Michael Jackson and the American News Media Both DOA

Michael Jackson has died an early, perhaps untimely death. We will know in time more about the official “cause of death”. To no one’s surprise Jacko’s demise has been spun up into a media circus. But even (cynic that I am about the American media) I am amazed at the sheer amount of coverage, even on news outlets one would think could maintain higher standards. All seem eager to jump onto the absurd bandwagon of unending repetition of what little is “known”, a parade of experts who really know nothing more than the rest of us, speculation much of which borders on the ridiculous, and the ongoing spouting of nonsensical King of Pop minutia.

The degradation of the American news reporting behemoth in the last few years is truly disturbing. Those of us old enough to remember when television, radio and newspapers actually reported the news (think of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Kronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, etc.), told us daily of the unfolding events when we were at war, and gave us more than sound bites about government. We, sadly, have also seen the entire American media machine become no more respectable than a 1961 issue of The Enquirer. And The Enquirer was the newspaper that featured headlines like “Mom Boiled Babies Then Ate Them”. That’s how respectable the The Enquirer was--pure fiction, nonsense, sensationalism times infinity, and in very many cases out-and-out lies. Some even quite hurtful to those being reported about. The editors and publishers hid, like Jerry Springer and Rush Limbaugh, behind the banner of “entertainment” so—then as now—they could continue their vulgar outpouring of a kind of anti-truth.

As newspapers slowly fade away--I read two regularly and believe me, they are slowly dying—-both in sales and in quality—-the rest of the media world gives us pap instead of news. Increasingly the nature of information we are given is no better on news channels than on QVC and infomercials. Snippets, half-truths, talking heads telling us not the news so much as their version of what we should think and believe about the news, all of this as substitute for content we can make our own decisions about.

There are still some better places to get news, but they are flickers rather than bright lights. Public radio (NPR and affiliates) is pretty good, although degraded in recent years by immense pressure and defunding by conservatives who targeted them for telling the truth. Conservatives prefer managed reporting ala Fox News—the Rupert Murdoch version of selective and slanted reporting spun so that lies sound like truth, and opinion masquerades as news. There is, and of course you know if you are reading this, the internet. So those of us who care to search for the truth, or some hint of it, anyway, hunt around the ‘net for some real news. To be sure, it is getting harder and harder to find. And if democracy depends on an informed populace, where does that leave America?