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The death of Michael Jackson marks the end of a musical era without question. Does it also mark the end of a news authority era?
There was a time when we turned to network TV first for the final word on any major event or tragedy. The anchors of the big three; CBS, NBC and ABC were more often than not, the white father figures who delivered the accounts of presidential and political assassinations, men landing on the moon and impeachment hearings with authority and finality. Legendary CBS anchor, Walter Cronkite’s famous closing sign-off included the words “And that’s the way it was…” as a concluding punctuation to his nightly newscasts. He said it — almost Godlike — and that was that until 6 p.m. the next evening.
Then along came cable and Ted Turner’s gamble on there being an insatiable demand for news 24-hours a day. The experiment worked reasonably well, but after the first Gulf War, the habit of watching CNN was fixed in national and possibly global, behavior. After planes hit the World Trade Towers, it was a wrap and CNN was the final authority.
On June 25, 2009 something different happened. The first to report the death of Michael Jackson was the annoying Internet and broadcast phenomenon TMZ. TMZ, notorious for its pesky cadre of staff and freelance paparazzi who seem to materialize, as if by magic at every celebrity grocery shopping, cafe visit or stupid indiscretion.
TMZ declared the King of Pop dead and relegated to history while major media outlets like the New York Times, the LA Times, ABC, the BBC and even CNN were giving us sketchy and inconclusive information. Most of them, at some point, began sourcing TMZ for their reports. It was an odd situation where we didn’t know what to believe or who to trust. Jackson fans of all ages were rooting for CNN to have it right — that the King wasn’t dead and he would rise from this, giving us another weird Jacko story to talk about as we prognosticated on his tour and eventual new musical productions. It would all go back to the abnormal normalcy of Michael Jackson. We were rooting for CNN over TMZ. We lost.
TMZ had it right and we can only wonder now if we not only watched the death of a musical icon, but the death of traditional journalism. Are bloggers, Facebook and Twitter now closer to the action and better positioned to give us the information we need quicker? Are we willing to throw out the practices of fact-checking and research for primacy and speed? It seems so, and you know what, so far it has worked with the plane landing in the Hudson, the Pakistani terrorist attacks and the Iranian response to their national elections. Michael, as was his usual custom in life, just made it official with the flair of a seasoned performer leaving us in suspense and wanting more. – sly
