Selling Sadness

Who couldn't help but be appalled and saddened by the cellphone video showing 68-year-old Karen Klein, a school bus monitor in Greece, N.Y., being brought to tears by the cruel taunts of a pack of middle schoolers?

 

As a former high school teacher, who has witnessed up close the bullying of students, and even some teachers, I admired Mrs. Klein’s restraint while also fighting the urge to reach through the computer screen and duct-tape the kids’ mouths myself.

I wasn’t alone.

The video, uploaded to YouTube, went viral. Soon, Mrs. Klein was being interviewed by a sympathetic/outraged Matt Lauer on the “Today” show followed by dozens of other news outlets.

 

In response, a fundraising website, indigogo, launched a drive to collect enough money to send Mrs. Klein and her family on a nice vacation.

We’ll there’s nice, and then there’s NICE. When the fundraiser officially ended in late July, Mrs. Klein was given a check for $700,000, courtesy of donors moved by the sight of someone, who perhaps reminded them of their own grandmother, being mercilessly harassed.

This one didn’t shock me for a number of reasons. The traditional media seize on these kinds of stories, and social media now give them added life. When an emotional response is triggered, it’s an easy sell (for obvious reasons, stories about children facing peril spur similar reactions among readers/viewers).

Mr. Klein’s personal anguish aside, there is also a bit of brilliance behind indigogo’s inserting itself into the story. Yes, the website was doing a noble thing, but it’s foolish to think it launched the Karen Klein campaign purely out of good intentions. Their involvement can also be read as an act of blatant self-promotion wrapped in Good Samaritanism. By latching onto this story, indigogo broke through the noise to make crowdfunding suddenly seem mainstream, and aided its own efforts to make a competitive run against other similar sites like kickstarter.

The now-defunct humor magazine National Lampoon learned long ago that if you want to get attention, you’ve got to be outrageous, and the best way to be outrageous is to trigger an emotion – sometimes with an actual trigger. The magazine’s famous cover showing a dog with a cocked gun to his head with the headline, “If you don’t buy this magazine, we’ll kill this dog”  was one of the Lampoon’s all-time best-selling issues and was voted the seventh best magazine cover of the last 40 years. 

Think of the elements that make the cover work: dog, gun, threat. No less so, consider why people gave 700K to Karen Klein: grandma, insults, tears.

Other horrible things are occurring in the world, but the Karen Klein story evokes a visceral response because it unfolded on our doorstep; it’s an intimate, familiar event and we connect to this woman’s sorrow. (Some would argue too much so.)

The truth is, geographic and emotional proximity to an event makes the heart grow fonder. Try raising nearly a million dollars for an earthquake victim in Peru and you’ll be in for a struggle. But a weeping old woman on a school bus? Jackpot.