I spent a little time this evening watching the BBC News channel’s coverage of the death of Michael Jackson. As part of it they went over to Lizo Mzimba, their showbiz correspondent, who is currently at the Glastonbury Festival (I feel a little sorry for him, he’ll be up all night covering this and then have to do Glastonbury in the morning!). He spoke to a few people about it. The first was the keyboard player of one of the bands playing this year, and another two who he introduced as “music fans at the Glastonbury Festival” who were hoping to see Michael in London in the next few months. He asked these two how they heared about the news. First of all they said they heared through their mobiles, Facebook, and general word of mouth. And then one of them said “we caught on to it first over at the press tent”.
Now of course I know how the media works — I’ve been involved in one way or another (snogging for example) on and off for years now — and I know they didn’t have much time to find coherent people to talk to them about the event (and I imagine finding coherent people at Glastonbury at that time of night must be tricky), but I do feel a little bit cheated — these weren’t genuine festival goers who were also devoted Jackson fans that the BBC had gone out and found on site, they were journalists who happened to be in the press tent at the same time as the people putting together the item. And they weren’t going to mention that.
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