Americans at forefront of royal wedding media frenzy

With the biggest scheduled television event of the young millennium less than 24 hours away, major U.S. news networks have descended on Westminster Abbey in London, the site of the April 29 nuptials of Britain's 28-year-old Prince William and his 29-year-old college sweetheart, Kate Middleton. There, American correspondents form but one wing of the vast scrum of international reporters hanging on every minute twist and turn in the lead-up to the royal wedding.

When the ceremony gets under way--at 9 a.m. in England, 4 a.m. in New York and 1 a.m. in Los Angeles--Piers Morgan and Anderson Cooper will be anchoring live for CNN; Shep Smith for Fox News; Martin Bashir and Chris Jansing for NBC; Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters for ABC; Katie Couric for CBS.

And thousands of miles across the pond, alarm clocks will sound earlier than usual for an untold number of Americans who plan on being counted among the record-breaking 2 billion viewers worldwide expected to watch the ceremony as it unfolds in real-time.

Neda Semnani, a journalist at Congressional Quarterly and Roll Call, is one of them.

"I don't know why I'm doing this, honestly," the 31-year-old Washington, D.C. resident admitted Wednesday. "It just seems like a weird social phenomenon and I kind of want to get in on it. It's weird in this day and age that there are still princes and princesses. The part I like is that people seem to be getting together all around the world to watch two young people take this step. There's something sweetly optimistic about it."

Whether the motivation springs from sweet optimism or cultural befuddlement, the ardent viewer rising at 4 a.m. or earlier to take in the regal knot-tying will be a boon for American cable and broadcast networks. TV producers will of course do everything they can to draw out coverage so as to make a vast battalion of U.S. connoisseurs of royal frippery not only bone-weary, but late for the final workday of the week.

Americans seem particularly susceptible to the royal mania--in part, perhaps, because U.S. news outlets have been building the hype around the ceremony to a deafening crescendo from the moment that the royal engagement was announced last November. A Nielsen study published earlier this week found that for the past six months, the United States has devoted twice the amount of advance media coverage that the event has garnered in either the U.K. or Australia. U.S. social-media junkies are no less besotted by the coming spectacle; 40 percent of royal wedding-related tweets in English come from U.S. users, according to the social media analytics firm Trendrr; 31 percent of such tweets originate in the U.K.

But not everyone's caught the bug. Two-thirds of the American public believe the event has gotten too much coverage--though it occupied just 3 percent of the national news hole between April 18-24--and a mere 8 percent say they followed the story closely last week, according to survey results released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. Seventy-five percent of Americans don't plan on watching the wedding at all, the same study found.

"There are two types of people," said CNN's Morgan, himself a Brit and supporter of the English monarchy (he's been anchoring his 9 p.m. prime time show from London all week), "those who don't care about the royal family, can't get too excited about it, think there are more important things going on in the world. And then there are people who just like a good love story, who think there's been lots of war and famine and financial crisis--very serious, depressing stories going on, and in the middle of it, we have a lovely young couple who fell in love and are getting married, and one of them happens to be a guy who will one day be king of England."

Semnani is in the latter camp. She will therefore wake up shortly before 4 a.m. on Friday and walk her dog up the street to a friend's house for a pre-dawn viewing party. There will be tea and crumpets. There will be champagne. Perhaps even some tears! And after the vows are exchanged, Semnani will then drag herself into work. She'll be tired, to be sure, but not as tired as she is of the usual celebrity train wrecks that have become all too frequent in the 24/7 American news cycle.

"Frankly, I'm tired of our celebrities," said Semnani. "I'm not so much into watching people fail. I don't care about Charlie Sheen talking about drugs ... Britney Spears shaving her head. This is a nicer story."

For others, it comes down to tradition.

"My mother talks about seeing newsreels of Margaret and Elizabeth when they were children and about how much she admired the queen mother. My older daughter and I watched on TV when Diana and Charles married," said Jean Goodwin, a 65-year-old psychoanalyst from Texas who will rise at 3 a.m. in the Central time zone. "It is like they are part of the family."

If that's the case, lots and lots of Americans will be projecting their own familial longings onto tomorrow's big event. As the Associated Press reported several weeks ago, plenty of pre-dawn viewing parties are cropping up across this former colonial outpost of the British empire. Golriz Moeini from California will host an all-night champagne fete at her pub in the Los Angeles suburbs. Lauren Wilson of Washington will watch the ceremony live, while DVR-ing it to show at a party of 20 women later that afternoon. Diane LaChapelle of Colorado will fly to San Francisco so she can wake up at 2 a.m. and watch the nuptials with her daughter.

"We'll make sure we have tea and I make pretty good scones," LaChapelle, 72, told the AP. "I'm sending my blue lace mother of the bride dress and that's what I'm going to wear."

The vibe is particularly festive in New York, where at least seven public viewing parties will get off the ground as early as 5 a.m., including a free open-air soiree under the Manhattan Bridge. The ceremony will be beamed onto a giant screen courtesy of the BBC, and several hundred people are expected to attend, said Alexandria Sica, executive director of Brooklyn's Dumbo Improvement District, the neighborhood group that organized the 5:30 a.m. event.

"Americans are very much into the fantasy of it all," she said. "This is our sneak peak into that world."

Try telling that to naysayers like Mark Oppenheimer, whose latest piece for Slate calls for a royal wedding boycott, because "Americans are supposed to hate monarchs, not worship them," as the subhead reads.

"For an American to be excited about the royal wedding is undignified and lame," Oppenheimer suggests. "And, I would add, if you get up at 3 a.m. on Friday to watch the wedding on television, you are a traitor to your country."

Morgan sees it differently.

"We're talking about the two biggest celebrities in the world right now," he said. "I think these events always show Britain at its best. They show the great pomp and pageantry that we can put on, and no one does these things quite like the Brits ... It can't all be wrong."

(AP Photo/Tim Hales, File)