Et Tu, “Nightline”?   

The Kobe Bryant and Michael Jackson sagas are the latest manifestations of the media’s infatuation with celebrity--even Ted Koppel ditched President Bush for the erstwhile King of Pop. But is that so wrong? In an era with so many sources of news, is celebrity overkill a major threat to the republic?

"If you don't want it printed, don't let it happen."

That's the blunt, somewhat plucky motto of the Aspen Daily News, a small Colorado newspaper that in October made a blunt and somewhat plucky move. The paper, its editors decided, would no longer print news of arguably the area's biggest happening in ages: the rape trial of basketball superstar Kobe Bryant. It happened and, news judgment of the rest of the world be damned, they weren't printing it.

The ski mecca of Aspen is about a 70-mile snowy drive from the county seat of Eagle, a serene mountain town until this summer, when a resort worker from there accused Bryant of raping her. For months the Daily News had willingly fed its 12,000 or so readers steady offerings about the essentially local case, wire stuff usually but occasionally one of the paper's two staff reporters would wander up the road to send back a dispatch from the fray. But on October 9, as most media outlets from the area and the nation were revving their engines for the opening of the preliminary hearing and the release of what could be the first solid details of what happened between Bryant and the woman in the hotel room halfway between Eagle and Vail, the Daily News called it quits. In an editorial that day headlined "Kobe Who?" the paper promised readers that it was done covering the case until the verdict, done publishing minute and irrelevant tidbits surrounding it and, above all else, done running with the media pack.

"We just felt like enough is enough," Editor Rick Carroll said in December, a couple months into the no-Kobe diet and not feeling particularly deprived. Carroll, a thoughtful sounding guy, comes off equal parts proud of his decision and flustered by the attention it has brought. The media, naturally, with their insatiable need to devour all things Kobe, couldn't miss covering the paper that decided not to cover Kobe. So Carroll ended up hearing from hundreds of people, many of whom jadedly accused him of trying to make a statement, which, of course, he most certainly was.

And the statement was the Aspen Daily News' version of the evergreen parental refrain: If all the kids were jumping off a bridge.... Or, just because every Tom, Dan and Peter was covering this or any story doesn't mean everyone has to. "We wanted to make a statement to show we don't have to do that dance of the mainstream media," Carroll explains. "We felt like the coverage was just going way beyond what it was worth."

Anymore, too much is just the way things feel. Overblown is par for the course and eye-rollingly expected when it comes to stories of a certain ilk. With Kobe, with Laci and Scott, with Michael. With Paris and O.J. and Chandra. With sharks and the flu and Britney's kiss. Whether it needs it or not, America gets this stuff like its fries: supersized.

And is that bad? Is there such a thing as too much? Depends whom you ask.

Stephen Bell logged 20 high-profile years as a correspondent for ABC News beginning in the late 1960s. It was a time, he says, when overkill was all but nonexistent.

Back then only a handful of news organizations anointed the stories of the day. These alpha dogs, which Bell calls "gatekeepers," all sung more or less the same tune, serious and sedate. The news people were seeing on ABC or NBC or CBS was what they were reading in the three newsweeklies or in the major newspapers.

Moreover, on TV, there was only 15 minutes to tell it all, then eventually 30. Even if a network did want to include a piece on, say, a famous basketball player's alleged sexual transgressions, it would all be said in about 30 seconds, hardly enough room to even begin anything resembling overkill.

Bell still remembers the day in 1977 when Elvis died and one of the big three networks led with it. "The other networks were aghast," recalls Bell, who now teaches broadcast journalism at Ball State University in Indiana.

