Look, I love a juicy tale as much as the next hack. Any reporter who turns his nose up at a story like this has no business in the news business. Ever since the silent-screen comedian Fatty Arbuckle was tried for raping and killing a young woman at a debauched San Francisco party in 1921, celebrity brushes with the law have been big stories. The New York Times covered the Arbuckle case aggressively before succumbing to a 75-year-long high-minded snooze when it came to salacious but newsworthy material that its readers might actually find interesting. Now the paper has come to its senses and is covering the Jackson story prominently.
But if the print press has some perspective, the TV networks think they’re back in O.J. land. Several commentators tried to compare a simple shot of Jackson’s arriving in Santa Barbara to Simpson’s Bronco ride, only this time the suspect wasn’t evading capture; in fact, he wasn’t even on the first plane the choppers so breathlessly followed. For more than five hours, cable news offered barely a peep on the huge terrorist explosion in Turkey or anything else happening in the world. TV news magazines are now on full Jacko footing. Having won monster ratings in February for documentaries on Jackson’s weirdness, the networks assume that a new media gravy train is pulling into the station.
But what if we’re experiencing a smut glut? With Michael and Kobe and Martha and Rush (so familiar that no last names are necessary) all looking at possible jail time, the celebrity-humiliation market is saturated. Of course the drip-drip of trial news is still central to television-revenue models. And cable networks have endless amounts of time to fill. But even there, the ratings for, say, Scott Peterson stories are nothing special. Aidan Quinn and Wynonna Judd were arrested in separate incidents for drunk driving last month and barely merited crawl lines.
Jackson is obviously in a different league, but the rules are changing. The audience is processing news more quickly now; its metabolism has speeded up. That means that masticating the same thin gruel won’t work without fresh reporting. The O.J. case actually preceded the birth of Fox News Channel and MSNBC, but that trial dominated everything because it split the country along racial lines; this one won’t, in part because of Jackson’s own skin-color manipulations. And the verdict won’t bring the country to a halt this time. The O.J. saga was riveting original programming; Jackson’s getting caught for something we assumed about him is a cringe worthy rerun–“deja eew.”
You know the story is already a cliche when the Santa Barbara D.A., Thomas Sneddon Jr., opens his remarks by talking about all the business and sales-tax receipts the reporters will bring in. Why didn’t he just go ahead and introduce his agent? Even before Jackson was booked, bail was set at $3 million. By whom? In cracking jokes and skipping the just-the-facts Joe Friday demeanor appropriate to a serious presentation of grave charges, even as he pledged to keep law-enforcement officials from trying the case on TV, Sneddon was auditioning for carnival barker: “Step right up, ladies and gentlemen! Check out the she-man who sings and dances and French-kisses 12-year-old boys!”
It will be hard for the media beast to avoid shifting its gaze from Baghdad to Santa Barbara. Fox isn’t so hot for politically inconvenient coverage of Iraq-war casualties anyway, while CNN and MSNBC are under relentless ratings pressure to gain ground on Fox. And there are logistical considerations. Deploying news troops to a California courthouse is easier and far less expensive than sending them into a battle zone. No one will have to worry about being shot outside the gates of Neverland. The change in emphasis will be rationalized as a welcome diversion for war-weary viewers eager for a little celebrity schadenfreude. The ever-ready justification: hey, that’s what they’re talking about around the water cooler.
But the water-cooler definition of news is looking increasingly lame in a post-September 11 world. Do journalists want to be remembered for pandering on racy stories or covering consequential ones? During the 1990s, we had the luxury to obsess over Monica Lewinsky’s dress or John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis. Sex scandals and celebrity comeuppance are the byproducts of peace. Today, they belong where they began, as entertaining sideshows, not the main event in our culture.
