Say, did Michael Jackson die by any chance? This was essentially yesterday on televised 24 hour news networks: "Farrah Fawcett passed awa...OMFG MICHAEL JACKSON. While I understand the impact that the man made, perhaps it's necessary to look at BOTH major stars that died yesterday, and not just the one who is going to bring you the best ratings. Farrah Fawcett suffered a horrific last few months, and almost no mention of it came once the word of Jackson's demise came across.
I'm much too young to have been given a raging hard-on by Farrah, and her work in "Man of the House" was the closest I came to being exposed to her acting skills. Nonetheless, I would much prefer to have heard only a mention of both, and here's why: because it is not news. All I want to know from news networks, no matter how biased they may be, is the news. People are dying in Iran and Iraq; North Korea is threatening to nuke us...and I only heard about Michael Jackson yesterday.
Well American news media, you have the pleasure of being the Piece of Shit of the Day.
*Thanks to yesterday's developments, I had to push awarding Ann Coulter with this illustrious distinction back to next week, when the series continues. The comments she made on the O'Reilly Factor on the 22nd will be discussed in that post.
While I'm not offended by it, your implications of what the news is and is not are pretty unfair. If the news was simply a tool to discuss national and world events only having to do with political struggle, war, disaster, etc it would be missing out on a key component of the global conciousness- matters of the heart. To imply that the global impact of music is not news is to imply that the smuggling of Jackon's own cassettes into 1980s Iran was not a sign of domestic struggle.
ReplyDeleteTo imply that the Summer of Love was something not to be read about in a paper because of its lack of DIRECT results regarding the Vietnam war is a similar subject; because everyone in the other stories you've mentioned are also living, breathing creatures with aesthetics and minds we find that stories alternate to those based on cold facts are also touching and inspiring.
Unfortunately, Farrah was legitamately not as engaged with the world and the culture of now as Michael Jackson was. But to an extent I blame sexism on this more than Michael Jackson. A beauty died, not beautiful. The story in that is killed--how can the press show pictures of an ugly, decayed woman? This is a major flaw in our society. Michael Jackson just up and died, rather than fading (admittedly painfully) out.