The instantaneous media has big problems with stories which contain ambiguity. For instance, they know how to report the death of someone "good", or someone "bad". But the sudden departure of the most talented entertainer in a century, tortured as he was by his own childhood and by the media, is presenting the hacks with a considerable challenge.
None more so than Martin Bashir, the inscrutable ABC Nightline Host, who was tasked tonight with delivering the network "tribute" to a 50-year-old man whose death left many friends in tears in my local bar.
A few years ago, a British commercial TV investigator out for a sensational headline, Bashir bluffed his way into the Jackson compound to make a documentary with a bad taste approach and style matched only by the horrid nature of the allegations themselves. His strategy was to lure the performer into a compliant on-camera friendship over a period of several days hospitality at the ranch, in the hope that Jackson would incriminate himself in his alleged abuses of children.
You might be concerned that Bashir hadn't demonstrated the right sort of balanced view of Jackson necessary to present tonight's ABC Show, but think again.
Although the allegations in his "documentary" were never proven, Bashir was there tonight in a new mask, talking about the Jackson family press conference on ABC News as "understandably emotional." And tonight's show was as inconclusive as only "The Mouse" versus Disney News can muster. Reinforcing, perhaps deliberately, a British (false, by the way) stereotype for insistence on decorum, Bashir drew particular attention to the fact that Jackson wore pajamas to one of his court hearings. As any mediocre lawyer might know, eccentricity might be an indicator of a problem, but isn't proof of criminal behavior.
At the end of the ABC show, in what Bashir himself might have described in UK tabloid language as a "bizarre twist" Barbara Walters, who DOES understand shades of gray, asked him what Jackson would be best remembered for. His list highlighted a singer who could "reach three octaves". Clearly, one octave is all you need for American network news.
My own recollection of Jackson, which just proves how old I am, way precedes "Thriller". Its a song called "One Day in Your Life", Number One in the UK singles charts in June, 1981, which captures the age of his innocence; an "in-the-moment" joy which, whatever the truth of his subsequent illnesses, Jackson wished for all young people all his life. After all, he was deprived of his own childhood, which might explain everything in time.
ABC News, and the others, for that matter, would better serve and interest the public by looking at the wider picture this tragic story might reveal. About childhood, poverty, greed, loneliness, fame, flunkies, tabloids, prescription drugs, and the entertainment business's self-destructive nature. But then, its cheaper to run old B-Roll of alleged confessions and dance routines.
