What Is News Worth?

Single white female seeks….

Following the death of his third wife, Jane Seymour in 1537, King Henry VIII of England was convinced to marry Anne of Cleves (pictured above), to cement an alliance with the newly Protestant German state.

Henry was convinced to do this by his Chief Minister, Thomas Cromwell.

Henry, who had destroyed the Catholic Church in England to satisfy his passions for Anne Boelyn (later beheaded), was not a guy to marry for politics.  He took his relationships really seriously.

So before he would consent to marry Anne of Cleves, who he had never met, he dispatched his court painter, Hans Holbein the Younger to Cleves to paint a portrait of Anne so that Henry could get a look in advance before making a commitment.

News (and images) were not what they were today, and Holbein was sort of the ace video crew of his era. In fact, he was the only one.

Everyone lived in a world devoid of images and information, and so if you could get your hands on an image (or information of any kind) it was of enormous value.  And very rare.

We are awash in images, so it is hard sometimes to imagine the world of Henry VIII.

The image of Anne of Cleves was so rare that it hangs today in the Frick Museum in NY.

Henry had but this one painting (actually two – this miniature and a full size portrait), upon which to make his decision about Anne of Cleves.  You might call this the world’s first JDate (except for the J part, I suppose).

And based on the painting, he proposed marriage.

Mistake.

When Anne finally arrived in England, Henry was not happy.

The morning after his unconsumated wedding night, he called Cromwell into his presence and announced:

“”I liked her before not well, but now I like her much worse”

which would indicate that things did not go so well.

Later, Cromwell would be beheaded, and it would be more than 450 years before the idea of online dating took off again.

What is interesting here, however, is the value and power of information, and the consequent impact of technology on our own perception of information.

In Henry’s time, images and information were so rare that only a King would imagine getting an ‘advanced picture’ of a woman a few hundred miles away. The cost and complications were so high that even to this day the painting and the story remain sigularly compelling.

As technology made image capture and transmission (photography, film and video) simpler, cheaper and more accesable to everyone, the perceived ‘value’ of the information became less and less.

Oil portraits were rare indeed. So rare that they are today considered pretty much priceless and are found only in museums or private collections of the wealthy.

Photographs of people are far more common. So common that we relegate them to shoeboxes or albums that sit gathering dust for years.

Now digital images and video (particularly with the advent of photo and video driven phones like the new iPhone) increasingly make images and the information that they convey part of the litter of the landscape.

We crank out photos (and soon videos) with impunity, email them off, take a look and delete them just as fast.

If Anne of Cleves had had an iPhone, one would think that Cromwell would still have his head.

Henry and Anne would have texted and exchanged videos and stills and Henry would have called it a day and moved on.

Information today is not so rare… nor so valuable. But it is a lot better.

It is a lot better because it is both cheap and voluable.

There is so much to choose from that statistically, a greater percentage of it has to be right.

When there is only one source, and it is really expensive to create, the ‘truth’ of the one source might, even with the best of intentions, be wrong.

Like sending Holbein to Cleves.

Or sending Katie Couric to Iraq.

Expensive… but maybe not so accurate.

Well, no one is cutting off Les Moonves’ head

yet.