Michael Jackson's death causes media scramble

Michael Jackson's death causes media scramble

Michael Jackson's death forced an extraordinary scramble for news organizations from covering it in a large scale.

"What a sad, incredible ... you couldn't write this," added a nonplussed Larry King on CNN by describing how his planned show on Fawcett was "blown out of the well" along with the death of Michael Jackson. He sensed immediately what most news organizations did, that the Jackson story was bigger, because of both the surprise factor and the magnitude of his stardom.

ABC planned one hour on Fawcett's death, a Barbara Walters special that had initially been scheduled for Friday . However it was scheduled to be aired earlier this week when word came that her condition was grave. NBC News, which last month had presented a show on Fawcett's fight against anal cancer, declared shortly after her death that it would do its own Fawcett special.

After Jackson's death, they became two-hour specials with one hour on each star. CBS also put together a quick hour mixing the stories.

Walters said, "I think we should remember Michael Jackson as the great performer he was”.

Earlier, she had asked co-anchor Martin Bashir whether Jackson would be remembered more for his talent or his scandals. Bashir answered that it would be his music.However the special, perhaps because there was so little time to put it together, leaned heavily on tapes of old interviews with Bashir, Walters and Diane Sawyer that focused more on his oddities than what had brought him to prominence in the first place.

The cable news networks almost immediately began covering the story.

Another famous channel Fox News had twin crawls in urgent yellow at the bottom of its screen, one repeating "breaking news" and the other nuggets like: "MC Hammer tweets on Jackson death: 'I have no words.'"

The clips of Jackson performances and videos ran continuously as wallpaper, their quick camera cuts reminiscent of MTV during 1980s, which lived off Jackson's hits.

BET, meanwhile, set aside programming for Jackson tributes and airing of Jackson videos.