Queen Elizabeth Still Dead, News Networks Continue to Report

Queen Elizabeth II is still dead, multiple U.S. news outlets continued to confirm on Monday.

The 96-year-old British monarch died on Thursday, ending a 70-year reign. Her death has triggered an unrelenting deluge of media coverage about her and the royal family – not only in the United Kingdom, but in the United States, which famously said no to the monarchy.

Yet, despite this innate aversion to hereditary aristocracy as a governing principle, U.S. media has provided wall-to-wall coverage of Elizabeth’s death, the ascension of her son King Charles III, and all the attendant but ultimately fatuous mini-dramas surrounding it.

The most incredible part is that the British throne wields little actual political power, thus making all of this a largely aesthetic matter. We are in fact talking about “optics,” and in one of the most superficial ways imaginable.

Upon logging in on Monday, I asked coworkers who’d been on the clock for hours if cable news channels were still in overdrive covering Elizabeth’s death. Here’s how one of them described a network’s coverage of a vigil for the late queen:

“CNN has aired uninterrupted footage every time the coffin has been taken anywhere and long stretches of it just sitting there.”

MSNBC and Fox News have also given bountiful attention to the royal family.

A scan of the TV and transcript service TVEyes reveals the number of mentions of “queen” from Thursday to Monday night.

On CNN, “queen” – which is not a commonly heard term on American cable news – was uttered 980 times; on MSNBC, 866; on Fox News, 595.

Those are rough tallies and may not be 100% accurate, but assuming the numbers are even remotely in the neighborhood, that is a lot of mentions of the queen.

All of this is another way of saying I’ve reached my Cafferty point.

On Feb. 8, 2007, model Anna Nicole Smith died suddenly, kicking off nonstop segments of her death on cable news. After hours of coverage that day, CNN’s famously cantankerous pundit Jack Cafferty had enough.

Upon wrapping up an unrelated segment, Cafferty turned to Wolf Blitzer and asked a pertinent question.

“Is Anna Nicole Smith still dead, Wolf?”

“Yes,” Blitzer said with a comically straight face. “We’re going to be updating viewers shortly on–”

“Can’t wait for that,” Cafferty sarcastically shot back.

Remember, Smith was reported dead only earlier that day. And while the chasm between the fame of Smith (or almost anybody) and Queen Elizabeth could hardly be bigger, the point is, there is nothing new to report right now. Enough.

For 70 years, people in the U.K. said, “Long live the Queen.”

And so it goes for the news cycle following her death.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.