Death and the media stampede
When Michael Jackson died, many people didn’t go to CNN, MSNBC, or even Fox News to discover the details. Instead, they got on such social-networking sites as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, and the latter crashed from the amount of people posting messages about Jackson at an extremely high volume. In fact, Trendrr, a website which tracks digital and social media trends, reported Michael Jackson’s name appeared in tweets over 100,000 times per hour on Thursday afternoon of July 25.
“It was the first celebrity death that was mainly an Internet phenomenon,” said longtime music critic Don McLeese, a UI associate professor of journalism and mass communication. “The news was broken by TMZ, which is a gossip blog. It took mainstream media three to five hours to confirm this. People were spreading this on Twitter. It seemed like a whole new way of getting people involved.”
That many people found out about Jackson’s death through the Internet made apparent just how much the media and the way news is reported has changed in recent years. Newspapers and even all-news channels are not the only major information dispensers anymore. This leaves an important question for professional journalists everywhere.
What benefit can journalists provide on the topic of celebrity death that most Tweeters or bloggers cannot?
“I think the good stuff is probably what you’re going to read from smart people in newspapers at this point - people who are taking more of an analytical look rather than simply parroting what they’re seeing on blogs and TV,” McLeese said. “I always thought that when I was doing my job right, I was helping my readers understand the phenomenon - whether that phenomenon was Michael Jackson or Britney Spears or Bob Dylan. If we can put something into cultural perspective, then we’re providing a service. If we’re just kind of going 24/7 with this stuff because we’ve got to feed the beast, then we’re not performing a service.”
So what is the real story to be told on the summer of celebrity death? Well, it’s not just about Nielsen’s reporting Jackson’s memorial service drew 31.14 million views (and even more worldwide) or that the Michael Jackson fan page has slightly more than 10 million fans on Facebook as of the writing of this article.
The answer is the stories about what made these celebrities tick and why they stood out in culture - whether good or bad. Many celebrities died this summer, including Farah Fawcett, Ed McMahon, and David Carradine, but Jackson’s death was the most covered in the media. After all, he had the most controversial story.
Jackson defies ethnicity
Jackson’s skin lightening was a subject of debate over the years, because the artist seemingly adjusted his skin, facial features, and hair to make himself look more white than black. However, Jackson always seemed to appreciate his African-American heritage in interviews and music videos.
Some argue that Jackson went through the process as a means of coping with the skin diseases vitiligo and lupus - he said in interviews that he was so concerned with image he could barely look in the mirror - but his reasoning for plastic surgery was never really known.
UI English Professor and International Writing Program adviser Peter Nazareth has his own views on why Jackson may have gone through the process.
“I read somewhere that Michael said he wanted to be greater than Elvis, and he was told he could not be because he was not white,” Nazareth wrote in an e-mail interview with the DI. “This may have played some part in all the changes he went through. Elvis used to go to see the Jackson 5 when he performed in Las Vegas, and he told them he loved and knew all their music. Michael must have looked up to him. He got his moves from James Brown and from Jackie Wilson (as Elvis did: He and Jackie were as close as twins) but also from Elvis (Jackie said that many African-American performers got their inspiration from Elvis).”
That Jackson followed pop culture and was able to expand on the styles of famous entertainers is what made him such as household name around the globe. He was not just good at what he did - he was the best.
“Compare Michael’s moonwalk to Elvis’s performance of the title song in the movie Jailhouse Rock,” Nazareth said. “Of course, Michael took it much further. And he did become greater than Elvis in that his Thriller album was the best-selling album ever. But I think Michael was trying to make color and race irrelevant. Notice how much the whole world reacted to his death.”
The theme of internal reflection and the way society defines people in terms of ethnicity is raised in many of his songs - most obviously in the tracks “Man in the Mirror” and “Black or White.” He didn’t want people to think of himself as the most famous African-American musician but rather, the most famous musician of all time.
Jackson even blurred the lines of sex, with his effeminate voice and looks over the years. These traits seemed to suggest he wanted to create a legacy around his music rather than his appearance.
When he died at age 50, people were talking about the music more than anything. In fact, people were so focused on the music they seemed to forget that Jackson hadn’t released any relevant material for 15 years or that he had been accused of being a child molester.
Maybe the musician had accomplished his goal after all.
Media overkill
People are always going to be engrossed with the idea of celebrity. That’s just a fact of life, but it is important that media outlets continue to seek out the “real news” rather than just repeating the statistics that people can gather through a quick Google search.
“Honestly, I think it was incredibly stupid that CNN and MSNBC covered his death so extensively,” said Kembrew McLeod, a UI associate professor of communication studies. “I understand that they covered his death, and yeah, I think that’s just indicative of the shallowness of today’s news coverage, and the fact that Walter Cronkite died within a week or two of Michael Jackson sort of is a reminder of that. Walter Cronkite famously said after he retired that he never would have covered a celebrity news story unless it was newsworthy. The reason the networks covered it was because they knew it would pull in ratings.”
The media aren’t only the ones to blame for irrelevant news; after all, the viewers and readers ingest the information, whether it be on the 24/7 news networks or the tabloid gossip magazines.
The next time people glance over an article or flip on a news station, they should stop and think about if what they’re seeing adds to the conversation or is simply a repetition of what has already been said.
Maybe in Jackson’s case - and the case in all of this summer’s celebrity deaths - the best way of mourning is simply to do what these celebrities would have wanted them to. Turn up the music loud or pop in that favorite DVD and think about what these people were trying to accomplish in life. That is what’s most newsworthy in the end.
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