MSNBC waking up everybody now

They interviewed Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw already, now they have Olberman on by phone. It is 2:30 on the east coast.

To a point they are doing this for ratings... I'd hate to be in the rolodex about now

but it's also a huge news story. I mean, it's very very late on the east coast, so I can't imagine the potential audience is that big right now (it's nearly midnight here on the west coast). Personally, I think it helps -- for those of us who are feeling sad -- to hear the reminiscences of those who knew him.

with the material as well.

Some inside knowledge a news director once shared with me.

All stations have canned material for when a major figure is expected to die. They revise them every so often, as in update them. Why Jackson caught them by surprise... this one, they have material ready and they are doing a good job.

Some of it, he was the ultimate cynic, was for ratings, some of it was genuine. As he put it, your job as a viewer is telling which is which. This one, I think is mostly genuine.

Papers also have the In-Memoriams ready to go... and the stop the presses you can bet your sweet you know what that happened on the East Coast.

The footage, is the canned material they had... and it is good see it, god he was a good looking young man.

From of all places the Mary Tyler Moore show. But I agree, it is pretty much genuine on MSNBC. Haven't checked to see if any of the other networks have woken anybody up, heard that Faux went back to their pretaped shows.

When Tweety announced that he would have his special on the Kennedy brothers on this week (Wednesday, I think?) I thought it sounded a lot like that Farrah Fawcett special that NBC was pushing the week before she died.

I figured they wouldn't be doing this unless they had reason to believe the end was very near. But I hoped I was wrong.

Sadly I wasn't :evilfrown:

It's not as if Jackson wasn't a big enough celebrity for them to have a prepared obit for him too. That's when those obits get started...has nothing to do with age or when you're expected to die in terms of how quickly you get one (because, after all, people do die suddenly). I'm sure NBC News has had a statement ready to go on Jackson for a long, long time. What they had to scramble and add at the moment was the circumstances and the details and so on, because those could not have been anticipated.

The "good" thing for them about Ted (not that it's good in any other way) is that in a situation like his, they can anticipate to a certain extent, they usually have more time to work on a deeply structured tribute piece, and they're not normally scrambling around for a lot of detail at the last second because the time and circumstances of the death are not a complete surprise.

after that, yep... it went to that. And they didn't care either. It was ratings, pure and simple.

And I tuned out.

Today it is not. At least MSNBC they care.