like. the. old. steve. with such a fantasy to be a commoner and then come out of this as a princess ah so is that why everyone is so obsessed with this real life fairy tale or are they will take a look at the media machine behind the man. and reality bites in the big apple this as the city charges big fines for so-called petty crime so is government preying on the public the refillable given. and it's online dating gone wild there's a new website that could guarantee you a fun night on the town just as long as you're willing to pay for.

it's friday april twenty ninth at eight pm in washington d.c. i'm christine for example you're watching our t.v. . something's happening today something newsworthy i just can't remember what it is because i better consult the mainstream media sure . this week it's only. issue that we need to capital is. anderson cooper piers morgan and richard quest. let me spirit when william's father and grandfather at the wedding they may well wear lobs handmade shoes costing close to five thousand dollars a pair. i can't this is thirty years and this is a piece of the wedding cake she gave to me on her wedding day there she is. the

value of more nikita put it cannot be overstated because it changed because it will be does it become unpopular absolutely a bit like your u.s. . news that there are folks no royal wedding day here on r t america so so sorry if you were hoping to hear me talk about catherine middleton's dress or the royal wedding cake or the kiss on the balcony instead of i want to talk about the madness behind the monarchy not the madness in the u.k. but the man is right here turns out the british royal family was everyone's family today despite other news where the events like the devastating tornadoes in the midwest or the latest violence in syria so well the world seems to be ignoring

reality for royalty it turns out some of the most hardcore wedding enthusiastic right here in washington are callin for it has more. this is the morning the royal wedding and all through d.c. the hundreds and hundreds that includes a t.v. i think. americans overthrew them as colonists two hundred thirty five years ago time heals some lose some don't think anyone here is actually still fighting the american revolution but today they were throwing their heart. and. see that it's from all over london and the reason that they got dressed up and bought a funny into the british monarchy so everybody thought it was insane i have a lot of tea party references to my and my children said they would be seen with me but that's ok but while no one would admit it one of their own american royal family they're not our royals. but it's happening here and we have to get up at

three thirty this morning so what are we like why are we doing this is a good example i mean you always remember that picture of the princes writing with two hundred fifty americans at the ritz to watch the royal wedding loved it was like our cousins or something across the water so how could you not celebrate with more than five hundred trying to get in people showed up just to try to. find british media that's all about having the royal wedding american media switched on and america's fascination of royal wedding is a classic example of the chicken or the economic is us media coverage twice what it is and driving us into war is us interest driving media coverage will people here say they can't get enough nobody practical like the bush you know this is something that we would never ever ever do here and for those here for whom money is no object they can recreate the royal wedding in washington just for

a couple million dollars the lucky couple who chooses package will get the ultimate royal wedding where we will actually take the entire hotel. the hotel will be yours for a week and you'll actually recreate westminster abbey for your ceremony we're going to recreate buckingham palace for your dinner. and plenty of people are cashing in on key and will from whiskey to bags to royal wedding jelly don't be so awful doesn't play right. yeah even going i mean it by the end of the night we want it any more i'm sure shelves packed with royal memorabilia were emptied within a few days for lynne clark this was the second best day of her life the first one was diana she like many here took the day off from work to watch with her home shopping channel replica of kate's ring this was a gift from. it was from his mother and he gave this to kate middleton as a token of his love oh it's such a fantasy to be

a commoner and then come out of this as a princess and a royal and it's just special for many it was also a chance to relive princess diana through her son we have watched the boys grow up . from babies and watched what they went through when they lost their mom and we sort of took ownership of them and the hundreds of fans that waited outside of shops like this one for a chance to own a piece of the royal wedding are gone and whether america's obsession with the british monarchy will remain after the royal wedding well that's a tough call in florida are washington d.c. . all right so here's something interesting a new york times c.b.s. poll found that just six percent of americans have been following the royal wedding very closely and twenty two percent have been following somewhat closely to those numbers surprise you and they might if you've been watching any television at all

over the last month now nielsen has been tracking coverage of the royal wedding in the last few months ever since the engagement became public take a look at this in comparing the u.s. the u.k. and australia turns out the u.s. that green line you see there the u.s. far surpasses both regions when it comes to the coverage by some estimates the u.s. has twelve thousand journalists at the royal wedding i mean the entire african continent has maybe a few hundred western journalists at any time mark oppenheimer is joining me to talk all about this from new haven connecticut he is the author of this work lies in homer a childhood subject to debate. our argue also had an article in slate called why can't the royal wedding americans are supposed to hate monarchs not worse of them and you wrote quote if you have it at three am on friday to watch the wedding on television you are a traitor to your country all right so i didn't get up at three but it's it was

