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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Can We Go Any Lower?

I just became aware that Entertainment Tonight Online… a Paramount-owned business… is running an EXCLUSIVE “last photo of Michael Jackson.” He is on a stretcher with a breathing bag taped to his face.
In their haste to publish this EXCLUSIVE, did it occur to him that the man was most likely as dead at that moment as he was when he was finally pronounced an hour or two later?
We know, last I checked, that he was in cardiac arrest and not breathing when the paramedics got to his rented house. We can tap dance around the pronounced time all we want, but I have seen zero indication that he was ever alive in any way other than semantic at that time.
Shall we look forward to more EXCLUSIVE photos of the corpse?
And by the way… all the media drooling over TMZ calling him dead first… is anyone actually thinking about this? The guy was dead before he arrived at the hospital. All TMZ did was to announce without the kind of confirmation that journalists consider legitimate. And had he miraculously been revived, all the gossip rag would have been accused of was jumping the gun… they have no journalistic credibility at stake. And yet, the media marvels are whoever said it FIRST!
Who is responsible for the degradation of the news? We are ALL responsible…. but especially Old Media outlets where the highest standards are supposed to be held and are often forgotten when dazzled by the speed of new media… until the porous standards of much of new media fail journalism and old media starts kicking the entire medium for the crime.

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24 Responses to “Can We Go Any Lower?”

  1. christian says:

    If you work for TMZ, you have no soul.

  2. Jeffrey Boam's Doctor says:

    FIRST!
    damn you christian.
    Dave. The whole world is now one giant comments page. Look at how many zillions tried to be the first MJ tweet or the first to update their FB status. Why knock TMZ for simply doing what the ‘status’ quo is.
    FIRST!

  3. Chucky in Jersey says:

    TMZ is owned by Time Warner. “Entertainment Tonight” is syndicated by a division of CBS.
    It’s no different from the Liberal Media drooling over Drudge Report.

  4. matro says:

    Note that Perez is still as popular as ever despite the “OMG FIDEL IS DEAD – THEY’RE GOING TO BE PARTYING IN THE STREETS OF MIAMI” masturbation fest a year or two ago.

  5. sloanish says:

    Out of all celeb deaths in the last couple weeks, the Billy Mays one is the only one I feel a twinge of anything about. Not sure if that paints me in a good light or a bad one.

  6. AH says:

    Well said David. You are totally correct.

  7. I remember seeing a similar shot, day of death, with The Insider listing it as an exclusive.
    But yeah, sickening. And 100% expected.

  8. Also, I have to ask: do you even know what TMZ’s source was. Fact is, they got it right and from a source that proved legitimate, so…

  9. IOIOIOI says:

    Yeah, Heat Rash, we need to focus more on how one mega-celebrities death almost crashed the internet. Seriously, MJ almost killed the fucking internet.
    If the net is now a freakin comments page. We’ve got some serious fucking problems.

  10. Lynch Van Sant says:

    Also pathetic was the Transformers ROTF premiere on E.T. where they had girls screaming on an audio loop throughout all the footage when there were shots of the crowd only standing there.

  11. David Poland says:

    Kris – The “news” was the same news that everyone had. He was not more or less dead when AP called it than when TMZ called it. It was how the decision to call it was made.
    This whole mindset of “well, it turned out to be right, therefore it was legitimate” is really bad for journalism… because it is closing a story before it is news.
    A case like this plays out as inconsequential because he was, in fact, dead. I knew he was dead the minute I heard the first description of how he was found. Unless that info was bad, he had to be dead. And any doctor would tell you that given those pieces of the puzzle, he was 99.99% likely to be dead before he arrived at the hospital. And I am 99.99% sure that this was the “source” of TMZ’s call. They got ahead of the story by making the call without actually being told much more than anyone else.
    Now, don’t get me wrong… as scummy as TMZ is, and I consider them the scum of the media earth, they do a lot of very strong, well crafted reporting. I’m not saying they don’t have sources or skills. But the line they set for fact is not what Old Media finds acceptable. Nor should they. There is no legitimate news reason to rush to be the first outlet to announce a death before it has been called by the coroner. There is plenty of self-promotional reason.
    But let’s get over this particular story. The trend of rushing to take credit for breaking a story is now creating a more concerted effort of companies and people to leak news as a way of paying off media cronies for positive coverage. Is this good for news? Is it good for the companies that are caught unaware by a gossip leak, which they know to be true because they know their boss(es) handle media this way? Does it serve the public good in any way?
    Seriously.
    If you see ANY benefit, please tell me what you, as a guy with a graduate degree in journalism and as a working writer, see as the good part of this.
    What I see is not only that news has become a grotesque game, but that more and more patently false information is being leaked into the conversation that is never challenged, never connected directly to the lying exec, and assumed to be true because it fits the overall tale, which has been designed for maximum benefit to its teller, who remains even more anonymous than most commenters on this blog.

