Meanwhile, the reaction of one Danyl Johnson to the death of Whitney Houston offers a masterclass in the overweening pride of The X Factor. You may well have forgotten Danyl, if indeed you ever knew him, but he was a contestant on the show a few series ago. At some point, the acts were briefly guest mentored by Whitney Houston – yet it was in the manner of an old rival that Danyl took to his Facebook page to give his reaction to her death.
"I know that Whitney Houston & I didn't see eye to eye," he declared, "but another legend is lost."
Most gracious. Still, there were less seemly takes on Whitney's demise. Consider OK!'s exclusive, described on the cover as "OK!'s DAY WITH WHITNEY HOURS BEFORE HER DEATH."
Alas, OK! has misrepresented tragic events on its cover far more cynically before, so in some ways it is no surpise to find it telling complete whoppers about Houston's death. This is, after all, the publication which published a tribute issue to Jade Goody while the cancer-stricken reality star was still alive, headlined "JADE GOODY 1981-2009". Yet even accounting for its form book, editor Lisa Byrne's recent appearance before the Leveson inquiry should have left her in no doubt of the dim view taken of celebrity magazines' tendency to mislead the paying reader.
And so to the publication's latest bit of apparent death-based fibbing. I'm afraid Lost in Showbiz had to search several times through its coverage before it alighted on the copy to which the coverline must refer: a single paragraph, penned by a celebrity stylist described only as "a friend of OK!", which mentions that he saw Houston at a distance several days before her tragic death. Riddle me this, Lisa – does that really warrant the line "OK!'s DAY WITH WHITNEY HOURS BEFORE HER DEATH"?
Or might a more accurate coverline have been: "SOMEONE WHO DOESN'T WORK FOR OK! CAUGHT A GLIMPSE OF WHITNEY HOURS BEFORE HER DEATH – PROBABLY AT LEAST 48 HOURS BEFORE, BUT YOU KNOW ..."?
