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Press coverage nears blind hysteria without letup
of TheColumnists.com
Nothing like a
really good superstar death to resuscitate the media and get
it jumping for joy. Michael Jackson’s sudden death last
Thursday stirred the press, radio nd TV on a drowsy late-June
afternoon like nothing since Prince Di’s demise.
A post-presidential election lull had settled in, and even the dire economic news has begun to pall, so Jackson’s dramatic death helped rescue the media during a sleepy news month. Even Ed McMahon’s death got 10 times as much ink as it might have six months ago, and Farrah Fawcett had the ultimate bad luck to expire on the same day as Michael Jackson, akin to being on “The Ed Sullivan Show” the night the Beatles debuted.
The newspapers went into overdrive, delighted to have something to jump-start their own lingering death. Even the normally sane New York Times went bananas, pulling out all the stops for a four-column photo and obit on the front page--above the fold; seven reporters were dispatched, about as many as man the Times’s Iraq bureau. On Saturday, the media frenzy continued, as The Times featured a mere three-column photo and story across the top of the front page, with a second story adjoining it.
I can’t recall any entertainer that got that kind of ink in The Times, not even entertainment giants of the 20th century who died in the last 10 years. Poor Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Carson, Marilyn Monroe and, if I recall, even John Lennon had to settle for below-the-fold Times obituaries.
Some celebrity called him “the greatest dancer who ever lived,” as the ghosts of Fred Astaire, Bill Robinson, Gene Kelly, Eleanor Powell, Ann Miller, Gwen Verdon and Rudolf Nureyev could only look on with envy. Jackson’s celebrated “moonwalk” was nothing that hadn’t been done 60 years earlier by dancers like Bojangles, the Nicholas Brothers, Ray Bolger, Buddy Ebsen and other great so-called “eccentric” dancers--none of whom were likely to have been seen by Jackson devotees who believe song and dance began with MTV. Jackson played the Scarecrow in the 1978 film musical “The Wiz,” but never pursued a movie career, as if a mere movie screen was too small to contain him.
You could swing a cat and find 1,000 Broadway dancers able to mimic Jackson’s steps, and far more. Before Jackson was born, dancers like Honi Coles, Sandman Simms, Bunny Briggs and Jimmy Skyde were moonwalking in Harlem revues, some of it captured in the great 1989 Broadway musical “Black and Blue”--possibly where Jackson first got the idea. His “Moonwalker” video came out a year later.
The San Jose Mercury News blared, “THE KING IS DEAD” on a black background across the top of the paper. Not even the death of real kings--or the former pop king, Elvis Presley--has warranted such revered regal treatment. In my memory, only John Kennedy’s assassination got that kind of profound front page epitaph. The House of Representatives was even persuaded to stand for a moment of silence. A nation mourns. Maybe American flags will fly at half-staff. As the King Tut exhibit prepares to open in San Francisco this week, the former boy king will be dwarfed by pop’s already semi-mummified boy king.
Charles Gibson led off ABC’s “World
News Tonight” with not one, but two, correspondents, reporting
on the event, which took up about half of the evening news report.
For shows like “Larry King Live,” the “Today”
show and “Entertainment Tonight,” Jackson’s death
was heaven-sent. King (the live one) will surely squeeze a week’s
worth of shows out of Jackson’s passing. The next night,
at the top of the newscast, Gibson announced--a sort of consumer
warning label--that most of the program would be devoted to Michael
Jackson’s death (should you want to look away).
The network news shows did much the same thing, each one trying
to out-grieve their rivals. Radio talk shows across the country
finally had a hot new subject to replace the strip-searched teenage
school girl story. Even radio sports shows were stopped in their
tracks, struggling to find a sports angle. The usual suspects
were trotted out to pay their respects, everyone from Liza Minnelli
and Jesse Jackson; even Uri Geller weighed in to cover the supernatural
angle. The Pope has yet to be heard from.
One report claimed that on the day Jackson died, 65,000 text messages a second were logged. Twitter crashed. The Networking world came close to imploding last week. The folks who feel a need to play walk-ons in celebrity death scenes hauled out their teddy bears, bouquets and Jackson photos, huddling and hugging near his Walk of Fame star.
