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The bottom line: Viewers want Jackson

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By WALT BELCHER wbelcher

@tampatrib.com

Published: July 2, 2009

We are now in day seven of Michael Jackson death coverage. And there likely is more to come.

Plans for a memorial on Friday at Neverland have been scrapped. Now there's talk of a public memorial sometime in Los Angeles. Whenever there is a service for the King of Pop, TV cameras will be there.

We haven't seen this kind of celebrity death coverage since Princess Diana died in 1997.

Those who don't appreciate Jackson's impact on pop culture, especially older viewers, may have grown weary of the massive coverage by day two or three.

Within hours of his death last Thursday, the story dominated television news. The all-news cable networks were almost wall-to-wall by Friday. Cable and broadcast news coverage continued over the weekend. Other networks scrambled to program tributes that continued this week.

Obama's health insurance plan, the unrest in Iran, even South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's strange love affair all were pushed aside. And while the wall-to-wall coverage had subsided by Monday, Jackson still dominated the news.

No. 1 every day on 'Today'

NBC's "Today" show, for example, has featured Jackson as its lead story every day this week, sometimes going 15 or 20 minutes before getting to the next subject. Matt Lauer will be live outside the gates of Neverland this morning.

It is excessive? Yes. But it's also inevitable in this age of instant, multichannel and Internet communication. News of Jackson's death spread faster online than it did on television. And it was a tabloid gossip site, TMZ.com, that broke the story.

Google and Twitter bombarded

There was so much interest in Jackson's death last week that the Google search engine mistook the millions of Jackson hits as a potential malware attack. The social communication Twitter site crashed. AOL's instant messenger service went into overload and shut down for 40 minutes, and the Wikipedia site experienced more than 500 edits to Jackson's profile in less than 24 hours.

Now, more than any other time in history, the media is fueled by what gets the most eyeballs. Call it exploitation. Call it pandering. Call it being responsive to public demand.

When TV ratings climb with every Jackson story, there will be more Jackson stories. And there's plenty of fodder for stories, from the cause of death to what's going to happen to his estate.

We will remember

To many he was a talented superstar who went from cute kid in The Jackson Five to the brilliant singer/dancer in the groundbreaking "Thriller." Others saw him as a freakish recluse who was maimed by cosmetic surgery. And there were the accusations of child molestation that were never proven but still left serious doubts about him.

Even so, Jackson's death at age 50, after a career of brilliant highs and bizarre lows, will be one of those "I remember where I was when I heard the news" moments. It ranks up there with the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Elvis Presley, John Lennon and Princess Di in that sense.

And whatever one thinks of Jackson, the coverage is there because the media is viewer-driven. It's a business that can't survive in today's economy without giving the viewers what they want.

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