Within an hour of Michael Jackson's untimely death, t-shirts of
the pop legend were being sold to crowds in Los Angeles and New
York, and Michael Jackson eBay items were being sold at more than
ten times the previous value. The cable news media and even
some networks dropped everything and it was non-stop Michael
Jackson on television. But a couple cable networks were
silent. While media guests reminisced about Michael's glory
days of breaking through on MTV, if you had switched to MTV like I
did, all you would have seen was a news ticker about Michael
Jackson on the bottom and regular programming. On VH1, there
was pretty much nothing.
This will have to go down as one of the most mismanaged
situations on modern television that I have witnessed. I
would be willing to guess that I wasn't the only person turning to
MTV to see what they were doing. It was their moment to shine
and they were featuring "Pregnant and 16," business as usual.
Viacom Inc. (NYSE: VIA) has many stations: Comedy Central,
Nickelodeon, BET, and Spike being the other big names. MTV
and VH1, however, are the names that defined a generation.
Today, the MTV name is more irrelevant than ever, due to
mismanagement that was displayed in this situation. All they
had to do was switch to non-stop Jackson videos and half of the
news audience would have switched and felt the comfort of the
little MTV logo being alive and well, along with the immortal music
of the King of Pop.
Instead, MTV continues to fade away, and we turn to YouTube,
brought to you by Google.
UPDATE: Despite
another writer…