part of a why am i a traitor. well i should say that i was being slightly tongue in cheek i don't actually think that you should be shot or sent to the stockade. but so so we're good there but i do think that there's something noble and wrong about americans focusing on monarchy it is one of the great parts of our nation's history that we were founded by our ancestors or it's not our ancestors specifically our antecedents as americans to be a place free of mars the rebellion against a monarchy it was a tyrant and it's you know our constitution for example that if you're an american office holder you're not allowed to accept titles of nobility so to spend all of this time soldering on. for these foreign monarchs just seems to me a little bit beneath us but i do have a theory part of part of being american it means growing up in a culture maybe more so for me than you but growing up in a culture of disney movies where the princess is always sort of the hero and always

gets her man so why would we not as americans want to indulge in the closest thing we've ever seen to a real life fairy tale i think that's a strong argument for why twelve year old girls would be interested and i have three daughters the i was just in this or she's very princesses right now and i had she been awake at that hour this morning which sometimes she is the thank god this morning but she wouldn't she didn't thought the princess was was gorgeous but of course we're adults now and perhaps we give up on those fairy tales and spend time doing other more fruitful things i'm curious what you think about the whole media aspect of this i mean by some estimates twelve thousand journalists at the royal wedding as i mentioned before i mean if you look around the rest of the world nothing compares to that and i talk about aspects of this are oh you know i. was enough to realize that of course journalism is to a great extent a for profit business and they've obviously decided this is where the ratings are i write a by weekly column for the new york times about religion and i think my own newspaper

will have the royals on the cover so on i'm a realist about this at the same time there's obviously something quite sad about the fact there are as you pointed out so few western journalists covering very very important things in much of the world and so many of them are looking for people with commemorative cupcakes and a grudge and i mean you just said my journalism is in many cases it's a for profit business but these polls and i think they're maybe a little understated but only six percent of americans you know deeply care about that so if that's the case or even twenty two percent why have add these media networks invested so many resources and so much money and by the way many media networks they've said at least that they've been struck. for catch and. we do know for example that when people magazine puts princess diana on its cover even many years after her death she's always on the cover at least once or twice a year there's newsstand sales are extremely high so i don't think it's necessarily

so many people care but those who do are very very passionate about it and. so passionate that they might also sort of be involved in not only the programming but the advertisements as well that make sense you know we wanted to kind of get a course on the street to find out for ourselves so we have more harshness of the residents on that share the streets of new york city to see what people there thought about the royal wedding and also about the seemingly endless coverage. i think of the media coverage of the royal wedding this week let's talk about bet this country ran away from england because of of royalty and pins and queens just because they're born into a stupid family if the british run it might then do it with the americans but the. price in a. is so ridiculous. but honestly i don't really care about the royal

wedding why does the media do that why do they cover these be that big story. kind of extremist leftist personally i don't really have any big media do you think maybe the news is making up things for people to be interested in and that people really aren't interested in or it's possible that it goes both ways i think sometimes you want. to give people you. maybe want to give it to you. and then we eat it exactly mindlessly as if people are just there t.v. what's known i don't know. but it's pretty. good and they say the same thing in one hour this is the same thing. people tune in and you know you know you watch the whole half hour same thing time eight holy day and make out all about or skip a track and i don't care. do you care about the royal wedding yes i care that

you need early. days and not the pavley because we have a nice abydos kone our prime minister becky we've he's a groom go boom that takes oh this scene so there you have your own big media story. eventually this brings our thoughts our reforms such things like and in japan things like that. in my opinion really we don't need to know is it good for people to have thoughts away from serious things or is it just the distracted good it is good because if you always think of all the problems. you could have in your life then you can tell us so what is it good for our culture does it enrich us as a people i don't necessarily think it hurts us as a people to know what the queen or the future queen is going to wear to haul our

our wedding it doesn't hurt me it doesn't hurt me any it doesn't take anything away it doesn't come you down it doesn't tell me down no it does not do you think it might down other people down on the planet well i think i think like like anything if you take it and you kind of like run with it and you know that's all it's about what you think yes it probably will come to them whether or not you want to be inundated with the media that they'd let the news stories the bottom line is they're not going to stop it then anytime soon the only real answer is to keep that remote control close at hand. all right mark so we just saw this piece something that struck me this one woman visiting new york from italy and she said you know they're they're not getting as much of this royal wedding coverage because well their prime minister is already in broiled in a scandal so what do you think here do we just need some sort of distraction and it doesn't really matter what it is. i'm not going to go suffice to say that what we

