And another thing…

A GEM from this week’s Now Show on Radio 4:

A spokesman for the Prime Minister said: "The Prime Minister’s thoughts are with Michael Jackson’s family at this time."

They’d better bloody not be! He’s supposed to be busy!

PREDICTIONS of the death of the "dead tree press" are greatly exaggerated in my view. But last night’s big story certainly highlighted the weaknesses of daily newspapers compared with the immediacy of both the internet and 24-hour rolling news coverage.

Sky started off reporting news from the showbiz gossip site, TMZ, that Michael Jackson had suffered a cardiac arrest and had been taken to hospital in Los Angeles. Fifty minutes later, the same site announced the singer’s death, but it was only when the Los Angeles Times announced the same headline that the mainstream media felt confident enough to report it as fact.

And this morning, inevitably, most of the newspapers (their earlier editions at least) were exposed as having been left behind the curve, reporting the latest celebrity death as Farrah Fawcett’s. There was no avoiding this, given the time the news broke last night, but I guess it could serve as another small nail in the coffin of the print media, with the internet and broadcast media reasserting their immediacy which, when it comes to this type of news, is everything.

Personally, I felt sadder than I expected when I heard the news. I used to have a copy of Thriller in my younger days, but it was on tape and was lost long ago. So last night I downloaded the 25th anniversary edition of the alum from iTunes. It includes not only the original album but various remixes as well as the iconic videos for Billie Jean, Beat It and, of course, the 15-minutes Jon Landis-directed Thriller. 

Jackson will remain a controversial figure, even in death, but Thriller and a lot of his subsequent work confirmed him as a genius, albeit a very flawed and, ultimately, tragic one.