The Wedding Mania

Even as a person who does not have a television, relying on 10 minutes NPR and several check of Twitter for news update, has finally realized how overwhelming this royal wedding is, in terms of it's media coverage.

The first British Royal wedding in the YouTube age, People magazine already launched a "Royal Watch" iPad app cost 7.99$. But what impressed me is how ambitious traditional media is on the coverage. The Advertising Age reports that and TLC will show 89 hours of oryal-related programming this week, CBS has sent off anchor Katie Couric for three nights live evening news (04/04, 2011). Of course, ABC, NBS, MSNBC, CNN, etc have almost the same extensive coverage.

Surprisingly, I found Chinese press is very low key about it. I cant even find a special editorial session on those portal websites. Only one Shanghai based English channel claims will live broadcast the wedding. Why THE romantic royal fairytale happy ending story was not well covered, even less coverage than a local celebrity wedding in Hainan province?

Just personal speculation: It's still a political event and the media have already received notice to be cautious on the coverage. To further explain, from the coverage of celebrity wedding, it is obvious that people like to read and comment on weddings at this Wei-Bo age. And this year, as the 100 year anniversary of Xin-Hi Revolution, which ended the feudalism and Sun Yatsen founded the historically called Republic of China. So people in Taiwan considers this is a very auspicious year and continuous coverage on the Taiwan celebrity wedding seems never ends. There's no reason the media is so unresponsive to this royal wedding other than special note.

Another thought is generally this culture is not cultivated by the royal tradition like the Europeans or the US ancestor. The event did not resonate too much to the audience since it is too far for day dream than a local celebrity. People do have the happy ending wish but rarely understand the British royal culture and it's meaning. For most people, it's just another luxury wedding and this is what I have read on the news, calculating the finance perspective rather than fantasize the wedding.

However, still, there are some people in China are extremely active on this news. I've read at least three different ceramic manufactures all claim they are chosen by the royal family to manufacture the dishes and gifts for the wedding. UK is not the only country that tries to make money out of this event. The same as Chinese, and even better, without paying anything for it.

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