There’s no shortage of blog commentary on Jacko. Frankly, we’d like to pretend like the whole thing never happened — just black it out, like a long night out with John Daniels, wake up the next morning, kick back a bloody mary laced with Alka-Seltzer and move on.
Thinking on the same wavelength, Greg of the Inside 465 blog, in a post titled “Journalism and Michael Jackson and that Aruba Girl and the Runaway Bride and …” explains why:
A few years ago, I was given the choice of either taking a intro journalism course or a business writing course. I chose the former…
Anyway, the instructor, who retired from the Star, stressed the “so what” (not the only thing, but I don’t feel like talking about inverted pyramids)…
Frankly, I can’t find a “so what” in the Jackson trial. I can’t find a “so what” in the Aruba missing girl case or any of the “white girl in danger” cases we seem to always hear about from the national media or the pervert of the week or celebrity crimes. Those are fine for the entertainment pages, but how about actually covering things that affect more than one family?
It’s ok to tell us that Michael Jackson was acquitted, but we don’t need a jury deliberation clock. We don’t need a clock telling us that Jackson is 14 minutes and 23 seconds late for court. (I’m looking in your direction, MSNBC.) We don’t need six hours of debate. I don’t really care what Sean Hannity thinks about it. I don’t want to see Jermaine on every damn show. We don’t need live coverage of the jury press conference. We don’t need Nancy Grace to yell at us about what she thinks. We don’t need ABC to interrupt Judge Joe Brown and Judge Judy to bring us the verdict.
Give us real news.
Sue Raging Roz at “Thoughts From Up Here” — that is, up there in Canada — has a “What are you going to do now that you’ve won” suggestion for The King of Pop. Her advice: “The best thing that Wacko Jacko can do for his country is to take himself quickly and quietly to Switzerland so that the media will have nothing to report on except maybe the real news.”
That real news — according to Roz — is the now-infamous Downing Street Memo, which finally made its long and winding way onto NBC’s national newscast last night.
Kissfan at Truespeak is happy to see the DSM get the exposure he thinks it deserves, but is unhappy with NBC for not asking “So what?” He complains, “Basically, the point of [the NBC] story is that the British thought we were fucking it up. Fine, I understand that. But they’re missing the obvious. They can’t see the proverbial forest. Look at the dates on these memos. All of them [are] from early to mid-2002. So in my mind, this begs the following question: Why were we told this [during a] August 27, 2002 [press conference]?” Kissfan then refers us to a press conference with then-press secretary Ari Fleischer, in which Fleischer repeatedly denies that the president has decided to take military action against Iraq.
His rant continues, “Why can’t NBC ask the obvious questions? Why is it that they are afraid to do their job? We were lied to and these documents prove it. Plain and simple, WE WERE LIED TO!”
“I’ve got to stop watching the mainstream news. One of these days I’m liable to blow a gasket or something.”
Rob, a Navy blogger based in Honolulu, is also angry with the corporate media, but not for its DSM coverage. Rather, he’s upset that the media didn’t jump all over yesterday’s earthquake off the California coast. His take: “As of approximately 3 hours after it hit, a magnitude 7.0 quake only 80 miles off the coast of California has yet to hit the major ‘mainstream media’ news sites. … But the ‘news’ services were covering major issues like the second-by-second details of the Michael Jackson trial (CNN deemed that worthy of not one, but two “Breaking News” alerts). Given the devastation of the December 26, 2004, tsunami you’d think a major quake that close to California would shake up some news coverage.”
Sorry, but since there were no injuries and no tsunami — we have to side with the “mainstream media” on this one. If a magnitude 7.0 earthquake wants some headlines, it’s going to have to get a little closer to Neverland Ranch.
–Thomas Lang
Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.