Send the AC360 team to journalism school…

I’m not even going to get into whether continuing coverage of Michael Jackson’s death is newsworthy (it isn’t). What I want to call attention to is the lackluster way in which the “Anderson Cooper 360″ program on CNN attempted to cover it last night.

It started with a “confidential police document” leaked to the AC360 team by an unnamed source. Protecting a source is standard journalistic practice, and I’m perfectly alright with that. But what happened next went beyond questionable journalism and ventured into what I can only describe as tabloid rumor-mongering.

Hill and Kaye... two gals in need of an edumacation

The document in question contained transcripts of a series of interviews of two of Michael Jackson’s security guards, conducted around the time of his ‘04 molestation trial. Early into the story, reporter Randy Kaye told Erica Hill (who was filling in for Anderson Cooper), “We are not naming the security guards,” and I found myself wondering why, from the perspective of a journalist, they wouldn’t name those two names. But I couldn’t contemplate that for too long, because the reporter continued to describe what the guards said, specifically that doctors were prescribing excessive amounts of prescription drugs to Jackson. When pressed for specifics, Kaye said “We’re not going to name the doctors,” and I almost fell out of my seat. Because, when pieced together, what AC360 had was a report from an unnamed source featuring interviews with unnamed guards who talked about drugs given to Jackson by unnamed doctors. I felt light-headed from the sheer lack of information being presented.

With this much ambiguity, the AC360 team could just go hog-wild, provided they remembered to include the word “allegedly” a bunch of times. Jackson allegedly took 30 to 40 Xanax a day and his employees allegedly had prescriptions filled in their own names and aliens from the planet Nebulon allegedly delivered an FTD Pick Me Up bouquet after Jackson was acquitted. OK, I made that last one up, but only to emphasize just how far removed from the source this story was. But they weren’t finished yet.

They also had a source “close to the investigation” who, wait for it, also wasn’t named. Four minutes into the story, not a single verifiable fact was to be found. Not a single source had been named. There was no way for anyone outside of the AC360 offices to attempt to corroborate anything that had been reported.

Finally, Kaye said she’d spoken to a “friend” of Jackson’s named Jack Wishna. Yes, she named a name and said he could provide “insight” into everything alleged in the report. But Hill’s first question was whether Wishna had ever witnessed Jackson taking any drugs, and Kaye replied that he had not, merely that, to Wishna, he seemed “drugged up.” So the one named source couldn’t back up anything alleged in the report.

Dr. Gupta, hypothetically speaking

But wait, as the late night commercials say, there’s more. Following the report, they segued into one of their “Digging Deeper” segments, and before I could ask myself how you could dig deep into unsubstantiated rumors, I received my answer. CNN’s medical expert, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, appeared to talk about how Jackson’s addiction could have manifested and how the doctors could have given him so many pills and how Jackson’s employees could have enabled the process. Of course, Gupta had absolutely no firsthand knowledge, so he wasn’t digging deeper so much as he was piling more on.

Giving the AC360 team every benefit of every doubt, let us assume every allegation they made was correct. It still was not journalism. It was gossip. Remember that kid on your elementary school playground who always ran to the teacher and tattled, saying things like “Jimmy told me that Brett said that Johnny hit Billy!”? That’s what AC360 did last night, only worse. What they said was “Someone told me that someone else said that someone gave Michael Jackson drugs, even though the guy I talked to never saw Jackson take drugs, but a doctor I know said it could have happened that way!”

As for why nobody was named in the story, the answer is both simple and very sad: The AC360 team didn’t want to do any actual journalism. If they’d run the names and the allegations turned out not to be true, they could be sued for libel or defamation of character. They only way they could have comfortably included people’s names in the story was if they’d actually verified the information in the report, which they clearly didn’t take the time to do. Instead, they ran with the rumor, skipping the fact-checking part of their job descriptions. In their over-eagerness to get the exclusive, they failed as journalists.

Watch the 7/9 podcast of the show and see for yourself.