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Why the Michael Jackson case matters
By JERRY ROBERTS
EDITOR OF THE NEWS-PRESS
It was Nov. 18, 2003, when county authorities staged a surprise raid on Michael Jackson's Neverland Valley Ranch, an action that triggered an instant media incursion into Santa Barbara equivalent in scale to the Normandy Invasion.
From Japan to Ireland, and all points in between, talking heads and TV trucks descended upon the local landscape, setting off a global media spectacle of broadcast shout fests, hyped-up scoops and low-rent rumors of the basest nature.
For our newsroom, being at the center of a full-fledged feeding frenzy by the ladies and gents of the world press has been somewhat disorienting, and not a little wearing.
As opening arguments in the trial get under way tomorrow, the feeling at the News-Press is a little like finally getting to watch the Super Bowl after a pre-game show that lasts, oh, say 15 months.
Similar feelings are shared by some readers, such as a Montecito woman who last week sent an e-mail titled "Minimize the Michael," and wrote to "implore you to knock off the front-page coverage of Michael Jackson, and all that surrounds him."
As the local legal system, and the News-Press, embark upon what is likely to be a several-month trial, it seems a good time to share with our readers the journalistic reasons why we're covering this story in depth, along with some of the standards and values we use to guide our coverage.
The simple answer to why we have committed considerable resources, in the form of reporter and editor time and newsprint, to Jackson is that it is, for us, local, local, local.
Michael Jackson may be one of the most widely recognized people on Earth, but he also happens to live in Santa Barbara County. That means that no matter the motivations of Court TV, Celebrity Justice or Geraldo Rivera, for us it is first and foremost a story with direct and immediate stakes and relevance for local voters, taxpayers and citizens.
Simply put, the charges in the case have been brought by Santa Barbara County's district attorney, investigated by Santa Barbara County deputies, will be heard by a Santa Barbara County judge before a Santa Barbara County jury, paid for by Santa Barbara County taxpayers.
For us, that is the crucial difference between Jackson and other high-profile cases.
In that regard, it is worth noting that we have given modest, inside coverage to other recent "trials of the century" -- Kobe Bryant, Scott Peterson, Robert Blake, for example -- that the mass media now encamped in our community blared and trumpeted around the world.
For us, the point is not that Jackson is a celebrity, but that he is a celebrity being tried in our back yard.
As the newspaper of record for Santa Barbara County, we have a responsibility to cover in depth and detail a story that has drawn the attention of the whole world, no matter how distasteful the nature of the charges.
So while we have both reported on daily developments in the case, and produced a series of exclusives and scoops beginning with DA Tom Sneddon secretly convening a grand jury, we have also reported and published dozens of stories about substantive local legal, economic and political issues raised by the case, such as:
How much is this all costing us, and, at a time of tight government budgets, where will the money come from? Is the extraordinary level of secrecy imposed by the bench on the documents and lawyers in this case appropriate for an open society?
Is there basis in fact for the defense charge that Sneddon, a longtime local officeholder, launched the case as a vendetta after failing to prosecute Jackson in 1993?
How did Jackson manage to push extraordinary development projects on his ranch through county planning channels? What was the experience of the hundreds, if not thousands, of local kids who visited Neverland with the sponsorship of local nonprofits?
What impact has Jackson had in delaying and disrupting our local criminal justice system, and other trials that are still waiting to start? What impact will allegations of racial bias in the county's jury selection system have in this high-profile case? What about Jackson's allegations of being mistreated while in the sheriff's custody?
As a journalistic matter, our coverage has also been shaped by a commitment we made to ourselves in the first days of the frenzy, to avoid being sucked into the media maelstrom of sensationalism and speculation: We would not publish Jackson stories, no matter how much play they got elsewhere, unless we confirmed them ourselves.
So, for example, while television stations around the world broadcast segments of a purported transcript of the grand jury proceedings in the case that were posted by a Web site two weeks ago, we held back on the story until our own sources provided independent corroboration.
In the end, what makes many readers -- and us -- uncomfortable about the Jackson story is that it is about awful allegations of criminal sexual deviance. In the weeks and months ahead, we will have to make many judgments about what to publish in a trial likely to contain considerable graphic material and testimony.
Mindful of the values of the community, we'll make those decisions by asking the same basic question we have to date -- how relevant is this to our readers?
Jerry Roberts is editor of the News-Press. E-mail comments
or questions to jroberts@newspress.com.
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