"media were fawning over"
Your comment is sexist, but it is true that a nice face to be sold to media is always a good PR tactic - usually works because there are too many male jerks in the media, and some female one as well. If she was someone regarded "uglier" by current standards - despite being a mammal or not, it wouldn't have worked so well. Appearance does work.
Today I was ashamed that on the site of one of the main national newspapers here, just below the news about Hawking death, you could watch "the embarrassing fall of Kate Perry". You really need a lot of jerks, mostly male but some female too, to think it was something worth to be put there.
You could really see the abyss...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
