News Must Be New

Oh my God. Michael Jackson died. A month ago.

I realize he was a megastar. I realize it was a shock for most people. (Sidenote: if I told you that Mickey Rourke or Eddie Murphy suddenly died, would you be surprised? Right. That's why I wasn't too shocked about MJ.)

But I realize that, particularly that day, it was a huge news story. But now it's not. The inability for the major news companies to let his memory and body rest in peace represents a full-time investment in tabloid journalism. A co-worker smartly said, right when it was confirmed, that this would be "Elvis all over again." And it was. I mean, it still is.

But that's all we care about. It's not the story. It's the story about the story. Any job posting for an online writer right now is really asking for a gossip columnist. Every morning show salivates to lead with a Jon & Kate or Michael Jackson's kids story.

I'm not sure when the turning point was, or perhaps it's always been this way, but there's something strange about this so-called "24-hour news cycle." For all the talk about how newspapers are dead, someone's going to have to tell me how the internet or television news cycle is any different than it used to be.

Newspapers would have one crack at their story, and it would have to be right. You'd get the paper on your doorstep, you carried the paper around with you all day, presuming that the investigative reporting in the stories was thorough and you'd believe what you read.

How is it different for online and TV? We're saturated with it for 24 hours, presumably because that's just what we were used to with the newspaper, even if there isn't anything new to report. Same story, over and over. The only difference is that the race to be first trumps the need to be right, every time.

Now it extends past the 24 hour mark, bleeding over to the next day, and the next. Just with shoddier reporting.

When Michael Jackson died, CNN covered a feed from the LA Times, which covered an unsubstantiated report from TMZ – of all places – that Michael Jackson had died. Can you blame me for not believing the story right away? TMZ would sell their own mother to the prostitution ring in Taken for twelve more hits on their homepage. They are gossip columnists, what do they care about getting a story correct?

But after the report was (miraculously) confirmed, now it's the networks' job to re-run the same story over and over. A story that might have had twists and turns in a newspaper (Watergate) was once said to "have legs." But we never knew any more about Michael Jackson's death than that he died. It went on like that for weeks.

You can't just go back on TV every day and tell me he's still dead. By definition, news must be new. But it's not. Maybe that's why we think we keep seeing shapes of Elvis in our soiled toilet paper. Or maybe that's just me.