need is for president obama to behave like a mr berlusconi. you know perhaps give us a distraction in the tornadoes that killed three hundred people in the south yesterday you know i think this too will pass if you know the sad and ironic thing about this is that of course we really only to pay this much attention every thirty years when it suits your royal wedding i don't think most people do care that that woman in your first segment said oh we watched these toys grow up we watched way in an area skit i mean how delusional is she we didn't watch them at all we periodically saw them on the covers of magazines obviously there was a burst of compassion when their mother still it was very sad but we know next to nothing about it i think if you told people once it was princess margaret it was princess and it would be fairly clueless to their credit i think the question for me really was you know i don't fault any media for covering this but the extent to which they've done so i mean i will say you know n.b.c. news anchor brian williams as soon as he landed on the ground was actually turned

around to come back to cover the tornadoes but you know looking around to see what moammar gadhafi has been out to these days or looking to see quite a few different things about any of the wars that we're involved in a lot of things going on war about the economy it's very very hard to find unless you do some deep deep digging i'm just curious why we needed so many documentaries about everything related to the melding. look i think that television media in particular is into the times financially as you said and there probably were some people who had to have change hopes this would resemble the ratings that came in ninety eight one i think you'll discover that that does not turn out to be the case and let me be clear i'm not opposed for polity i think that one of things i wrote in my slate piece is that look if we're going to pay attention to about people getting married let's have them be crashing at least they're american and we don't give them silly royal titles. and certainly an interesting article titled a boycott

of the royal wedding mark oppenheimer thanks so much for joining us he also wrote and by the time our. best. has adopted a subject of it yeah thank you so much. all right reality bites in the big apple to get more money new york has decided to do something a little different or maybe it isn't so different they've decided to charge people for doing what we would normally consider petty crimes are going to cause more. archery silk is something of a smoker's rights champion. living in a city where a pack of cigarettes cost thirteen bucks and the freedom to park where you please grows ever more limited. down in our basement this retired new york city police officer nurtures a garden of rebellion this garden is about reacting and defying their attempt to

control my behavior hundreds of home grown tobacco leaves hang to dry before silk shreds and smokes are nicotine we're talking about products here so back it was legal if they don't want people to smoke they should go to congress and lobby to have it criminalized the big apple's new smoking ban comes a bit close very soon it will be illegal to light up in new york city's parks beaches and closets like this one in times square violators caught blowing smoke can be slapped with a fifty dollars. if that's so dangerous. they probably make a lot of because they want to morning america. just like we socialize the bad how come we can't smoke pot officials say the ban ins to limit harmful public exposure to second hand smoke this is the latest avalanche of restrictions rules and prohibitions being aggressively enforced under

a shrinking economy among them a one hundred dollars fine for putting too much personal rubbish in public waste baskets and taking something from the garbage is also by a big costing up to three hundred. this winter a new road rule was born drivers park in bus leaves one hundred fifteen dollars fine this is their first melting pot ponies up ninety four different vehicle and parking violations arguably the bread and butter for big revenue instead. the big apple broke records by issuing ten thousand parking violations in just one day i take a blitz that generated a reported five hundred thousand dollars for new york city but the crackdown on working class americans followed weeks of snowstorms and which parking rules were suspended and a means of income for new york city was brought to a halt and critics like gerald celente say policing the people is becoming

a means for city and states to deal with budget deficits and economic hardship what are these cops telling is this why we have a police force to check on every minor infraction that we make they become goon squads they have to bring in revenue to keep their jobs through every day thousands of cash strapped new yorkers visit manhattan finance office to pay the city for forgiveness he's going to get is i mean i don't know since the city will try to make money where they can get people to you know. live you know bicycle in the city two hundred thirty tickets two hundred seventy bucks each have reportedly been issued to cyclists in central park this year compare that with just eleven kids issued in all of twenty time we just just got on the sidewalk and some groups are yelling at. you know it's legal you can get arrested and we weren't even cycling we were just standing over our meanwhile argue we still may eventually be

the last smoker left standing these are the remnants of last year's crop here in a liberal city filled with debt and a rising tide of finance. r.c. . and from paying fines to paying for a lot of turns out these days that's an option or at least someone to go out with it's becoming more clear after all that those traditional ways of courtship are over and the days where you can do just about anything on the internet we want to. show you a new web site you could say well it was the playing field and i'm not talking about you harmony or match dot com this website has been called by some online prostitution but for others it's simply a way of cutting to the chase art is a necessity if you're going to take a look. remember the days when real life courtship was the ticket to romance if you do websites like this may feed those memories fast what's your price dot com it's

a new dating service launched in las vegas where intelligence or a sense of humor apparently don't invite addict but a big fat buck does members are split into categories generous and attractive the generous ones are for the money the attractive ones get the cash and the deal is sealed the idea came about from my own frustrations of online dating i would join a website. for girls as you all have high standards and i would get no response brandon wade founder and see your website as well as the so flea will attract certain member says a business transaction lures in the girl of your dreams and ensures she won't stand you up but critics ask isn't this prostitution this generous entrepreneur has provided us with an event a four hawkers i think the chances of this girl not actually being a hooker are rude negative five thousand percent this

