The latest New York Times/CBS News poll, of 1,224 Americans, has found that only 6 percent of respondents have been following news about the wedding “very closely,” and another 22 percent “somewhat closely.”
Though a third of women under age 40, and 4 in 10 of those 40 and up, said they were keeping track of events, half of the male respondents said they were not following the buildup at all.
Anchors, reporters and support staff from American networks and cable news channels are already arriving here. And in the days leading up to the wedding, Buckingham Palace has promised to keep its floodlights on an hour later, until midnight, so that the palace can be used as backdrop for live news reports by broadcast networks in the United States.
But those networks are remaining tight-lipped about how extensive their coverage will be. CBS and NBC said they did not discuss staffing decisions; ABC did not respond to messages.
But three employees at NBC News, who spoke anonymously out of concern for their jobs, said that NBC and MSNBC would have about 200 people involved in covering the wedding. The large numbers were prompted, suggested one, by “the thinking that it’s a happy, fairy-tale story — and America needs happy stories right now.”
Some Americans, though, rejected that idea when contacted for a follow-up interview after The Times/CBS poll.
“It’s their British thing, it’s their custom,” said Edward Rakas, 57, of Colchester, Conn. “I guess they enjoy it, but it’s just not something I’m interested in.”
Even in Britain, where hundreds of thousands are expected to fill London on the wedding day, a significant number — about 47 percent in a telephone poll conducted by Ipsos MORI last week — said they had little or no interest in the proceedings.
Some of that might be attributed to the contrast of a wedding steeped in centuries of opulent privilege with sweeping spending cuts that the government says are necessary to tame Britain’s deficit.
When it was announced in November that Prince William was engaged to Miss Middleton, one reader of The Daily Mail, which is usually staunchly royalist, commented, tongue in cheek, that the princess-to-be “has been largely unemployed since she left school and is now marrying someone who has been on welfare most of his life.” With cuts to state benefits inevitable, the reader went on, “I do worry for them.”
And in contrast to the ranks of earnest souvenirs that now fill London’s tourist shops, disaffected Britons can also buy royal wedding airsickness bags.
Lydia Leith, the graphic designer behind the bags, said in an interview on Friday that she was inspired to make them after conversations with people who said they were “sick of the royal wedding.”
She estimates that she has sold about 8,000 since February, adding, “I haven’t really had time to count because I am just about keeping up with orders.” Large quantities have been bought, she said, for anti-wedding parties that will be taking place around the country on Friday.
Many of those parties were organized by Republic, a group that has campaigned for the abolition of the monarchy since 1983, according to Graham Smith, its executive officer. “We’ve seen roughly a doubling of our numbers since the engagement was announced in November,” he said, “to about 14,000.”
Mr. Smith hopes that the wedding will help rally others sympathetic to his cause; the MORI poll showed that 18 percent of Britons would like to see the end of the monarchy.
“While we’re all tightening our belts,” he said, “they are helping themselves to our tax money for a big wedding.”
The American media, said Fred M. Leventhal, emeritus professor of British history at Boston University, “does not have to worry about constitutional or financial elements.”
Instead, he said, “It’s fascinated with things royal partly because they’re different from what we have. The glamour that attaches itself to some presidents, like Kennedy and to a lesser extent Obama, is politicized, and many people don’t go along with it. The royal family are exotic, and they’re free from all those conflicted political questions.”
But when British royals toured the United States in 1939, he said, “they deliberately did not include most of the Midwest, because they felt there was general indifference.”
More than 70 years later, he said, “it seems likely there will be large parts of the country that are indifferent this time, too.”
Marjorie Connelly contributed reporting.
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