She died how she lived for the last seven years – in the full glare of the media spotlight, or to use its cosy pseudonym, ‘the public eye’.

Cosy because this suggests the lustful operations of the mass circulation media in illuminating the private lives of public figures are always on behalf of the public.

But theirs is an unsubtle light. The documented life and demise of Jade Goody is just the latest example of how little room for nuance there is in our increasingly celebrity-obsessed media.

So, whatever we think of this section of our industry and the characters involved in it, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that not only is professional PR inevitable in these circumstances, it is socially necessary.

When the lascivious dogs of Fleet Street scent meat – and what a feast Jade’s gaffe-prone Big Brother performances offered – to where does a working class girl from Bermondsey turn? The battle lines were drawn early on.

And so it was predictable that the same class prejudice – fostered by the mass media – that makes a virtue of hereditary wealth yet vilifies wealth obtained by the ‘undeserving’, would manifest itself as snobbishness against Jade’s decision to die as a reality star as well as live like one.

Critics decried Jade’s honest and public admission that she wanted to make as much money as possible from her death so that her children’s start in life wouldn’t be scarred by inner-city poverty as hers was.

But where’s the logic? If there is any moral value to be attached to the ownership of vast sums of money, it is surely not in their accrual but their use and distribution.

The concurrent complaint that she should have just “died quietly” is a nonsense given that we only know who she is because she appeared on a reality gameshow.

As a journalist and a socialist I recognise the forces at work in the telling of Jade’s story.

But the ethics argument put forward by many, including those on the left, that she was exploited by Clifford for his own financial gain and notoriety is difficult to sustain.

There is no evidence that she was in any way unhappy with Clifford’s PR operation. Quite the opposite.

The dogs will have their flesh. What Clifford did was ensure that they didn’t take it all, and that a poorly-educated working class girl got to exercise a degree of control over her, inevitably very public, death.

Clifford took her from “the pig” to “brave Jade”. How much more ethical can you get?

Posted by Rich Simcox

Tags: ethics, Jade Goody, Max Clifford, news, Newspapers, PR, public relations