Celebrities’ Memorial Afterlives: Obituaries, Tributes, and Posthumous Gossip in the Romanian Media Deathscape

Abstract

Cross-culturally, dead are protected from posthumous negative evaluations by the universal "nil nisi bonum" precept that governs the ethics within the community of mourners. In this study, we set out to test the observance of this injunction against posthumous gossiping in the Romanian public deathscape. Obituaries and other posthumous articles ( N = 1,148) were collected that covered the deaths of 63 celebrities who passed away between 2013 and 2016. Materials were gathered from the digital archives of three Romanian news sources (a news agency, a "quality" newspaper, and a tabloid), published one week after the moment of death. The findings show that 22% of the articles do contain negative evaluations of the deceased. The percentage rises to 36.4% if we restrict the sample to only those celebrities with a controversial anthumous reputation (19 of 63). These results indicate that celebrities are not spared from critical assessments after they pass away.

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“…Obituaries can provide valuable information for researchers; for example, a famous analysis of over 1,000 obituaries showed a higher incidence of mental illness among artists compared with other professions (Ludwig, 1995). Although obituaries have also been studied for the types of values they convey (Alfano, Higgins, & Levernier, 2018), the views they present about particular career paths (Tight, 2008), and whether individuals are willing to “speak ill of the dead” in response to obituaries (Rusu, 2017), their effect on public views of broader topics or issues has not received as much attention. One exception appears to be the influence of reporting celebrity suicides on suicide contagion, which suggests that celebrity death reporting can have negative effects on vulnerable populations (Ma-Kellams, Baek, & Or, 2018).…”