  12. Nick Rogers says:

    I actually saw this Thursday night on “Larry King Live.” King called the photo “an amazing piece of reporting.” He then asked the “Entertainment Tonight” reporter how it was obtained. She said, “You’ll have to ask my producer.” The whole thing made me want to launch my remote through the fucking TV.

  13. martin says:

    It’s sad that “good reporting” these days amounts to a shot of Michael Jackson’s corpse.

  14. Joe Leydon says:

    David: Hate to say it, but even during the days of Old Media, the pressure to be “first” with a story resulted in… Well, go back and see how the wire services spread the myth that Hinckley did what he did because, in Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle supposed told the child hooker, “If you don’t love me, I’m going to kill the president.” Seriously.

  15. David Poland says:

    Fucking up is not new. And it won’t ever go away from journalism. Competition has benefits and downsides.
    My concern is not so much when the borderline players stunt, but when the bigger, more earned-prestige, serious outlets follow. Life goes on when the occasional “major” outlet misses the mark too. But when it becomes systematic and systemic, there is trouble.
    I admit, if the big outlets avoided acknowledging TMZ “breaking” this, they would have seemed like sour grapes (even if TMZ is a highly funded Time-Warner product). But we are traveling a slippery slope, as guessing is given credit as leading news gathering and news organizations of every size find themselves lowering standards to match the public’s lowered standards, short memories, and general apathy about the pursuit of the truth.

  16. I had the same reaction to the photo, Dave. There’s video footage of cameraman blocking the ambulance’s exit too.

  17. anghus says:

    Q: Can we go any lower?
    A: Yes.
    That was easy.

  18. slavun says:

    Everything is for the money. But all tv’s do what people wants-sensations.
    Hoodia Gordonii

  19. I hear ya, David. On all of it.
    Conversely, I wonder who was left working in the LA bureau for CNN the next day. They seemed to drag their feet for an hour after LAT, NYT, AP, NBC and CBS had already called it before they were willing to confirm. Shades of the election.

  20. sharonfranz says:

    I don’t consider TMZ a legitimate news source, so I consider it a rumor until CNN, NYT, LAT, or any of the other old media outlets confirms it.
    Yup, it’s hard line to cross. You know new media (the internet) will always be the first to say me first without confirmation.

  21. Chucky in Jersey says:

    CNN — slow to report the uprisings in Iran. NY Times — home for fabrications, plagiarism and propaganda.
    Why would anyone believe CNN is credible? I have one word for you: PsyOps.

  22. jeffmcm says:

    HHAHAAAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHA

  23. christian says:

    Actually, there’s no doubt that the military influences the national media. To the extent they could “mole” their way into CNN might be debatable, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t be the exact sort of thing our military-industrial complex is capable of. CNN did in fact sell us a war about WMD’s not too long ago…

  24. Triple Option says:

    So do we know for sure TMZ just made a blind call or did they actually have a source on the inside? If someone suffers cardiac arrest, why not announce that the person is dead? From TMZ’s position, if MJ was later recovered, they wouldn’t say it was faulty coverage on their part but announce an hour or so later that MJ was “miraculously revived!” Who’s jumping off that story? The doctors and paramedics all become instant heroes, and man, talk about career revival, “come see MJ now, he’s already died once. This really could be his farewell tour!” Suddenly, the 50 date tour turns into 200, ppv concert on new year

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

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