Every morning, between 6:30 and 7:00, as I have my coffee before getting ready to go to the office, I like to watch the second half of the news hour presented by Bret Baier on the Fox Cable News network. It features a panel discussion of noteworthy political topics in the news. This panel is made of analysts who usually provide interesting insights that go beyond the thirty-second headlines we have sadly gotten used to. My favorite panelist is Charles Krauthammer, whose views are deepened by his professional training as a medical doctor and psychologist. When I see it in Singapore, this program is actually broadcasted at the same time in the evening on the other side of the world, prime time on the US East Coast.Yesterday morning, when I turned the TV on, instead of Bret Baier and the panel, I was exposed to a “Breaking News” message announcing the death of Michael Jackson, floating over a continuous stream of pictures of a crowd gathered in front of the Los Angeles hospital where Michael Jackson had been pronounced dead a few hours earlier, and various clippings of his performing career. As usual this went on and on, with non-stop repetition of the same news (no details were known at the time except that the immediate cause of death was cardiac arrest) amid statements of various celebrities who felt compelled to rush to the scene.
One of them was the aging “Reverend” Al Sharpton. We have a black man in the White House, but the reverend’s line has not changed; he still milks white guilt for everything it is worth; this is his raison d’être. Apparently Michael Jackson was not taken seriously by the music industry at an early stage of his career. Perhaps Al would like us to believe that this racist neglect is the deep-seated reason for Michael Jackson’s weirdness, the plastic surgery that accentuated his androgynous looks, the outlandish clothes and bits of paraphernalia he adorned himself with, and the scandal of alleged child molestation that clouded his late years. More likely, however, the real reasons must be an abusive father and a performing career as a pop artist that started at the age of four.
Michael Jackson’s death, as a news item in a one-hour regular news program, deserves no more than a simple and short statement, for it is not an event that affects the state of affairs on the world stage in any way. For people who are interested, a one-hour in-depth and well researched program on his life and career could be produced and broadcasted at a suitable time after the event, when more is known about the exact circumstances of his death. The timing of this death invites questions, for it happened only a relatively short time before the staging of a series of concerts in London announced a few months ago as his farewell to the stage, and as a way to put behind him the dark clouds of suspicion over his involvement in the molestation of children in his LA home.
Why then did Fox News decide to cancel a regular in-depth news program primarily dedicated to political issues to make room for this continuous bombardment of incomplete non-news? It was not the only cable TV network that did this. I flipped through CNN and BBC World, and on those channels also it was all about Michael Jackson’s death, with the same pictures. There can be only one reason: commercial news channels thrive on the sensationalism and emotivity that drive the interests of the vast majority of TV viewers. For high ratings (and therefore high publicity revenues), there is nothing better than the untimely death of a controversial celebrity adulated by millions around the world.
Commercial broadcasting was supposed to bring variety and choice to the public. But, when it comes to “breaking news”, there is no choice: you see the same story pretty much told in the same manner on all news channels. In those times, I long for publicly funded broadcasting.
