Dying in the Big Brother house

The British reality TV star Jade Goody is making the headlines the world over because she wants to die on live TV in the Big Brother house. Celebrity news has broken the last taboo: death. Why do we feel so uncomfortable with this? asks Hilde van den Bulck, a lecturer in media culture, in the daily De Standaard: "Criticising attention-grabbing and money-seeking celebrities who are willing to shamelessly market their own death is no doubt the easiest thing to do. But they are just one of the parties in this moral story. … Not only the gossip magazines but also hardcore news media like newspapers have long since realised that celebrity news brings in the money, above all when it's about the private lives of celebrities. And what could be more private than illness and death? … After all, we ourselves are the increasingly greedy consumers of such news. The uneasiness we feel about these stories is our shame at our own boundless voyeurism."

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