Too much Michael Jackson?

Yet on cable TV and on newspaper websites, it was all Michael, all the time. So, how did a pop singer heavily in debt and desperately hoping for a comeback, one who hadn't really sold any music for years, one who was best known for his bizarre life, obsession with cosmetic surgery and for the allegations of pedophilia against him, become in death the most beloved media figure since JFK?

To understand, you need to go back to that all-conquering popular culture -- and its indispensable adjunct, the cult of celebrity -- and consider the de facto Faustian bargain into which the American news media is sliding.

America's serious news media -- whether print, broadcast or cable -- are in the grip of a collective nervous breakdown. Embracing popular culture and its icons seems somehow therapeutic on several levels: It appears to address charges that serious media are elitist, as well as the manifest indifference of younger readers and viewers to conventional news. Then there's the fact of simple, brute commerce; popular culture in the form of film, music and TV now provides an outsized share of the financially strapped media's advertising revenue. Finally, there's that source of the news media's anxiety and confusion -- and that great enabler of popular culture -- the Internet.

When Jackson's death was first reported, traffic across the Internet spiked to virtually unprecedented levels. Google's search engine slowed to a crawl; Yahoo reported "one of the biggest things" in its history; social networks Twitter and Facebook nearly collapsed under the weight of traffic. This newspaper experienced 12 million page views at its website, apparently because it was widely credited with confirming the death.

Whatever they say, many newspaper editors and TV news producers have begun to allow website hits and social media volume to function as a kind of sub rosa ratings system whose numbers dictate coverage and the play of news stories. What's wrong with that? For one thing, it leads to the sort of irrational excess we've all been through since Thursday. No reasonable editor or producer should ignore the kind of public interest we're seeing. But surrendering utterly to it ultimately undercuts what's genuinely valuable about serious news media.

A serious newspaper or broadcast news outlet must simultaneously be a mirror and a window to its audience -- a look at themselves and an opening to the wider world.

--

timothy.rutten@latimes.com