Complaints About News Coverage of Michael Jackson's Death Miss Sight of What News Is
A pop icon dies young, under tragic circumstances. Millions around the world mourn, and the media respond with nonstop coverage – TV specials, newspaper headlines, magazine covers - all of which the public devour. Ratings soar, papers fly off newsstands.
Yet others complain that it’s all too much. The news media should focus on more serious matters, they say – war, politics, the economy - anything but the life and death of a pop singer.
Sound familiar? This was the scene in the hours and days following the death of John Lennon on Dec. 8, 1980.
The first announcement of Lennon’s death came from ABC sportscaster Howard Cosell, who interrupted a Monday Night Football broadcast to tell viewers:
“Yes, we have to say, remember this is just a football game, no matter who wins or loses. An unspeakable tragedy, confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City, John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous, perhaps, of all of the Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, dead on arrival.”
The next evening, anchors of the big three network newscasts all led with the story of Lennon’s death, placing it ahead of serious news like the threat of a Soviet invasion of Poland and negotiations to win the freedom of the American hostages in Iran.
CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite began his newscast this way:
"The death of a man who sang and played the guitar overshadows the news from Poland, Iran and Washington tonight."
Was Lennon’s death more important, in the grand scale of things, than the big issues of the day? Probably not. So why did the media devote such wall-to-wall coverage to it?
Because, as any good reporter can tell you, issues are important, but people – real, individual human beings - are what we find interesting.
A statistics story about the more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq? That’s important.
A profile of a young mother with two toddlers who has lost her husband in combat? That’s interesting, to say nothing of heartbreaking.
Readers may say they’re likely to read both articles, but any editor knows it’s the latter story that most will read, and remember, and comment on.
Fast-forward to today, with 500 TV channels, 24/7 cable news and the Internet. The media environment of 1980 – no MSNBC, no Facebook - seems positively Neolithic by comparison.
Yet even with the enormous glut of information available to the casual surfer or viewer, there are those who still complain that too much media attention has been devoted to the death of Michael Jackson. Indeed, nearly two-in-three Americans feel this way, according to a poll last week.
It makes no difference that even with all the Jackson coverage you still can, with the click of a mouse, call up more news, from every corner of the globe, than you could ever actually read. The complaints still come.
But the news has always been a mix of what we need to know and what we want to know. And sometimes it's not just about presidents and prime ministers, but about artists and authors, singers and dancers.
"A newspaper is like a buffet," a great editor once told me. "There should be something there for everyone."
Now, there are many motivations for the blanket coverage of Jackson’s death, and some of those have to do with profit. Cable news ratings have soared in recent days, and some news websites have seen their traffic skyrocket.
Sure, there are profits to be made with stories like these. That’s why they call it the news business.
But whether it’s war or the economy, politics or yes, the death of a pop star, news, in the end, is the story of people’s lives. And even his detractors must admit that Michael Jackson’s life made for a strange, tragic and ultimately fascinating story.
It's what Walter Cronkite understood when he began his newscast on the evening of Dec. 9, 1980: Sometimes the life and death of a man who sang songs overshadows everything else.
Read more: Dismiss Michael Jackson For His Eccentricities? Maybe. Dismiss His Music? Think Again.
Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images
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Good insight, Tony. It’s not that the death of John Lennon or Michael Jackson is more important than the big issues of the day, but people like Lennon and Jackson become a part of our lives while they are alive, and their deaths leave us feeling we’ve lost something personal and, sometimes, precious.
In the case of these two stars, their music was part of the soundtrack of a couple of generations and helped to express the feelings of millions of people. If we sometimes feel their deaths more keenly than those of others around the world who suffer and die, it is only because we feel we know them and they have given us something we continue to treasure an enjoy long after they are gone.
News about the war, the economy and the environment will continue to dominate nightly broadcasts, newspaper pages and blogs forever. But for a few brief moments, people should be allowed to grieve a fallen artist without the critics throwing stones.
These are in no way comparable.
John Lennon’s death led the TV news for one night. It wasn’t two-week-long orgy of nonstop coverage. It wasn’t front-page news for days and days in major newspapers.
Lennon’s personal life was unconventional, but he hadn’t paid a mult-million-dollar settlement to hush up one case of alleged pedophilia; and he hadn’t talked publicly about sleeping with little boys in his bed. The Jackson coverage barely mentioned these small facts.
What this coverage says about the media is bad enough. What it says about America is worse.
I did a Google News search for the terms “Michael Jackson molestation” and came up with 17,407 hits. So who’s not mentioning this?
The media shows what people want to see. Thats how they generate money right? I agree with Larry, these people do become a part of our lives and losing them is a little more personal than all those faceless people dying in other parts of the world. Not that their deaths are any less tragic.
Economy and war… Thats something we’ll be seeing a lot of in coming years, so I dont think a two week break will hurt anyone.