Walter Podrazik, a media contributor for Chicago Public Radio who has just coauthored a book called "Watching TV: Six Decades of American Television," says the contrast between the way so-called big news is treated today and the way it was historically is best evidenced by looking at the coverage following the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

The president had just been killed yet, at the end of the day, each of the three major networks signed off. Yes, they preempted scheduled entertainment shows to broadcast live aspects of the tragedy--and that at the time was rather revolutionary. But when they ran out of new things to say, they said goodnight. They said, " 'Nothing is happening now so we're not going to be on the air,' " Podrazik says. " 'We'll come back tomorrow morning.' "

Ironically, Podrazik says it was the tasteful and appropriate coverage of the assassination that opened the door to the wall-to-wall excesses that define modern news. For one thing, it showed that sometimes the public appreciates seeing everything--the world fixated on each plodding step in the funeral procession, breathed in every tearful detail at the burial. And it all demonstrated the power and the drama of going live. Until then, "live" was a rare treat for viewers, extended only to the occasional presidential address or other scheduled events of state. But cameras--rolling live as the arrested shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, was led out of a Texas jail en route to another--captured his death as Jack Ruby fired on him from the watching crowd.

Now viewers expect no less for much less. These days it hardly takes an assassination. And if Elvis died in 2004 it would lead every newscast and make every front page in a heartbeat, the proverbial news meeting no-brainer.

What's changed? Everything really. First off, there's no such thing as a gatekeeper. There are bazillions of media outlets, and any one of them at any time can catapult a story into national play. A then-unheard-of guy with a Web site named Drudge broke the story about Bill and Monica--when the traditional "gatekeeper" Newsweek wasn't ready to go with it. And during the trial of O.J. Simpson, the established and respected journalists chased stories published by the not-exactly-lofty National Enquirer. "Now you have even chat rooms putting stories into play," Bell says, adding that anyone will chase the slightest whiff of news reported by anyone else, for fear of being the only one without it. "For competitive reasons alone you can't afford to be left out."

And add to the ever-increasing list of places to get news a seemingly ever-intensifying celebrity-centric culture. A Newsweek with Tom Cruise on the cover is as likely as one featuring Saddam. Entire cable networks are seemingly devoted to finding out the brand of Jennifer Aniston's shoes. And if somehow legitimate news intersects with fame, just throw up your hands, then stand back for the unstoppable force. If someone is arrested for rape, it may or may not make the local news. If Kobe Bryant is arrested for rape, the national media won't only trip over themselves to report the courtroom details, they'll tell you the cut, color and carat of the "oops-I'm-sorry" diamond ring he gave his wife afterward.

The thing is, say Bell and others, anyone who realizes the status celebrities have in today's world can hardly deny their place in a newscast or above the fold or in any legitimate news position. Elvis' death, Bell says, should have led the newscast.

"Why not?" he asks. "No matter how much people claim not to be interested or are quite tired of Monica or whatever, back we come with extreme interest. Ratings tell how much people really do fixate on this. People love to deny being obsessed with these things, but ratings tell otherwise."

That they do.

When Leroy Sievers, executive producer of one of network news' most esteemed programs, ABC's "Nightline," sent out an e-mail memo on November 19 telling the show's newsletter subscribers that the staff was bumping coverage of President Bush's visit to London for news about pop star Michael Jackson's arrest on multiple counts of child molestation, well, you would have thought he'd just said Ted Koppel would be broadcasting live from MTV's spring- break beach house--in a Speedo. The memo was quickly posted on media news sites with commentary dripping with surprise and thick disdain.

"Even 'Nightline'?" Sievers squeaks, mimicking the general sentiment that was aimed at him. Is nothing sacred? We'd expect this from the likes of "Dateline," but "Nightline"? Et tu, Ted?

Sievers says he sent the memo after a late-morning meeting with the entire staff, a meeting that featured a rather intense back and forth about what to do--it was anything but a given that a presidential diplomatic visit was of more gravity than a freaky pop star's supposed sexual misadventures. They went around and around about it, about half the staff believing that Bush was the way to go. Michael Jackson, they felt, was "lurid and meaningless," a scandalous pouf of a story that really didn't warrant the Ted Koppel treatment. But others adamantly felt that here is one of the best-known figures on the planet, involved in something sordid, but something he could possibly buy his way out of. Plus, they argued, the president could still be fresh the next day.

"We agonized over this one," Sievers says. In the end, after a show of hands, Michael won. "It was pretty obvious that was the way to go.... It's a big story."

Big and popular. The report was "Nightline's" top-rated show of the year, handily besting Koppel's reportage from the war in Iraq. Though the Jackson piece was no dispatch from the front, its ratings are deserved and its subject matter is nothing to be ashamed of, Sievers says. He says "Nightline" reported this story like it would any other, thoughtfully and with a hard-news mentality. "We treated it as a serious story," he says.

