time and to remind readers to remember all the victims and their families in their prayers.
ReplyDeleteIt is a mistake to view the importance of a person's life in terms of how, or if, it is covered by the media.
ReplyDeleteWhen I die it will not be reported because my death will not be of interest to the General Public and that's perfectly fine with me. The significance of my life is not in the hands of KTLA, it is in the hearts of my family and friends and those whose lives I have touched. Why should it matter if strangers mourn my passing?
The lives of the passengers in the Kobe Bryant crash are not made less by how it's reported. I seriously doubt their families care, at this terrible time, how they are characterized by the Press.
Ken with all the tributes to Kobe, I heard almost no one mention the Colorado rape case.
ReplyDeleteWhere do you stand on that?
When is it OK to make that also part of his life story?
Is it ever OK?
Aldous Huxley was about as famous as a writer can get, but few people noticed when he died on November 22, 1963. Timing is everything.
ReplyDeleteI see the headline as "Baseball star Tony Gwynn, the writer of Mannequin Two and another person"
ReplyDeletePoint well taken, Ken. I appreciate you focusing today's post on "the passengers" who also died tragically yesterday. In one of your previous posts, you noted that because of television, we grew up watching many of the celebrities whose upcoming death will now impact many of us--some more than others. Kobe, unfortunately for those crying foul at the attention his death is getting in comparison to the other passengers, is the more known public figure (some of the other passengers were private citizens). He's the one we think we "know." As others have pointed out, if you and I were the two passengers in that taxi, Ken, I would have been the "passenger" while you would have been the one featured in news clips and included in the "In Memoriam" segments of both the Oscars and Emmys. It's all relative.
ReplyDelete--Orleanas
File under: unintended consequences or be careful what you wish for:
ReplyDeleteThe headline could read "Baseball star Tony Gwynn, the writer of Mannequin Two and another..."
Richard Roper had a column like this many years ago. He got on a plane, and in first class was a "major" celebrity. He thought/wrote, great, if this plane goes down, no one will know anyone else died except for "famous celebrity".
ReplyDeleteSuch is life. So we just continue to move and and do stupid shit until it is our time.
"When first reported yesterday the story was Kobe Bryant and 5 other passengers perished. Later it turned out there were more victims and their names slowly were revealed."
ReplyDeleteReread what you typed here about "when first reported." Obviously it was Kobe's plane and he was known to be on it. However, no one knew at the time who else was on that plane. That's why initially it was reported that 5 were and then that was changed. Their names were "slowly revealed" as they were identified and family members notified. Pretty standard in these cases.
For some reason, I am reminded of an old country musician and comic, Stringbean, who used two lines when he was on a package show:
ReplyDelete"Lord, I feel so unnecessary."
"I'm the only person here tonight I've never heard of."
You guys fell for that old "additional passenger charge" scam? (There is no such thing in NYC.) The cabbie must have known that you guys were from way out of town!
ReplyDeleteAs someone who writes obits, I can tell you there are a lot of factors that go into coverage.
ReplyDeleteKobe is obviously going to dominate the coverage and the other passengers are relegated to secondary status, but it is true that any coverage they get will be because of Kobe. Not worth obsessing about, we can't change that, and the tragedy remains for everyone.
Here's something to consider - compare the coverage Kobe's death is getting to the coverage Jerry West will get when he dies.
Jerry will get a lot of deserved plaudits but it is unlikely it will be anything like Kobe.
And yet it is hard to argue that Jerry West is not the most influential Laker of all (greatest would depend on your definition).
Nearly the player Kobe was, maybe as good; the face of the NBA- the logo; and the incredibly successful general manager who among other things brought Kobe (and Kareem and Shaq) to the Lakers.
And when George Mikan died it barely registered - Shaq paid for his funeral, which tells you what a mensch Shaq is. All George Mikan did was revolutionize the game, win five NBA titles (same as Kobe) and put the Lakers on the map -albeit in Minneapolis.
Mikan was as great in his era as anyone and as influential to the Lakers success as Magic or Kobe, maybe only behind West. Ask 50 Laker fans about him.
Young athlete deaths trump old athlete deaths.
On the bright side, you'd be a sports trivia answer for ever more
ReplyDelete@Michael: that second line you quoted was also spoken by Shirley MacLaine in SWEET CHARITY.
