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As many celebrities pass on and Sarah Palin fades from view, I'm reminded of what an amazing job news organizations do of depriving their targets of the respect that all human beings deserve. I think that if the media have shown us anything, it is that life in
front of the cameras is rough. The media will recycle your worst
moments til the day you die -- and beyond. I don't know about you but I
like my worst moments where they are: deep in my past, and my personal
memory. And while Michael Jackson's life may have included a fair
number of transgressions, it's important to remember that the media
gets paid to report allegations just as well as they get paid to report
facts -- even more, sometimes, because facts get old a lot faster. I
don't really have unvarnished faith in the legal system, but I do have
faith that if a judge and jury found plausible evidence of child abuse,
they would eagerly send anyone to jail for it regardless of the legal
talent involved.
I am not saying that I absolutely believe Michael Jackson was innocent,
or guilty; I am just saying, I wasn't there, I don't know, and I think
that if you look at the way he lived, its pretty safe to say that
Michael Jackson was both talented and profoundly messed up as a person.
If the damage he suffered caused him to damage someone else, then
that's unfortunate. But the media that followed Michael Jackson did not
do so because they were imbued with any noble intentions of crucifying
a pedophile -- they were just hoping to capture and resell a bit of
human wreckage, whether that was due to a crime, or the grind of the
criminal justice system.
Sarah Palin is not, in my opinion, all that talented, or for that
matter, all that messed up. I do think there is a disconnect between
the attention she receives and apparently the amount of attention she
actually wants. When she was first called upon to run for VP, her first
reaction was, "I don't really know if I want the job. I mean, what does
the Vice President do?" That gives me the impression that she was more
concerned with achievement than title. It seemed to me that everyone
has a slant on Sara Palin, just as everyone has a slant on Hillary
Clinton, and that there is very little direct material behind both
women's media personae. I don't think that Sarah Palin was a genius --
but I also don't think that she was a simpleton, beauty contest or no.
I think she is not someone who projects well under the camera. But
having presented material to small groups myself, I know how difficult
public speaking is and how your ability to converse alters under the
mental pressure of an audience. Even when your job includes speaking as
a way of life, to go from Governer of one of the most lightly populated
states in the union to the pressure of a Federal campaign, and the
associated exposure across all media, is a challenge.
I hope that the overvomit from YouTube will reduce the relative impact of official media, but I think that its never too soon to remember that the images that TV projects into our lives are not always scripted characters: some of these people are real, flawed human beings trying to live their lives, and even when their jobs put them in the public eye, the deserve to be treated humanely and judged by the breadth of their accomplishments in life, not by the highlights that the media uses to get our attention.
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