Michael Jackson dead at 50

[Sput]

Hrm, I'm no doctor, but getting a daily injection of potent painkillers doesn't quite square with him putting on 50 performances starting in a month or so.

[cwathen]

they really have reached new levels of shit over there

Anyone care to bet on how long it is before the Digital Spy rules of dictatorship are amended to forbid any negative comment on Jackson, with Beth Hart brought back to moderate it?

Admittedly, I may quite possibly be the only person alive who doesn't think Michael Jackson was any good. Regardless of his personal life, his music at best did little for me and at worst annoyed me. The breathy style of singing he eventually developed and the way he clipped notes to breath in like an untrained primary school choirboy would be lambasted as incompetent were anyone else to do it - he actually had much better vocal dexterity and demonstrated better training when he was black with an afro than when he became wacko jacko.

Nevertheless, whilst I was not surprised by the display of distraught crying Americans on Sky News I am somewhat amazed at how the general media seemed to have dropped everything to cover this as if the queen had died - even the Plymouth Evening Herald - the fricking local rag which is supposed to be about Plymouth - is today running with 'Michael Jackson Dead at 50' with no explanation as to why they have put a world news story on their front page.


I wish people would get a grip on this and not forget that there are far more important things going on in the world at the present time.

[Chie]

I saw this on BBC News earlier

"I warned everyone that I could, I said to family members that one day, that Michael Jackson was going to wake up dead,"

Link

I am somewhat amazed at how the general media seemed to have dropped everything to cover this as if the queen had died - even the Plymouth Evening Herald - the fricking local rag which is supposed to be about Plymouth - is today running with 'Michael Jackson Dead at 50' with no explanation as to why they have put a world news story on their front page.

That is a bit over the top. The same thing happened here after September the 11th and I thought that was a bid odd at the time as well, even though the event was so big.

[Nick Harvey]

Plymouth Evening Herald

First word of those three says it all!

[Sput]

I am somewhat amazed at how the general media seemed to have dropped everything to cover this as if the queen had died - even the Plymouth Evening Herald - the fricking local rag which is supposed to be about Plymouth - is today running with 'Michael Jackson Dead at 50' with no explanation as to why they have put a world news story on their front page.

That is a bit over the top. The same thing happened here after September the 11th and I thought that was a bid odd at the time as well, even though the event was so big.

So not for the first time, something called Plymouth has a overinflated sense of self importance?

[DVB Cornwall]

A theory.....

The BBC Expenses non-story broke yesterday, the MJ story enables the BBC to move the news agenda on and divert some of the politically motivated criticism of these expenses. Other news outlets can't be seen to be ignoring a populist story so continue with the BBC in covering the MJ story. Once one outlet drops I suspect the others will quickly after.

However we aren't 24 hours in yet so I can accept it being the lead in the news agenda until after the Post Mortem is made public.

[fusionlad]

Oi watch the Plymouth jibes. We're not all like The Herald and Stuart

The Herald had a really lousy link to the MJ story with over 100 intelligent <ahem> comments from Plymouth people. http://www.thisisplymouth.co.uk/news/Re ... ticle.html

[Gavin Scott]

Oi watch the Plymouth jibes. We're not all like The Herald and Stuart

You're the redeeming feature.

STV News lead story is MJ.

Eh?

[Alexia]

I am somewhat amazed at how the general media seemed to have dropped everything to cover this as if the queen had died - even the Plymouth Evening Herald - the fricking local rag which is supposed to be about Plymouth - is today running with 'Michael Jackson Dead at 50' with no explanation as to why they have put a world news story on their front page.

Also, places like Plymouth wouldn't have got a late edition of the national papers, so there would be little-to-no coverage in the nationals. Even in South Wales we only got the Sun, Mail and Times covering the story. So buying the Western Mail was a viable alternative.

[Ronnie Rowlands]

A "poor man" he wasn't.

Poor in the sense of disturbed and clearly unwell.

Just to be absolutely clear - being found "not guilty" is not the same as being found innocent.

No, but it does leave one unsure, and since people don't know for sure, they've no right to say "He did it. He wasn't found guilty but I know he did it."

But worse still is paying millions of dollars to make a court case just "go away".

I can see why that is suspicious, but perhaps the fact that the general opinion put forward by the media was that Jackson was a weirdo and that his odd behaviour correlated quite closely with the accusations put against him would prompt him to see that he could be fighting a losing battle. Maybe there was something that could have been misinterpreted.

Or maybe he was guilty. We just don't know.

That's why it upsets me to see people being so barbaric, in the same way I get upset when I see people joining Facebook groups calling for the return of hanging etc.

[Nick Harvey]

You're the redeeming feature.

Agreed.

Even Spotlight tonight ran a story about some guy from Devon who was a bodyguard for Jackson when he visited Exeter years ago.

However, the story was buried seventeen minutes in, so not as bad as some other outlets.