MJ Coverage: How Much Is Too Much?

And how much is just enough?

I'll be honest, that was the conversation we had among ourselves yesterday in planning today's program. If you tune in, you will see that we decided to go with a focus on the Michael Jackson memorial service and more about Michael's legacy.

The question was asked, are we over it yet?

We are not.

There are numbers that suggest there's a racial cast to this.

The Pew Research Center on People and the Press has been doing some surveying on this question. Last week and again new numbers will be released today. But last week's opinion poll suggested that while the public closely tracked the Michael Jackson story, nearly two out of three said news organizations gave the story too much coverage.

But when you look more closely, there's a split. More than half of African-Americans say the amount of coverage has been about right, compared with 25 percent of whites. Seven in ten whites says there's been too much coverage, compared with 36 percent of blacks.

There was this interesting exchange on Howie Kurtz's CNN Sunday program on the media, as reported by Richard Prince. On CNN's "Reliable Sources" on Sunday, host Howard Kurtz said this to CNN anchor Don Lemon, a black journalist:

KURTZ: You've also been doing endless live shots and devoted most of your Saturday and Sunday evening program to this. Don't you feel deep down that this is overdoing it?

LEMON: No, I don't feel it's overdoing it. And I don't — and when I hear people say that, I have to be very honest with you, Howie, I think it's elitist.

I don't remember — I'm sure there was some criticism when there was the coverage of Princess Diana's death, but I don't think that there was this sort of criticism that we're having with Michael Jackson.

Michael Jackson is an accidental civil rights leader, an accidental pioneer. He broke ground and barriers in so many different realms in artistry, in pictures, in movies, in music, you name it. So, no, I don't think it's overkill.

In our office it didn't track that neatly. Two of the segment producers who spoke up about being very much over the whole MJ thing were men of color. I wondered if gender played some role in that they didn't grow up thinking they were going to marry one of the Jackson 5 like we girls did (sorry, it's true).

 

But I think it speaks more to questions of what matters and why and who gets to determine that. One of the segment producers said he felt we'd covered all necessary ground already and anything more would be speculation or overkill. Another said he thought there were just more important things happening in the world.

At the end of the day Marie Nelson, our executive producer, and I decided that this was the focus of the day.

Why?

Jackson — love him, hate him, over him — was a huge star for reasons that are now easily forgotten: he was the first African-American to receive airplay on MTV. And it took a major intervention by Sony to achieve that. He produced the biggest selling album of all time and it isn't clear who is going to top that — not Utada in Japan, not Sinatra.

His life represented so many of the personal racial and social dilemmas of our time. His seeming desire for an ambiguous racial identity and his increasingly ambiguous gender identity, along with his obvious burning desire to be a parent, and to achieve that through unconventional means all represent struggles that many have had.

And I have to say, his brushes with the law, represent one of the ongoing threads in American life — but to what end? Celebrity entitlement? The desire to bring the famous low? Who knows?

All I know is that I (we) decided this was worth an hour of your time today.

We know some will agree and some will not.

To those who don't, there's always tomorrow ...