To get away from it all, I surfed the channels and found that the Food Network offered a brief respite from the Jackson onslaught. Only Rachel Ray, basting a portobello mushroom, perky as ever, seemed obliviou--but, of course, her shows are taped. Before it’s over, the Food Network may well devote an evening to Michael’s favorite dishes.
All of the hand-wringing over a moderately talented pop star (admittedly a minority view) is a measure of not just the current depressed state of the culture but also of the media’s daily doldrums and of the sadly depleted stature of pop iconography itself. That so many people invested so much emotion in this peculiar star (“I can’t stop crying”--Diana Ross) is some kind of comment on our exhausted showbiz cosmos.
Jackson’s career, even his boosters conceded, had been over for 20 years, and had descended into a series of freakish incidents--all of which heightened his passage and gave the story long legs. Already the conspiracy theorists are on the radio phones to claim that Jackson’s doctor should be “jailed” for prescribing potent drugs like oxycontin that caused his heart attack, that 911 was slow in responding, etc. The speculation over how Jackson died should easily rival JFK’s, Elvis’s and Princess Di’s deaths. Michael Jackson took drugs? Shocking. “He was a walking pharmacy,” said ABC’s Dr. Tim Johnson.
Jackson was, apart from the king of pop,
surely the king of self-promotion and the king of celebrity freaks--as
if merely being a famous entertainer and worldwide phenomenon
was not enough to satisfy his ambitions. He became, to quote
one of his songs, a “Tabloid Junkie.”
But as has been said many times, pop stars are America’s
royalty. It was almost a certainty that Jackson, with his flamboyant
life, would come to an equally flamboyant end, tailor-made for
tabloids but leaped on with equal excitement by the main stream
press in an orgy of inflated praise and news overkill. He was,
wrote Steven Winn in The San Francisco Chronicle, “a
never-ending spectacle.”
The lead Times’ writer, Brooks Barnes, wrote an adulatory obit, claiming Jackson “ushered in the age of pop as a global product--not to mention the age of spectacle and pop culture celebrity,” an exalted place formerly held by everyone from Lindbergh to Warhol to Monroe to Madonna. This is just generational vanity--the belief that the era in which one lives has produced the greatest this or that.
Part of the massive coverage, I suspect, was to justify the media’s own decades of pumping up Jackson into a pop colossus. A stoned sounding Rolling Stone writer, Anthony DeCurtis, told Larry King that talking about Jackson’s death “was like talking about the sun or the air.” Maybe physicists will want to add “Jacksonium” to the periodic chart. Clearly he was a curious amalgam--half male and half female, half black and half white, half child and half adult, half brilliant and half batty.
Jackson’s three unlikely children, the lurid child molestation charges, three-ring circus court case, and recent financial woes--all of it was of a piece. His attempts to paint himself (literally) as a kind of real life Peter Pan gave comics material for decades. Like Peter Pan, he managed to lose his shadow (original skin tone), until he looked like a white-faced mime, even becoming a pal of Marcel Marceau.
Quincy Jones, who seemed to be cast by the media as the official caretaker of the Jackson legacy, noted with some dismay that Michael had photos of blonde, blue-eyed kids hanging in his Neverland home. Steven Winn added that “Jackson’s life reminds us that a twisted childhood can produce a badly bent adult.” In the end, Jackson had become a sad joke, a late-night punch-line, which makes the over-the-top reverential press coverage seem an odd, out-of-synch response.
Jackson the performer had long ago been pushed out of the limelight by Jackson the perverse character--“Wacko Jacko”--whose bizarre life and behavior, confused racial and sexual identity, headline grabbing marriage to Elvis’s daughter all looked like desperate, even pathetic, ways to prolong his fading stardom at all costs.
If Jackson was weird, what can you make of the two women who married him? It was as if he hoped, by marrying Elvis’s daughter Lisa Marie, to upstage and submerge the former king of pop. At one point he even clung to Nancy Reagan and Liz Taylor (or was she clinging to him?) as a ploy to stay in the news. Everything he did appeared calculated to top all his previous bizarre behavior, from dangling his kid over a balcony to leaping up on a car during his molestation trial, almost as if he was thinking, “You want to see weird? I’ll show you weird!”
At his death he was planning yet another comeback, and maybe this was it. At 50, the only thing he had left was death, which, as the cynics say, can be a great career move.
©2009 by Gerald Nachman. This column first posted June 29, 2009.
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