As other news reporters swarmed outside Jackson's amusement park-like Neverland ranch, aiming cameras at helicopters that may or may not have been ferrying the star, or trying to wrench scoops from "Jackson family friends," this is how Ted Koppel opened his report: "The word voyeurism was created for a day like this. Whatever it is that makes us slow down and crane our necks as we pass a traffic accident, whatever causes us to linger at the checkout counter as we scan the headlines on the Star and the National Enquirer, whatever relish we derive from the misadventures of the rich, powerful and famous, you could not ask for a more blatant self-destructive target than Michael Jackson. And today, he has descended into the deepest valley of a trouble-plagued career."

Sievers knows that plenty of media outlets blew the November 19 Jackson news out of all logical proportion. But, he insists, there was a story there, a significant one, crying out for the right kind of treatment. "Was there excess?" he asks. "You bet. But the issue for us was, are there broader issues? Illuminate this."

The "Even--gasp-- 'Nightline'!" cries of disappointment perfectly demonstrate something of a cottage industry in journalism that's sprung up in the shadow of saturation coverage. It's shame. It's self-loathing. It's the whole idea that by covering a Michael Jackson or a Kobe Bryant, the media are falling down on the job, somehow abdicating their responsibilities to be eternally highbrow, their noses buried in stacks of government documents. And that if they do stoop so low as to join the "circus" or the "feeding frenzy" or the "spectacle," they need to somehow distance themselves from the others elbowing one another in the morass, to find a way to say, as they're standing, palms sweating, in front of Neverland's gate, that "yeah, I'm here, but it's not what you think."

This is one of Bill Powers' favorite topics, one he's written about in his "On the Media" column in National Journal. In December, in the context of Michael Jackson's arrest, he served up these words with a healthy side of sarcasm: "If you're a respectable media outlet doing a Jackson story, there's a kind of purification rite you have to perform, in which you demonstrate that although you're technically part of the feeding frenzy, you yourself are actually very much above it."

The Boston Globe reported from Santa Barbara the day Jackson was arrested, Santa Barbara where all the reporters were, that "the world's media jostled for the money shot of the pop superstar in handcuffs." MSNBC's Chris Matthews asked Sam Donaldson this, as if Matthews hadn't heard about Jackson on his own network: "Sam, this Michael Jackson story, it's been all over your radio show on ABC this week. What's the big story here?" And how many journalists informed readers and viewers that this Michael Jackson thing, it's going to be the biggest media frenzy, the most crazed media circus since O.J.?

Inevitably, everyone excessively covering whatever the story of the day is pauses for a second to ask a media expert how much is too much. Invariably, said media expert will all but scream, "This! This is too much!" At which point the reporter will type up his story, slugged "frenzy," or turn to the camera saying, "Back to you, Gary, in Neverland."

Bob Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, gets these calls all the time. In fact, he jokes, it's almost at the point where he's fearing an overkill of stories about overkill. He says it used to be the case that a story would need to spin for a few weeks before reporters, concerned about whether the media were overdoing it, would start calling him. Now, he says, it only takes a day or two.

Thompson says that the discussion about the coverage can be thought-provoking and certainly worthwhile after a stakeout at an airport to see if Michael Jackson's plane might land there. However, he says, as often as the media sincerely ask whether or not things have gone overboard, they're just looking for another reason to talk about Michael, Kobe or whomever. "It's our mea culpa," he says. "It's the media slapping its own hand while also keeping these things alive."

It's the televised reports, Thompson says, more than anything else, that contribute to the feelings of absurdity and the sense that things are out of control. That's because instead of the traditional style of reporting a story after assembling the facts, on TV reporters feel their way as they go along, speculating about probable causes and possible outcomes on air with experts. "You don't report it and get the facts," he says. "It's happening as part of the programming, while you're figuring it out.... You're talking to people like me about whether or not you should be talking about it."

The story of Michael Jackson, though frighteningly overdone, is "damn interesting," Thompson says. He's tuned in to it not as a television sociologist but as a guy who's fascinated. "I'd be watching it if I were an electrician," he says.

