Congratulations, murdered and mutilated Sierra Leoneans! You finally have a
celebrity angle, meaning your obscure little story has been given its brief moment in the limelight, before being reassigned the sort of news value that couldn't hope to trump a Cesc Fabregas transfer rumour.
And so to
Naomi Campbell's testimony at the
war crimes trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor in The Hague. Who'd have thought the first Campbell to be summoned to The Hague would be Naomi? At this rate, the first Blair to be subpoenaed will be Lionel, with the old trouper accused of accepting a ruby tie-pin from the Burmese military junta during his ill-fated Name That Tune, Rangoon! tour in 1987.
But back to Naomi, of whose historic appearance you will no doubt be aware, on account of it having led every major TV and radio news bulletin today, with
Sky News and the BBC News channel obligingly screening an uninterrupted feed of it. Print and webwise, this newspaper
ran a live blog of madam's turn, as did the Times. A terrible oversight by Der Spiegel and the New York Times, you'll agree, but the good news is that a most prodigious array of news outlets gave madam blanket coverage, and we shall explore that edifying clearing of the schedules in more detail shortly.
As you will know, Naomi was ordered to give evidence after Mia Farrow alleged that representatives of Taylor gave the supermodel a diamond in the dead of night in 1997, after they'd all been guests of Nelson Mandela at some charity dinner in South Africa. Despite earlier denials, the supermodel today conceded that she had been given a few "dirty looking pebbles" in this manner – and news outlets streamed every ruddy word. If you wished to distil the entire apocalypse-hastening event into a single exchange, it would probably be the following. Declaring she and Taylor had met only once, Naomi attempted a winningly self-deprecating smile and told the court: "I'd actually never heard of
Liberia at that time."
"Many people hadn't," purred Taylor's defence lawyer, "until you turned up today."
Yet call Lost in Showbiz a stick-in-the-mud, but is it entirely seemly to find news organisations so mesmerised by Naomi, for all that she served up the obligatory odious soundbite about having to appear being "a big inconvenience" to her? Without wishing to let daylight in on magic, being odious is pretty much what Naomi does, as evidenced by those court appearances for beating her staff. One does not look to her to provide us with a considered perspective on life.
One might, however, look to a plethora of so-called respected mainstream media outlets for said perspective, which makes their slavering interest in this single witness at Taylor's trial so emetically disproportionate. An academic covering the trial describes attention on Naomi's testimony as "off the scale", with a court normally attended by 20-odd accredited journalists under siege from several hundred.
At this point, do let me to take a moment to address inevitable concerns about why Lost in Showbiz is covering the matter. To make it super-simple for the casual visitor, who quite understandably may have dropped by to a column called Lost in Showbiz expecting to read about the Pakistan floods or hard-hitting analysis of the latest fluctuations in the Hang Seng, this extremely small weekly offering is supposed to be about celebrities, in the same way that the Sport section is about sport. Naomi is its stock in trade.
Indeed, to make it
crystal clear, it is not
any coverage of Naomi's appearance which Lost in Showbiz regards as such a charming testament to modern priorities – a supermodel at The Hague is obviously a very newsy quirk. It is the
prominence given to said appearance compared to other testimony from the trial that feels faintly out of whack.
Given that both Sky News and the BBC News channel cleared their schedules for over an hour and a half, Lost in Showbiz's guess is that they lavished more time on the model's appearance than they have on live coverage of the whole of the rest of Taylor's trial since its inception-proper in 2007. In fact, Sky confirm that they have not covered any of the other 90 witnesses live – not even Taylor himself. The Guardian website led on the trial when the former president testified, but attempts to establish from outlets ranging from the Today programme to Channel 4 News whether they had done the same before today found them explaining that it would be too complex to check. Hats off the to chap from ITV news who conceded "it seems unlikely".
Hang on, you might be protesting. Maybe there simply weren't any other mildly intriguing bits of testimony in the trial of man who has been accused of 11 counts of war crimes, from the grimmest atrocities to the recruiting of child soldiers.
Admittedly, none of the other witnesses has ever produced something as inspirational as Naomi's ghostwritten novel Swan. But we have heard from the likes of Joseph "ZigZag" Marzah, one of Taylor's erstwhile military commanders, who in five hours of astonishing testimony in 2008 claimed, "We executed everybody – babies, women, old men. There were so many executions. I can't remember them all." Taylor had encouraged his commandants to cannibalise victims, he said, in exchange for $200 of "cigarette money".
Um, whatever? Unless this is about Mia Farrow I am way B-O-R-E-D.
Clearly, then, the message from The Hague today is simple: you can kill and rape and mutilate as much as you like, but if you really want to gain a purchase on early 21st-century western discourse and are not simply pissing about, you do need to have once had contact with a celebrity in some incredibly minor way. Even now, let's hope that Janjaweed militia are making a pitch for posterity by sending baskets of muffins to Lindsay Lohan, because if and when they are ever brought to justice, they sure as Shirley aren't going to make the major bulletins without that kind of news peg.
What else is there left to say? Other than: this is your world. Try not to choke on it.
