T/S: Michael Jackson vs. real news

If you as a broadcaster don't play the trash TV game at least a bit to goose your ratings, you don't even get the chance to lay the serious stuff on the general public. You become a niche broadcaster like PBS or C-Span, putting out a quality product to the few who seek it out.

there's an argument to be made that the michael jackson story isn't TOTAL trash news ... that, if the charges brought against him are true, that a person long suspected to be a pedophile was allowed to wander free largely because of his fame and wealth. it's a subspecies of the rush limbaugh story -- rich/famous people getting away with stuff that would land ordinary or poor folks in jail.

or at least that's one way to look at it. i concede that the MJ story isn't anywhere near as important as the latest congressional shenanigans re Medicare "reform" or the energy bill, much less Iraq or Dumbya being a dummy in Buckingham Palace. but i don't know if i'd call the MJ story total trash (like Tonya Harding or the Gary Condit bullshit stories).

good point. Do you think people interested in the MJ story are interested in the power dynamics/court proceedings or is it just another episode of E! True Hollywood Story?

dunno -- i don't think that either is mutually exclusive.

i could also get really hoity-toity, and come up with some sorta grand theory that michael jackson, rush limbaugh, parris hilton and the mutual fund shenanigans are all connected -- rich/famous/influential people getting away with sickening, illegal, immoral, and/or questionable behavior. it could be an epiphany to some folks (e.g., this is how the "let 'em eat cake" set lives THEY'RE NO BETTER THAN SCHLUBS LIKE ME IN FACT THEY'RE WORSE!). or it could just be bread and circuses.

not to mention mr. jackson's willingness to play the race card whenever the heat turned up -- see "tony mottola is a racist!" and hanging with reverend al.

Dude, where's Momus?

"rich/famous/influential people getting away with sickening, illegal, immoral, and/or questionable behavior"

And we get to punish them symbolically as a mass public by condemning/ridiculing/projecting fantasies upon them, and therefore avoid looking too deeply at the way rich/NONfamous/genuinely influential people get away more wide-ranging injustices, no?

bump

I really don't know these days. Who's to say what kind of news is real? Can you really say we NEED to know about the social security bill any more than MJ? God knows I WANT to know about the social security bill. Who sets the standard? One of the reasons I can't watch TV news anymore is that unlike the internet I don't have a variety of stories and headlines to pick from. I have to settle for the most showy story imaginable.

I remember Ted Koppel talking on some show about how now that they can deduct ratings to the minute, they know the second they move away from a hot story the ratings immediately go down, so the idea that people will learn more about other subjects if they tune in for MJ seems kind of flawed. If I can tune out ads between parts of a show surely they can tune out stories.

I agree with Anthony re: the subjectivity of judgements about what is or is not important information that is to be disseminated. I also find it interesting that the redeeming merits that Eisbar pointed out about the MJ story are NOT the aspects of it that are "news" in the proper sense. Is it really the place of news oulets, which are at least ostesibly attempting to disseminate unbiased information about goings on in the world, to comment on social problems?