girl is a professional and i don't mean a paralegal or gun repair expert the website mastermind disagrees how is this the same from prostitution it's completely different you're paying for the chance of falling in love you're not paying for sex on the first thing you're paying perhaps for the chance that you might suit you attract and potentially have sex on the road as they can resume where you want me prices for that chance generally range from twenty to one hundred dollars to make finding the one easier personal profiles are available i'm down to earth outgoing very funny i consider myself as being a nice conversation. as well as in a real photos leaving very little to the imagination it's true the girls are scantily clad but there's a reason for about a preference about the value themselves and the value they're trying they're going

to join with an attractive member and they're going to do more if you're serious sure me how serious you are someone suddenly just income for component of showing how serious a person of years and the seriousness of a potential deletion ship is somewhat disputed by member nicknames double trouble peterson first and stephanie be among hundreds of others when i'm looking for a serious relationship i don't initially introduce myself by nicknames like kooky fare and come here i generally say hi my name is sarah it's nice to meet you some twenty thousand people have signed up for the website but two thousand digits for cash already negotiated this leaves one wondering if this new is dating trend could become a symbol of american free market consumerism tikkun to the extreme and archie york so could this be the wave of the future and if star what would the implications be i mean if the simply a way to be more honest develop a game of love or are we making prostitution more prevalent and more accepted

earlier i spoke to dr darcy smith a licensed clinical social worker she joined me with her insight from new york city . you know i'll be honest with you i really don't have a problem with it why not. you know i think this is i don't i don't know that we're necessarily introducing a new element here i think a new element is the honesty for me. i think people that doing this forever. people have been going on dates there's an exchange for the time that people are investing in that date and so typically that has been sort of the the border of the day right so you go out with somebody and one of the two people picks up the seat for the dinner the tab and that's the part or that's that's the deeper service there i think that's an interesting point i mean to an extent you are sort of throwing political correctness out the window but on the other hand you know this class system on the on the web site you know you have to rate yourself as either generous

or attractive but let's be honest here i mean most people think about high school most people rank themselves in those categories anyways right based on who they hang out with and how they see themselves that's right and if you want to date outside of your your whole range there just needs to be some sort of exchange for that typically for what you know on the street you see two people who are both. well matched on the attraction meter you don't question if one of them has more money than the other well your way you're walking down the street and you see one incredibly hot person with a not so hot person immediately what comes to mind is the not stop person has got to have money or she started yes certainly here in the in washington d.c. i think a lot of people would say you see a lot of that and you always wonder i wonder what the other person's job is or you know where they rank in terms of the political scale because this is the town of that but what about those critics who say you know what this could do serious damage on the psyches of people who feel like you know maybe they dreamed that they

were equals at one point and now they're realizing you know what in order to go out with somebody that i'm attracted to i've got to pay for it. you know i think it's a i did a lot of reading about the site myself and i saw a lot of alec allegations regarding whether or not this constitutes legal prostitution or maybe not so legal prostitution but whole issue of prostitution in and of itself. is one it's exciting and one that we all want to talk about but i don't know that it's relevant to this particular argument the question at hand is whether or not somebody wants to date someone if they're outside of their attraction range or outside of their socio economics range is willing to just be honest about that and prevent out there and i think that's what this does to be honest with you i know that that's probably not a politically correct response i'm wondering dr said what you think about how this shapes the future certainly we watch these old movies about you know courtship

involving you know sitting in the front room with parents in the next room or you know walking around the garden together those days of course are long gone now but how does this shape the future in terms of big there's always going to be i'm sorry i think there's always going to be people who meet that way by chance and i think that romantic dialogue is always going to exist there are always going to be people who have that story to tell this were a generation where people are very busy we're all over achievers we're all very very over schedules. and this sort of takes a guesswork out of it doesn't it you know you go online and you answer an enormous amount of questions and you're very honest about what it is you're looking for if you were somebody who considers themselves to be the attractive one then then you're looking for somebody who's going to compensate you for could potentially be a really boring day. when. the social worker i mean does this mean that you know

they both say the two people the attractive person and the generous people the generous person say they hit it off but does that mean they start off on a foot on footing that is an equal or does that really just happen with every one anyway. you know it's interesting it almost strakes me as the affirmative action of the dating world right so you aren't guaranteed your first date with the person but there's no guarantee that you're going to get a second date with the person so it really is up to the individual to sink or swim on that date like out the affirmative action of the dating thing that was dr darcy's a licensed clinical social worker in new york city and that is going to do it for now for more on the stories we covered go to youtube dot com slash r t america i'm christine have a great night. with the law and back you. all the way to god is when a people are sick just speaking fees are older you know she says.