In 1977, I was watching Star Trek when the news that Elvis had died scrolled across the bottom of the screen. When Michael Jackson died, I was in a hotel in Detroit. Everywhere for the next few days, screens lit up with the news, then with endless re-runnings of brief clips of the troubled recluse venturing forth in a burka and fedora or dangling his infant over a balcony rail.
This distressed me. Not because I was particularly affected by his passing or was even a Michael Jackson fan—in fact, there are few musicians I've liked less. I hold to the contrarian notion that his musical achievements topped out with 1979's Off the Wall, hitting bottom with the choreographed squealing of Thriller and staying there until his untimely death.
It was always troubling to see Jackson playing out, in his ever-changing face and in his melodramatic performances, what must have been the results of his unusual and demanding childhood helming his family band. At the UK's BRIT Awards in 1996, after performing "Earth Song" in front of a giant spinning Earth, he removed his jacket and pants to reveal a flowing white tunic. He then posed in a clearly Jesus-like fashion for a couple of minutes while bestowing kisses of apparent blessing and laying hands on a crowd of mostly children (and even a rabbi), and declared "I love you all" and "I believe in you all." The messianic trappings even brought Jarvis Cocker of the band Pulp onstage in protest.
Something, it seemed, had seriously misfired in Jackson's psyche. It must have been exceptionally difficult for him to wrestle such demons in a never-ending spotlight. He seemed like a man in search of some vital kind of acceptance that he couldn't find in the interaction between performer and audience. All of that only makes the furor over his death more of an unseemly spectacle.
Regardless of his musical talent, no matter his influence or ubiquity, no matter even nicknaming his kid "Blanket," what distressed me in seeing every television screen broadcasting images of Jackson endlessly was what it replaced. The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism reported that the coverage was just as lopsided as anecdotal evidence made it appear, although it was less so on non-cable news outlets: "Fully 93 percent of cable coverage studied on the Thursday and Friday following his death was about the King of Pop."
I tend to see the world in terms of the arts; the creative process is vital to me, and, even if I didn't care for his style or his songs, Jackson was an artist. But lest we forget, his image knocked out of central position images of a bloody struggle for democracy in Iran.
That kind of human struggle and sacrifice deserved, at the least, as much coverage as the death of Michael Jackson. Instead, barring further sensational events, the face of Neda Agha-Soltan, shot dead by an Iranian sniper while standing near a protest, will quickly fade from memory, drowned in the flood of images of the last version of Michael Jackson. There are no winners in that equation.
It's hard to know the effect of worldwide news coverage on those who still struggle to be heard in Iran. Maybe it doesn't matter as much as it seems at a glance. But something has long been wrong in American media—not that we really needed further confirmation. The story of Iran's struggle was short on video and images, so the boring alternatives of talking heads in fancy studios had to carry the day and offer some kind of informed discussion. So much easier, then, to run images of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford confessing to sex in Buenos Aires. Easier still to let the death of one of pop's most troubled figures completely replace the hard, unpleasant realities of a struggle for democracy that resonates with profound implications around the world. The corporate media's sensationalist, dollar-driven choices and omissions can do very real harm.
The Pew article also points out just how much things have changed: "When Elvis Presley died in 1977, CBS News was criticized for choosing not to lead its newscast with it." As much as I love "That's Allright, Mama," I wish someone had the fortitude to make that kind of choice now. I'm not going to hold my breath.
