The View From Here . . .

By Bob Morgan, Jr.

It is not like this is a slow period for important news. Major unrest has occurred in Iran following a disputed election, although the government now appears to be gaining the upper hand. The president of Honduras was removed and deported by the military following the president's seemingly extraconstitutional attempt to extend his tenure. The highly controversial cap and trade bill, heavily attacked by Republicans as a perverse tax increase in a bad recession, cleared the House in a narrow vote. In New York, the Albany stalemate continues into its fourth week, with a number of major bills in political limbo. And there are other key stories (the US military pullout from Iraq cities, for example).

But for much of the media, little of this is very important. The focus has been on such matters as the sentencing of Bernie Madoff (since he is now 71 years old, how important was it that he received 150 years rather than 25?), the extramarital saga of South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, and by far most important, the death of Michael Jackson last Thursday.

The Jackson death received intense coverage. All of the broadcast networks put on primetime specials on the singer's life and there are plans for additional Jackson programming this week. As late as Tuesday, the Jackson death led the news coverage on both the "Today show" on NBC and "Good Morning America" on ABC. Cable news went into its saturation mode with round the clock coverage of every aspect of the story, however minute. Even Fox News, generally regarded as the leading conservative voice in the media, played Michael Jackson video excerpts without any reportage, followed by pan shots of mourning crowds in California. Locally, the New York Post , which had not been shy about stories labeling Mr. Jackson as "Wacko Jacko," moved to a much different spin, publishing an insert with pictures of the singer's life plus a full length tribute photograph.

In some measure, of course, the media hype was just giving the public what it wanted. Ratings for the cable news networks were far higher than usual for the Jackson coverage. Indeed, the broad level of interest in the singer's death is reflected by the huge amount of internet traffic, which led Google to fear that it was under attack and Twitter to shut down a number of functions.

Obviously, news providers are in business to make money, and ignoring or downplaying excessively the death of a pop icon is no way to generate revenue. And Michael Jackson's early successes (the Thriller album, for example) coupled with the sheer weirdness of his later life (from the establishment of Neverland to the skin treatments to the child molestation acquittal to the financial difficulties) made his life and death story a strangely compelling one. And he had millions of fans around the world.

But in the final analysis, the Jackson coverage was over the top. One of the advantage of traditional journalism, whether print or electronic, over the "new media" of internet forums and blogs is the existence of editors whose job is to make sense of the stories and to try to put things into some perspective. When they stop doing their job to cover what is essentially an ephemeral story at the expense of more significant topics, news consumers can be forgiven if they wonder exactly what these journalistic stalwarts are bringing to the party.