It’s Wogan v Bowie in the battle of the obits today – but death wasn’t always such big news | Ian Jack

In the era of limited space and scarce newsprint, most papers stuck to a strict hierarchy of importance in reporting, and celebrity deaths just didn’t really rate – it has been a long path to 24-page specials and tribute fatigue

“Why Wogan touched the depths of our hearts in a way Bowie& couldn’t”, read a& headline in the Daily Mail this week, above a piece by Robert Hardman that tried to evaluate which of these recently dead men – “two of our greatest modern cultural institutions … giants in their field” – would be the most missed by the& nation. A competition between the dead! Who would you rather were still alive, your mother or Elvis? Or, more tribally, who to choose between David Bowie or Glenn Frey of the Eagles? According to a Guardian music blog, mourners of the first had taken to social& media to mock those of the second, which struck the blogger, Everett True, as hypocritical and grossly insensitive. “Many of these [anti-Frey] jokes came from the same people who were so worked up over a handful of others criticising their mourning of Bowie,” he wrote, like a cleric intervening at a quarrelsome funeral tea.

Related: Terry Wogan: the intriguingly subversive national treasure