The Michael Jackson media circus: My thoughts and yours

Yesterday morning the host of CNN's "Reliable Sources," the Washington Post's media correspondent Howard Kurtz, asked his panel of CNN-anointed journalism experts if the media's carpet-bombing coverage of pop-star Michael Jackson's death was (is) professionally justified.

The brief exchange, which, exasperatingly, came at the segment's end rather than as a lead-in, unfolded as follows:

Kurtz: I only have half a minute here. [One panelist] mentioned the network newscasts, which led Thursday night, Friday night, of course, with Michael Jackson. Back in 1977, CBS led with another story, the Panama Canal instead of Elvis' death. And it just seems like everybody is on this Jackson bandwagon.

[Second panelist]: It's because people are talking about it. I mean, you know ...

Kurtz: Is that the standard? Is that the media standard, whatever people talk about becomes the most important story?

[Second panelist]: Yes. It is now. I mean, I'm not a 40-year veteran of TV journalism, but I can tell you that you cater to what everyone is talking about. That seems to be the new standard.

There is, of course, no "seeming" to it. That is the new standard -- the entertainment-driven, ratings-obsessed, profit-chasing standard that would make Howard Beale blush.

Yet it's not that cable-news networks have either forgotten or never understood the difference between hard, important news and pure, sensationalistic distraction; it's just that cable-news executives now report to corporate boards of directors and shareholders who are less than fussy about how profits are turned. If some executive fails to grasp that, the board, assuredly, will find someone who doesn't.

In this respect I tend to find philosophical harmony with Marx -- no, not Groucho -- in his (not very well-known) sympathy for the capitalist, who, wrote Karl, is as much a victim of impersonal market forces as the next guy; he does what he does, in general, not out of inhumanity or malice, but through the ruthlessly competitive need to survive.

In short, said Marx, blame the system, not the capitalist -- and I imagine that would have been his decree with respect to the Jackson media circus as well; there is no personal blame to be had here.

But what do you thing? In your opinion are network executives perpetrators of distracting madness, or merely helpless victims?