Requiem For A Heavyweight

Wash Post TV critic Tom Shales: "We're not going to go away," said Wolf Blitzer on CNN after the ceremony -- and it sounded like a threat. He meant that coverage would continue, along with delivery of all the other news that had been kept waiting since three or four hours earlier, when the channel became the Michael News Network.

NYDN TV critic David Hinckley: "Before the service even got underway, MSNBC's Dr. Nancy Snyderman suggested the whole event felt "like the Oscars, an awards show."

NYT TV critic Alessandra Stanley: Some network anchors seemed a bit mortified by their own unstinting and reverential coverage. Brian Williams of NBC, who sat on a special platform outside the Staples Center, told his colleague Lester Holt that the public had a way of deciding for itself what matters, “despite, at some times, the news media’s better wishes.” He added ruefully, “And this is an event because it is.”

By the time Paris broke into sobs at the end of the service as she expressed how much she loved her father — “I just wanted to say, ever since I was born Daddy has been the best father you can ever imagine” — newscasters cast aside any pretense of covering a news event and joined in the orgy of mourning. Shepard Smith of Fox News, speaking over the music in almost syncopated beat, noted: “He was a lot of different things to a lot of different people. There were days when on the cover of The New York Post, he was just ‘Wacko Jacko.’ But today, just moments ago, his daughter reminded us all he was also, Daddy.”

On CNN, even staid Wolf Blitzer got caught up in the emotion, urging his viewers to take a moment to join him in listening, once again, to Jennifer Hudson singing Mr. Jackson’s song “Will You Be There.” The ABC news anchor Charles Gibson invited Martin Bashir, an ABC correspondent who taped sensational interviews with the performer, to help with commentary. But even Mr. Gibson didn’t seem very interested in rehashing old scandal. “People have gone back to the music,” he told Mr. Bashir. “It’s as if the last 10 or 15 years didn’t happen.”

NYP columnist Andrea Peyser: "Michael Jackson died with enough drugs in his system to fell a small village -- indulging a habit that, like everything else about his twisted, wasted life, was overlooked by toadies, enablers and those who profited from access to this amoral walking skeleton. And I haven't mentioned the small boys he routinely shared his bed with, young enough to be his children. Enough!"

Will the Michael Jackson Sympathy for the Devil beat these other landmark TV ratings blockbusters? [Source: Nielsen]

Gulf War, Day One Jan. 16, 1991 85.6 million
O.J. Simpson trial verdict Oct. 5, 1995 53.9 million
Princess Diana's funeral Sept. 6, 1997 33.3 million
President Clinton's apology address to the nation Aug. 17, 1998 67.6 million
President Reagan's funeral June 11, 2004 20.8 million
Michael Jackson trial verdict June 13, 2005 30.6 million
President Ford's funeral Jan. 2, 2007 15 million