And with that, he's just like much of the rest of the country. As Fox's Eric Burns pointed out in a column, when the Jackson story broke, his network's daytime ratings jumped 25 percent, CNN's leaped 44 percent and MSNBC's were up 51 percent. People wanted to know what was up and expected the 24-hour news channels to tell them.

Of course some of those very same people turned around later and said that the coverage was disgusting them, that they couldn't believe it was Jackson, Jackson, Jackson, him and his demented, powdery mug shot, all over the dial. It happens every time, Thompson says. "There were people complaining about the O.J. coverage. With Tonya Harding, the thing wasn't out four days before people were complaining about the backlash of that," he says. "But the big paradox is at the very same time they are complaining about how they're so sick of all this Michael Jackson coverage, if I see the mug shot one more time I'll throw up, they're flipping through the dial looking for more."

Columnist Bob Kravitz of the Indianapolis Star, writing about everyone's "secret" fascination with the Kobe Bryant trial, put it like this: "In a sexual assault case, no means no. In the case of the consuming public and the media, no means, 'OK, I'll watch the Stone Phillips exclusive with the alleged victim's camp counselor, but that's where I draw the line.' "

The people are transfixed and the media--people, too, despite themselves--are as well. "We're all drawn to these things and hate ourselves for it," Powers says, adding that it's almost puritanical, the conventional media wisdom that if something is popular, journalists shouldn't dwell on it. It's not "important" enough. He calls it "institutional snobbery." "There's only a certain kind of story that concerns important issues that we can care about," he says. "All we're supposed to really care about is policy. We're not supposed to care about anything about entertainment or celebrities, but they're the most powerful people in a society like ours."

Thompson agrees. "I don't think news must constantly be about a civic duty, civic duty, civic duty," he says. "I don't think that's journalism's charge."

Powers remembers that when media types were criticizing then-New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines, they'd point accusingly to the time he put a story about pop vixen Britney Spears on the front page. "It was mentioned as a low point in Howell Raines' tenure," Powers says. "In my opinion, that was a good sign--he knew enough about the cultural mind-set to know this will hit people where they live."

If anyone is taking the brunt of the blame for exacerbating the media's inability to know when to say when, it's the 24-hour news operations. When the subject is breathless reporting, everyone knows that those voted most likely to pant are over on cable.

So it could seem ironic to some that Anderson Cooper, host of CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360," takes a few moments most weeks on his program to feature something in the news that he thinks has "been done to death." The segment's apt name? Overkill. So far they've cast a bored eye on such over-discussed topics as Christmas, Jessica Lynch and Paris Hilton. Oddly, no Jackson or Kobe, but the irreverent Cooper is more likely than most anchor types to crack the occasional joke at his profession's expense.

"On the first day of Michael Jackson, at the end of my program, after everyone had done the story to the nth degree, I joked there should be an obit for all the stories no longer being told because of Michael Jackson," Cooper says. "We try to keep it in perspective as much as you can. But this will probably be in the overkill hall of fame."

Joking aside, as of December, Cooper wasn't overly concerned that the Jackson soap opera was getting disproportionate play. The day that Jackson was officially charged, Cooper led his show with John Lee Malvo being found guilty in the 2002 sniper shootings. Next up was an update in the case of a U.S. citizen held as an "enemy combatant." Only then came the Jackson. But earlier, after the pop star's arrest, Cooper unabashedly showed, for 15 minutes, shots of Jackson's motorcade inching through the streets of Las Vegas.

"One of the biggest entertainers ever is about to be arrested and shown in handcuffs. I don't think it's crazy that people would want to see that. I see no reason to apologize for that," Cooper says. "I thought it was fascinating. People were mobbing his car, the window would roll down and this little pale hand would pop out and wave. There are live moments that happen to be fascinating whether or not it's earth-shattering."

Nor does Cooper think much of the decision by some of his fellow journalists to take a pass on some of the more sensational stories. Like Powers, Cooper sees snobbery in that attitude. "There's an elitist part of that that is unattractive," he says. "I think it's a mistake."

