Riveting Coverage on MS-NBC Until

After hearing the news that Michael Jackson had, indeed, passed away, I was glued to the TV for several hours. Keith Olbermann was on earlier, instead of the usual Hardball replay and I watched most of Keith's coverage - up until the helicopter carried MJ's body to the 2nd hospital, the one with the coroner. MS-NBC's cameras were there to get the money shot, the corpse being carried from the chopper to the hospital door. As much as I like Keith and his news-commentary, there was something very unseemly about it, wasn't there? When they started showing that same shot over and over and over, well, I gave up. What had seemed like genuine sharing of a human interest story had become trash tv. It was the 90's all over again. It didn't help that Keith had Diane Dimond there to fake some kind of empathic humanity when she, perhaps more than any other psuedo-journalist, had doggedly pursued the Jackson story for so long. Even before trials which found MJ to be not guilty, and in fact exonerated him as a victim of extortion plots, she had pronounced him guilty. For you younger people who missed the Diane Dimond stuff from the 90's, think of Nancy Grace with a darker hairdo. And, somehow, less charm. Keith, I still like ya, but there's a reason Rachel Maddow is seen as a more serious journalist.