ReplyDeleteI remember having the same feelings about the media coverage of the tragic Space Shuttle explosion in 1986. Seven people died, but it seemed all we heard about was one victim, Christa McAuliffe. It was a tragedy of equal magnitude for all seven families.
ReplyDeleteI feel a little bad relating something humorous you're posting reminded me of, while feeling so sad about all the folks dying in the crash and their grieving families. There's an old story from the 1950s-60s about the New York Yankees flying to to play somewhere when the plane hit a lot of turbulence. One of the players said: "If we crash, I can see the headlines: 'Entire New York Yankees Baseball Team Killed In Plane Crash!'" to which Whitey Ford replied: "Nah, the headlines will read: 'Mickey Mantle And 24 Others Killed.'"
ReplyDeleteA lot of journalists and social media users, to their credit, are mentioning the others who died in the crash, particularly the woman who was a youth sports coach and left behind a husband and family.
ReplyDelete@cd1515: The rape case is tricky because the charges were dropped, but Bryant still paid a settlement to the woman involved. Bryant did admit infidelity in that event, but what exactly happened we'll likely never know. With the line between #MeToo's "I believe women" tenet and the judicial principal of "innocent until proven guilty" so tenuous, it's a tough call.
Something similar occurred when the lady in my avatar died in an air crash in January 1942. Not only was Carole Lombard killed, but so was her mother, Clark Gable's press agent at MGM (he was serving as Carole's chaperone for the war bond rally she was returning from) and 19 others -- 15 of them Army Air Corps fliers some 40 days after Pearl Harbor. Elmer Davis, an influential radio commentator of the time, decried the disproportionate coverage given Lombard compared to the young pilots.
ReplyDeleteA few years ago, my Facebook friend Robert Matzen wrote "Fireball," a splendid book about the accident. It's half a bio of Carole, half an investigation of the disaster -- and all the victims' life stories are covered.
Here is everyone.
ReplyDeletehttps://sports.yahoo.com/christina-mausers-husband-calls-wife-extraordinary-remaining-kobe-bryant-crash-victims-identified-174153225.html
Sorry, not buying this one. I understand your perspective, but 1000s of people die every day, and never get a soundbite. Equating "news coverage" with "value of their life" is a sad perspective, and not one I share.
ReplyDeleteThis is about coverage by newsmedia, and the only "newsworthy" item in the crash is the one passenger that everyone knew. If not for him, it's local news only and no one other than family and immediate vicinity would even know.
Tragic, yes; sad, yes. But "oh no, they're making more of one death than another?". Yeah, because the one person touched many more lives and it affects more people.
Are you expecting someone in Boise to care about the death of someone they've never heard of, didn't know existed, has no connection to them at all, and since they are unlikely to travel in a helicopter as a commuting vehicle, no sense of resonance at all with the story?
It would be unfair if his wife made a big deal about him and not the daughter. But if you don't know the other people, of course you're going to care about the one you "knew". And the media is going to report that part too.
What bothers me more is the media trying the same tactic and saying "what about the other passengers", but only really doing so to create a false sense of injustice so then they can pretend to be "fair" but really just prolonging the story to feed the vulturous news cycle.
P.
In his first volume of memoirs, Gore Vidal recounts with amusement flying on Air Force One with JFK once. Kennedy, who was a good friend of Gore's (And his step-brother-in-law as Gore and Jackie were step-siblings, both of their gold-digging mothers having at different times been married to the same wealthy man), saying to him, "You know, if we crash, the Headlines will say 'John F. Kennedy dies in plane crash.' You might get mentioned in the fourth paragraph."
ReplyDeleteTell Former Texas Governor John Connelly about being "Others also shot were..." He was a friggin' Governor, but his injuries in the JFK assassination are seldom remembered, and did not make the headlines, even in Texas.
I have a feeling that when I die, they're just going to roll me into the closest ditch and be done with it.
ReplyDeleteEvery time I hear a Tony Gwynn story it makes me respect him more. I'm a Cardinal fan but always listed Tony as one of my favorite players. When Tony was approaching 3,000 hits he naturally wanted to hit #3,000 in front of the hometown fans in San Diego. However as he approached the milestone the Padres were on the road. Tony stated that if he could not hit it in San Diego, he would love to hit it in St. Louis because of the knowledgeable fans and welcoming atmosphere at Busch. Well, he hit 2,999 there on his last at bat, the crowd gave him a standing O, and Tony teared up. BTW he hit 3,000 in Montreal.