Joe Howry, managing editor of California's Ventura County Star, probably wouldn't mind terribly if someone labeled him elitist for his refusal to go gaga over Michael Jackson's arrest. He's watched the cable coverage, and if it's elitist to not want to be a part of it, then count him in. He's not though. He's merely sickened by the idea that a child might have been molested, and he can barely see that point being made through all the klieg light glare shining on Jackson, his glamorous motorcade, whether or not that's his plane landing--right now!--at the Santa Barbara airport.

"They were live watching a plane come in. It was like the president was landing, or some great dignitary. But three ordinary businessmen get out of the plane," Howry says. "It makes you just ill to watch that. It's not why I got into journalism."

Howry's paper did give Jackson's arrest A1 play, with a story that they took great care to make sure included the singer's denial of the crime. And the infamous mug shot was out there too--in color. In retrospect, however, Howry still wonders about running that mug shot. Who's to say if that's a fair portrayal of the way the guy really looks and not just a frightful image the police specifically chose to release because it helped their case? All of it troubles Howry. "There are just so many things," he says, "that really bother me....

"A celebrity story is a media happening," he continues. "In the great scheme of things, do you really stop to think about how you're coming across to readers? Are you following the pack, part of the horde, as caught up in the curiosity of celebrity as everyone else? What are we really saying to our readers?"

What we seem to be saying and showing, with the breaking news updates, the extensive live footage and the extreme interest in the size of Kobe Bryant's wife's diamond, is that these things are of huge, huge national concern. The intensity of the media coverage, Stephen Bell says, ends up distorting the significance of events or of people.

"I think we have distortion by magnification," Bell says. "There are so many bright lights being focused on the same little thing. The systematic reaction is an overreaction; it assumes an unnatural importance. The people themselves become so magnified by the intensity, their importance to the societal order becomes totally distorted. They become bigger than life."

Journalists aren't doing this on purpose, Bell adds. But they're doing it. The question becomes, what harm is it causing?

None, National Journal's Bill Powers would argue. He says that when big Michael Jackson or Kobe Bryant news breaks, it certainly seems like that was all anyone heard on that particular day. "You get the impression that's all they saw that day," he says, "but they didn't see the piece about Medicare right next to it."

"It would be troubling if we only had three networks and a handful of papers, but there are so many places to go for your news," Powers insists. "I just don't see anything that this is blotting out. It doesn't take up your whole front page, it's just one story." And, he adds, "Everyone has a clicker."

And there are a few places to aim those clickers if you're one of the Americans who truly mean it when they say they're fed up with the curiosity du jour. A tiny band of contrarians like Joe Howry are just saying no, knowing they can because their peers are saying yes, yes, yes. Howry's trying to confine Jackson to the inside pages. CNN's Lou Dobbs told viewers, on the very night of Jackson's arrest no less, that "pop star Michael Jackson has been arrested in California. The cable news networks have devoted hours of programming to the story. We have just reported ours." CBS' Bob Schieffer announced in his weekly commentary that the very fact that the rest of the world's lens was aimed at Jackson meant he could point his elsewhere.

And there's the Aspen Daily News, standing firm in its decision to be Kobe-free, most days a little proud, others a little sheepish. Editor Rick Carroll laughed when someone told him he ought to be nominated for an ethics award. He'd rather, he says, get the accolades for doing something than for the mere act of doing nothing, weirdly heroic as doing nothing is in this day and age.

Still, many readers and even a few journalists have complimented the Aspen Daily News' stand, calling the move "refreshing," "uplifting" and courageous. But others, many of them journalists, call it "appalling," a cop-out, and "a cowardly disservice to your readers." Carroll is the first to admit, sighing, that the naysayers make good points.

Yes, there are worthy stories about Kobe Bryant's case to be done. And yes, while the paper has nixed Kobe, it's all right with Michael Jackson--and what's really the difference there? But they were making a point, Carroll says, trying to anyway. "You have to take risks in the business," he says, "and with this risk, we created a really good discussion about the media's role."

And if any of his 12,000 readers need to know whether Kobe wore a tie to court, they know where to go. "There are plenty of options out there aside from the Aspen Daily News," Carroll says. "It's out there. You can't avoid it."