Re: Coverage of celebrity deaths intensifies

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: : : The only thing more dead, even then, was that kind of thinking, which Roone Arledge, applying what he learned as head of ABC Sports to a revamp of ABC News, was quick to brand elitist. : : I remember being an idealistic j-student who actually believed the high-sounding principles taught at school. One summer as an editing intern at a fairly large a.m. paper, I wound up debating the publisher on this very point. (The other interns were pretty much suckups, but I was known in the newsroom for speaking my mind...) : I suggested that I liked more serious news and that the media were leaning too heavily toward fluff. The publisher was horrified. He responded that my way of thinking was "elitist," and journalists must not be elitist but simply "give the people what they want." : By the way, this conversation occurred during at a lunch at the publisher's country club. : The only way I ever got into a country club was as a caddy or a halfway house cook. Yet here was a well-to-do country club member telling me I was an elitist. : Anyway ... : People don't decide what they want in isolation. "What the people want" is in large part, determined by what you give them. It's a feedback loop. : It could be argued that it's elitist to patronize people by pandering to the basest instincts of the lowest common denominator. ("You're not good enough for steak ... here, have some dog food.") Or more to the point -- losing any sense of perspective and indulging in one mania after another like a raging case of journalistic ADHD. : And, as people in psychologists, educators and motivational experts know, people usually live up, or down, to what's expected of them. So congrats, anti-elitist newspaper publishers who lunch comfortably at country clubs. Congrats for helping create the dumbed-down America that arguably is responsible for putting you out of business. Why read newspapers? Reading is too hard, we'd rather look at pictures. Why think? Thinking is difficult. We'd rather be titillated. : : : : CBS would come to repeat the mantra "Remember Elvis" for years afterward, fearful of ever again seeming out of touch with what touched viewers. There was no debate at the House of Murrow when Bing Crosby died two months after Presley. : : By 1980, when John Lennon was murdered, the major-media template for handling celebrity deaths -- prominent coverage, specials and other remembrances -- was established, straddling between tribute and exploitation, news and sensationalism. And you saw it still last week for Jackson and Farrah Fawcett. : : What has changed is how, and how fast, the news is gathered and spread. : : If CBS' stubbornness fed ABC and NBC the millions interested in the King of Rock 'n' Roll in 1977, imagine today when the audience not only has more alternatives for information sources but is better able to monitor who's delivering what they want at any moment. : : Those on Twitter on Thursday were trading links to the latest Jackson info in real time and sharing judgment on their quality. (Spurious Tweets killed actor Jeff Goldblum but later revived him and others said to have followed Jacko and Farrah on the Final Red Carpet, but still.) : : Time Warner's TMZ.com and Chicago Tribune parent Tribune Co.'s LATimes.com were out front on Jackson's condition, and other outlets -- initially able neither to ignore the dispatches nor corroborate them -- had to tread carefully. : : TMZ's Time Warner cousin, CNN, seemed to hesitate as much as anyone in acknowledging TMZ's reporting, preferring to refer to the reports of the Los Angeles Times, and even then expressing concern. "CNN is an independent news organization; corporate affiliations do not factor into our editorial decision-making," a CNN spokeswoman said. : : CBS, meanwhile, used video from the tabloid show "Inside Edition," produced and syndicated by another wing of its parent company, in its "Evening News" report on Fawcett. Later, in its prime-time special on Jackson, it used branded content from "Entertainment Tonight" and the host of "The Insider." : : Just as viewers have more sources than before, so, too, do news outlets. One TV executive pointed to the use of YouTube video in coverage of the election in Iran, but said with increased outside options for content comes increased need to vet. : : By the way, it should be said that CBS wasn't alone in failing to connect the cultural dots on Elvis Presley's death, although National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" didn't make the exact same mistake. It had the Panama Canal story second, leading with a report on the problems dogging Bert Lance, President Jimmy Carter's erstwhile head of the Office of Management and the Budget. : : NPR's report that Elvis had left the building -- and the rest of this world -- closed out the program that evening. : : Calling it a "mistake" on the air 20 years later, host Susan Stamberg explained, "You see how culture can last long after the names of kings, queens, and OMB directors are forgotten."

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