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Poll: Media OD'd
on Jackson death

Two-thirds say there's been too much coverage of his death


By Toni Fitzgerald
Jul 2, 2009

Michael Jackson’s funeral plans still haven’t been finalized, but the broadcast and cable networks seem likely to offer the same wall-to-wall coverage they’ve been giving the pop star’s death for the past week.

They may want to rethink the media blitz. A new poll from the Pew Research Center for People and the Press finds that 64 percent think news organizations gave too much coverage to Jackson’s death, with only 3 percent saying they gave it too little.

Twenty-nine percent say the star’s death, which received 93 percent of the cable news networks’ attention on Thursday and Friday, got just the right amount of attention.

That may be because some are unhappy with the tenor of the coverage. While half said the media balanced its attention just right between the singer’s career and his scandals, 26 percent thought the scandals received too much attention. Just 11 percent said his career got too much play.

Overall, 30 percent of respondents said they have been following the story very closely and 28 percent say they’ve followed it fairly closely.

There’s a striking racial divide in who’s consuming all that coverage, however. Eighty percent of African Americans say they have followed the story closely, compared to 22 percent of whites.

And 35 percent of women, compared to 26 percent of men, say they have followed the story closely.

Still, despite what the depth of coverage might lead you to believe, public interest in Jackson’s death isn’t as high as for a few other recent high-profile celebrity deaths.

Fifty-four percent of respondents said they followed the deaths of Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy Jr. very closely, 24 percentage points higher than Jackson. And while 30 percent said they followed the death of “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin very closely, 36 percent said they followed it fairly closely, 8 percentage points more than Jackson.

Toni Fitzgerald is a staff writer for Media Life.	© 2009 Media Life Magazine

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