Michael's Death & Media Missinformation

In an earlier post I wrote that "Sex trumps substance." Well, death trumps sex, and so Iran be damned, healthcare slide by the wayside, global warming go lay down at the beach. We demand all Michael Jackson all the time. And that's an okay choice, I guess. The media are allowed to pander to the public. My objection is not to the public for having low taste or the media for feeding it. My objection is that the media gets so much so wrong.

The more I know about a particular subject, the more small mistakes I find in the coverage. This does make me temper my judgment. Sometimes when I think a paper or TV channel is twisting the news on purpose, I have to consider the possibility that it is ignorance and carelessness and not a plot or conspiracy.

There is a saying in the law--usually saved for jury instructions--that you may consider that if something is false in part, it may be false in its entirety. So what to make of the thousand paper cuts of inaccuracies in the Michael Jackson story?

I first learned of his death when a national cable network had a reporter, obviously unfamiliar with the Los Angeles area, report that Jackson had died in Bell. Knowing Bell, I was pretty confident that he would not, in fact, be caught dead in Bell. I guess she meant Bel Air(e). That too would have been wrong, but closer. Then I heard that he had collapsed in his rented mansion in Beverly Hills. Also not true. By evening the local TV coverage had it right, Holmby Hills, but even this morning the BBC was reporting that he died in Hollywood.

I happened to be in Westwood last night going to the Geffen Theatre and saw all the helicopters and TV trucks--as well as a fair number of print reporters hurrying back home at 7pm. There were some people gathered around but hardly a mob. It looked like the same number you would see stop for a car wreck. While having our dinner earlier, the TV coverage made it look like a huge and growing crowd. When we left the theatre around 9:50pm the civilians had mostly gone home. The few gawkers remaining were watching the field reporters for our local stations prepare or tape their stand up reports. You know the "Live from UCLA where 8 hours ago something happened is our own (fill in the blank) __________with our exclusive eyewitness report."

Meanwhile, nature and the media abhorring a vacuum, we got wall-to-wall coverage, speculation and misinformation. As late as this afternoon NPR reported that crowds were gathering around Michael's star on Hollywood Blvd, but some fans had mistakenly put their flowers of the star of the wrong Michael Jackson, whom NPR misidentified as "the disc jockey Michael Jackson." Our own Michael Jackson, the talk show host who virtually the invented the form, has not been a disc jockey since 1960.

If we in the media do not get the small things right, how can we have credibility with the big issues?
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com