King of Pop Dead At 50 But Viewers Are the Victims

The news has been canceled on cable news.

I’ve said that for years now, thanks to the increasing amounts of airtime handed over to “personalities” on cable news networks like MSNBC, CNN, Headline News, and Fox News.  On slower news days these hosts bring “appointment viewers,” people who tune in specifically to see those people night after night.  MSNBC has Morning Joe, Countdown, Rachel Maddow, and Ed Schultz.  CNN has Larry King, Anderson Cooper, and Lou Dobbs.  Headline News has Nancy Grace and a few other interchangeable Hollywood entertainment reporter types.  Fox News has Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, and so on.

But tonight, viewers got practically none of this, because of the untimely death of pop icon Michael Jackson and screen star Farrah Fawcett.  Other news simply doesn’t exist, and cable news is driven to excess, covering the same ground over and over and over again, with no significant new developments.

MSNBC was the worst tonight.  Keith Olbermann was literally at a loss for words, as the proverbial hoe got dragged over the same plowed field endlessly.  ‘Michael Jackson is dead.’  ‘We don’t know why,’ but in the MSNBC Spec-U-Plex, everything is fair game.  With the inane “B Roll” video clips running on an endless loop, Olbermann was stuck with shoddy guests coughed up by some MSNBC producer.  The Jackson family lawyer’s appearance was the lowest point in television news since good ole Judge Larry bursting into tears during the Anna Nicole Smith “matter.”

The grandstanding by this guy was unbearable.  An LA lawyer looking for his 15 minutes, telling MSNBC viewers “I warned the family about the prescription drugs,” not less than four times, promptly followed by his desire “not to speculate” on the cause of death until the tests were in.  That was followed by regular reminders of his close association to the Jackson family and, for that Hollywood ending, you need a good cry, and he delivered his best performance at the end.

I wanted to cry.  Shameless.

An “anticipated” (by who?) press conference was running an hour late, and in the end one Jackson brother showed up in front of the microphones to spend three minutes telling us everything we already knew, and asking the media to leave the family alone (fat chance).

Then Olbermann wandered into a landmine field when a host runs out of things to say (which he did 15 minutes into the “special coverage.”)  The whole affair was comparable to former CNN anchor Bernard Shaw, who went into an incoherent ramble during the start of the first Gulf War at around 2:30 in the morning our time, when he literally described the events in the Baghdad carpet bombing as a dichotomy, similar to a visit he once had to some Maryland jazz club, all while hiding terrified under the bed in the hotel room he was trapped in.  Olbermann visibly reacted to the loading of Jackson’s body into a plain white coroner’s van headed off to Mission Road, home of the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office for autopsy.  He suggested that after all the fame and notoriety, in the end, it was all reduced to a rapid loading of his body into some white van to be carted off.

Cringe.

Well into Rachel Maddow’s 9pm timeslot, with absolutely no end in sight to the “breaking news,” it was time to grab the remote control.  CNN was running Larry King, which meant, of course, more of the same.  Cher had called in to express condolences to Fawcett’s and Jackson’s family, and did so respectably, unlike the aforementioned lawyer.  Larry not only had a full lineup of guests for his 9pm show, but he reminded us he’d be back at 12 midnight with a second live hour.  Gosh, thanks.

Sean Hannity on Fox News was MIA by the time I tuned in.  Instead, we got Geraldo Rivera re-running a gladhanding interview with Michael Jackson he did several years earlier.  Now we know how he got the interview in the first place.

In the end, the only refuge from the wall-to-wall excess of frivolous “nothing new to see here” coverage was on C-SPAN, where the House of Representatives was still in session trying to get some bills passed.  I’ve seen that before too, but it was still better than the news vigil on cable news.

Anna Nicole Smith was a dog and pony circus, particularly during the trial, thanks to a judge looking for a career doing a judge show.  But there were enough characters to keep viewers from throwing things at the television.  Not tonight.  Not only was the coverage shallow, repetitive, and pointless, it was illustrative of the psychotic world of Hollywood-star-obsessed Los Angeles media literally chasing Los Angeles County Sheriff helicopters on the “Live Cam” for absolutely no reason.  The LA crowds spontaneously gathering to stand around coroner travel routes, the hospital, and morgue didn’t help either.  Don’t these people have something else to do?

The cable news world sure didn’t.  Iran, the debate over health care, the continuing saga of the Sanford affair, the surprising jump in unemployment numbers… none of it mattered enough to breakthrough the solid wall of useless cable news coverage that existed for no apparent reason.  Again.