It is by now a well-worn truism in news circles that George W. Bush’s Christmas present came complete with scraggly beard and tongue depressor.
The images that streamed into the nation’s living-rooms on that Sunday morning in December – of an evil tyrant reduced by American might to a submissive freak-show curiosity – represented a tremendous boost to the president’s re-election prospects.
And not a moment too soon. The national debt was at an all-time high, the currency was in dire straits, international relations were at an all-time low, and Osama bin Laden was still at large. Added to that, in the glaring absence of weapons of mass destruction, the administration was under intense pressure to produce some concrete justification for mounting US casualties in the Persian Gulf. And then— whew, we got Saddam. What a relief.
But it could be argued that Saddam’s capture was actually the president’s second Christmas gift – that the first had arrived some weeks earlier, when the media learned that Michael Jackson was to be brought up on charges of child abuse.
What possible impact, you may ask, could the alleged shenanigans of a has-been moonwalker have on the popularity of the world’s most powerful head of state? The answer, as is so often the case in the puzzling world of American media, stems from a single word: ratings.
During the month of December, one of the bloodiest in Iraq since the war began, another battle was underway at America’s news networks, waged between news reporters and their counterparts at the entertainment desk: the battle for audience, and its inextricable corollary, screen time. If the numbers are anything to go by, the war reporters came off second best.
On December 28, a day after four coordinated suicide blasts killed 13 and wounded more than 100 in the Iraqi Shiite city of Karbala, CBS’s 60 Minutes – arguably one of the country’s most venerable broadcast news programmes – drew an impressive 19 million viewers, making it the week’s most watched TV show.
The subject matter? An exclusive interview with Michael Jackson; the first since his arrest and subsequent release on bail ten days earlier.
Antiquated notions of newsworthiness be damned! With ratings like that – 12% higher than the show’s weekly average – the CBS brass had every reason to be proud of themselves. After all, when it comes to spurning the news media, the surgically altered pop star reputedly runs a close second to J.M. Coetzee. So how on earth did they pull it off?
According to a New York Times report published two days after the interview, the answer is dazzlingly simple: they paid him a million bucks.
“I will tell you categorically that we at 60 Minutes did not pay Michael Jackson one cent,” came the emphatic response from the show’s chief, Don Hewitt, in a virulent letter to the Times editor, in which he accused the paper of perpetrating a “colossal lie”. (Hewitt will be familiar to those who saw the film, The Insider, a docu-drama in which his character, played by Philip Baker Hall, under pressure from corporate higher-ups at CBS, tries to kill a story on the mendacity of the tobacco industry).
But the source for the Times exposé, an unnamed business associate of Jackson’s, explained at length how the interview had been bundled into a broader US$5 million deal for a prime time Jackson entertainment special: “they paid him from the entertainment budget, and CBS just shifts the money around internally. That way 60 Minutes can say 60 Minutes didn’t pay for the interview.”
This is not the first time allegations of this sort have been levelled at CBS. In June, attempting to nail down an interview with Pfc. Jessica Lynch – the American soldier who was rescued in Iraq under disputed circumstances – CBS reportedly threw in offers of a book deal with Simon & Schuster and a special on MTV, both divisions of Viacom, CBS’s parent company.
That bid ultimately failed, and ABC won the interview. But it’s safe to say that this problematic brand of synergy between divisions is not limited to CBS. Indeed, in an age in which conglomerates’ activities span the gamut of media platforms and genres, such “bundled” deals are in danger of becoming accepted journalistic practice.
It is not my intention to remonstrate here on the perils of chequebook journalism. Readers interested in that subject would do better to visit the vast literature surrounding the unfortunate tale of Vusi Mona and the Mpumalanga government. Besides, as one of the few people over twenty-five who never purchased a copy of Thriller and never managed to master the art of moonwalking, I have not followed the Jackson story all that closely. I am thus ill-qualified to pass judgement on the balance and accuracy of the interview.
Equally interesting from a media perspective, however, is the suggestion that an esteemed news outfit like 60 Minutes should go to such great lengths to secure an interview with a beleaguered pop star during what is perhaps one of the most weighty moments in US history since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Interesting, but not surprising. News, after all, is a business; and success in any business is a function of giving customers what they want. In fact, the news business is perhaps more vulnerable to market pressures than most, since it has not one, but two sets of customers: consumers and advertisers. Advertisers want consumers, and consumers, it would appear, want Michael Jackson.
For this state of affairs one cannot blame Don Hewitt or CBS, nor, for that matter, any single player in the complex fabric of today’s media industry.
The overwhelming evidence suggests that, all things being equal, the Jackson trial – or something of its ilk – is likely to be the biggest television news story in America over the coming weeks, at least until it is usurped by the Saddam Hussein trial, which, in turn, will probably be usurped by Bush’s victory in the November elections.
What’s that? What does all this have to do with the national debt, Osama bin Laden and the quagmire in Iraq? Actually, come to think of it, with all this talk of Michael Jackson, I’d completely forgotten about that stuff.
Tim Spira is The Media’s correspondent in New York.