Three network evening news shows covered the incident, Disney issued a statement, a young star wrote an apology, bloggers opined with both outrage and forgiveness, and a magazine's website crashed when the curious clicked on a few times too many.
No, I'm not talking about news of an economic turnaround or an update in the presidential sweepstakes. The media is atwitter over the latest starlet scandal: Disney star Miley Cyrus of Hannah Montana fame revealed a little too much in a photo shoot. The brouhaha over the Vanity Fair magazine cover, with the 15-year-old singer wrapped in a satin bedsheet, her back exposed, her hair mussed, unfortunately arrives on the heels of a few dubious shots of Cyrus leaked online -- all in all, a sudden need for damage control by the Girl Next Door.
Public condemnation has been overwhelming. The Christian Coalition has demanded Cyrus be reprimanded and even Fox's Bill O'Reilly offered his personal commentary. Me, I find the hand-wringing a tad hypocritical. Last time I checked, no young girls leafed through Vanity Fair. In fact, I don't know many adults who do.
I suspect the outrage was primed even before the photo shoot, and the attention showered on this story was manipulated to cause a perfect storm of publicity. In other words, we've been had.
But first let me backtrack. For the uninitiated: Miley Cyrus is a huge star, a franchise player for the tween set who reached said status in a TV series about a teenager who struggles to be just average during the day and an international pop star by night. Her Best of Both Worlds tour sold out within minutes and concert tickets went for hundreds of dollars.
Cyrus posed for the occasionally controversial Vanity Fair and the always envelope-pushing photographer Annie Liebovitz. So, really, the result shouldn't surprise us: the bare-back cover shot, which has caused the biggest stir, and one pic of the girl draped over her tattooed father, singer Billy Ray Cyrus, her midriff exposed.
Disney accused Vanity Fair of deliberately manipulating their star to sell magazines. Vanity Fair defended itself, saying her parents and minders were on the set all day and saw the photos digitally. And Leibovitz, who could teach Madison Avenue a thing or two about hype and promotion, claimed her portrait was misinterpreted.
Oh, please. All this backpedaling by people who know better, by companies who make millions in titillation, would be comical if it weren't so disingenuous. It has as much substance as the public finger-wagging.
I think it's time to do some personal values auditing. A close look at what we allow our own daughters to do may explain why a magazine whose readership skews to the old set is getting so much publicity over photographs of a teen idol. Go online. Check into MySpace. What you click on might surprise you. Girls barely out of braces posing in underwear. Teens in high school showing off compromising behavior. Comments that would make anyone over 30 blush.
This is our children's milieu, the one we've allowed greedy media to co-opt. Then we express shock -- shock, I tell you! -- that a G-rated act with her eye on the future might want to adjust her wholesome image by some calculated exposure. We can't be that clueless, can we?
Sad to admit, but given a shot at this kind of fame, how many 15-year-olds wouldn't have cashed in like Cyrus, and how many parents wouldn't have looked the other way?
