When Maury Povich eventually dies, The New York Times will undoubtedly run an obituary for the former talk show host. But what readers of the newspaper might not realize whenever that day comes is that Povich himself helped craft that tribute.
In a new episode of the Founder’s Story podcast, Povich said he fielded a request from a Times reporter drafting his obituary.
“I get a call from The New York Times about four or five years ago, and this guy — who, I find out later on, is a terrific writer — is calling me because they want to write my obit,” Povich said. “And I went, ‘Oh, wow. This is interesting.’ So, I’ve spent the last couple of years talking to The New York Times about my obituary, which is written.”
But one aspect of the process left Povich “very pissed off,” as he admitted. “I finally asked the writer, ‘How about — can I see it? Can I see my obit? I would love to see my obit,’” he recalled. “[The writer] said, ‘We can’t show you that. Are you kidding me? This is The New York Times. We don’t show people what we write.’ I said, ‘Does that mean I’m going to have to read about it after I die?’ He said, ‘Yeah, that’s the way it’s gonna be.’”
So Povich had another idea: “You know what I said to myself? Well, then, if that’s the case, let’s have the funeral right now so that everybody can stand up and say all these things about me, and I can listen.”
In a statement to Entertainment Weekly, a New York Times spokesperson said, “Times obituaries are written by Times journalists. Our writers research and report the full lives of the subjects of obituaries, but they are only finalized and published after the subjects are deceased.”
That said, news outlets sometimes jump the gun and publish obituaries early. People notoriously ran an obit for Kirk Douglas in 2014, more than five years before Douglas actually died.
The New York Times’ Margalit Fox wrote a 2014 column for the newspaper about the peculiar task of writing these advance obits.
“One of the most stressful aspects of reporting an advance entails, when feasible, telephoning its pre-dead subject for an interview,” Fox wrote. “This is one of the stranger social predicaments in human experience and, trust me, there is nothing in Emily Post to cover it.”
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Originally published on tvinsider.com, part of the BLOX Digital Content Exchange.
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