Via Slate’s kausfiles blog I noticed the claim in bold below, from journalist Maureen Orth on the Britannica Blog site:

Today we are all one besotted planet feeling the connection of celebrity. In the decade since Diana’s death we have seen the celebrity industrial complex spread globally like the fallout from a dirty bomb. Celebrity dish that travels the 24 hour news cycle on the internet and on cable TV as well as in print—not to mention celebrity maintenance—is a huge business worth billions of dollars. Minor pop stars now trail entourages of fifteen and twenty, too many to fit into network green rooms. By 2003, I counted more white limousines for the memorial service of the previously unknown murdered and pregnant Laci Peterson in the small town of Modesto, California, than Elvis Presley had at his funeral in Memphis[,] which I covered in my early days as a writer for Newsweek. (Elvis’s death in 1977 rated two paragraphs in People Magazine.) Today there are red carpets for the opening of a McDonald’s. People routinely are willing to humiliate themselves in front of millions for the chance to appear on a reality TV show.

Orth is a really good reporter, though I don’t agree with the hand-wringing here. But is that claim about Presley true? At a time when there was a lot less media around I remember enormous coverage of his death. I could be wrong, but I wonder a) if she is remembering an issue that came out immediately after Presley’s death, in which the news came on deadline and the editors had time only for a mention, with full coverage coming the following issue, or b) whether People, still a relatively new magazine at the time, just blew a story that was big news everywhere else. As the excerpt above says, though, Orth was on the story at the time, so she may be right.

I’m interested because Presley has been overcovered and excessively lionized ever since his death. My theory as to why that is is based on a vortex of, if you will forgive this crude formulation, hipster and yahoo sensibilities, in which the affection for Presley maintained in the hearts of a relatively few unquestioning fans is magnified by a hipster population that finds the adoration of an artist with such a widely varying output sort of funny. The hipsters adopt the star with a highly ironicized affection. Serious critics, too, venerate Presley’s sociological importance, which helps. This all buttresses the feelings of the Presley fan base, who don’t get the irony, which is considered to be even funnier by the hipsters, and so on and so forth. It’s a hall of mirrors.