ReplyDeletecd1515, I've seen several stories about Kobe Bryant's death that mention the rape case. The ones I've seen provided brief overviews of what happened, including the trial and its aftermath. For what it's worth, unlike other celebrities in a similar situation he did not stonewall, lie, or hire an attorney who tried to bury the victim in slander. Eventually he offered an apology and paid a settlement. I'm not trying to absolve him from wrongdoing, but in the end he at least took responsibility for his actions. Offhand I can think of three other famous people in similar circumstances still denying everything.
ReplyDeletePolywogg sums up my thoughts exactly.
ReplyDeleteI would expect your name to appear in "Hollywood Writers Magazine" or "Short Plays Monthly", because your name would be recognisable to readers.
But to the average person, the name Ken Levine means nothing.
(Even less so now, with credits being either deleted or barely readable).
And remember that if Kobe's accident didn't occur until 2045, his death announcements would be much more low key-
Because many of the journalists of 2045 would not know who he was.
Part of what makes this so tragic is it could have been avoided. Was the trip so urgent that it needed a helicopter journey in foggy weather? I'm not trying to criticize the dead. It's probably because I'm looking at it as the type not to take unnecessary risks when they can be avoided.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the most horrendous was the Challenger disaster where it later emerged that there was a reluctance to delay the launch again after it had already been delayed despite warnings and concerns about the integrity of the shuttle. Had it been delayed again, the structural damage caused by the overnight freezing weather would have been discovered and fixed.
Re. the mention of Mannequin 2 above, check this out, Ken. A podcast called Think Funny Podcast is planning to do one on the Mannequin movies!
ReplyDeleteI love mannequin 2 on the move and I’m not even joking ...we are going to do a podcast episode about the 2 mannequin movies
https://twitter.com/Thinkfunnypodc1/status/1209633320163848193
Hope you reach out to them about joining them for their podcast.
Well said!
ReplyDeleteIntended for PollyWogg
DeleteReminds me ot this Woody Guthrie songs written after a plane full of immigrant farmers crashed; their names unreported.
ReplyDeleteMany years later, as happy an ending as could be expected.
Sometime in the early '70s, there was an airline crash here in Chicago; the local press gave most of the coverage to a local Congressman, George Collins, who was coming back from the Capitol for some Democratic Party business; also, a local TV reporter whose name I can't call to mind just now, who was being looked at by the CBS network for a possible national spot.
ReplyDeleteBut a funny thing happened some while afterward: it turned out that another passenger on that flight was Mrs. E. Howard Hunt, whose husband was in a DC jail trying to deal his way out of Watergate.
Over time, it developed that Mrs. Hunt was carrying a large amount of cash, in order to "facilitate" things; soon enough, the Congressman and the reporter were all but forgotten as the "second-rate burglary" took the spotlight.
Hey, things happen …
The reporter you're thinking of was Michele Clark. I think she did become a national correspondent for CBS in 1972, a few months before the plane crash in December. She was only 29.
ReplyDeleteIn the fictional scenario of Ken Levine being in such a crash, I think the 2020 news media would initially mistakenly report that Ken Levine the game developer had been killed.
ReplyDeleteEventually most would print a retraction. TV and radio news would announce the error, but pronounce 'Levine' incorrectly.
It turns out that Tony Gwynn went 3-for-5 at Shea TWICE while you worked for the Padres. The first was May 31, 1995, and the second was August 29, 1996. According to Wikipedia no one famous died those days, so the headlines would have been yours.
ReplyDelete>media won't release the names of victims until their families have been notified.
ReplyDeleteThis explains why ESPN and other sites had nothing on the story for several hours after TMZ.
Anonymous, George Mikan also nearly signed Kareem to the ABA as its commissioner. He had a plan to go in to the meeting with a check for a million dollars. Mikan's thinking is that that check would be in Kareem's pocket after the meeting, and he would go home thinking about it, and he would find it hard to walk away from that check. Good plan, except at the meeting, George forgot to give Kareem the check.
I quoted you. TMZ is scum.
ReplyDeleteAlso, ABC suspended national correspondent for reporting on live TV that ALL of Kobe's daughters were killed in the crash, before later retracting it.