http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/business/media/09rating.html
Blowout Ratings for a Farewell, Online and Off
On television and on the Internet, tens of millions of viewers tuned in to
Michael Jackson’s star-studded memorial service on Tuesday, making it one of the most watched farewells in history.
Media outlets have treated much of the last two weeks as an expansive public funeral for the pop star, culminating in Tuesday’s service at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Mr. Jackson had been planning a comeback tour at the time of his death on June 25.
Nielsen Media Research said Wednesday that the 18 channels that simulcast the service had a combined average of 31 million at-home viewers during the nearly three-hour event. The service drew a bigger TV crowd than the funerals for two former presidents,
Ronald Reagan in 2004 and Gerald Ford in early 2007.
Princess Diana’s funeral drew about 33 million viewers in 1997. (In comparison, the combined audience total was only slightly higher than an average episode of Fox’s
“American Idol” singing competition.)
Mr. Jackson’s memorial also attracted millions of online viewers. Citing internal data,
CNN.com said it served 4.4 million live video streams during the service; MSNBC.com said it counted 3.1 million.
Yahoo reported 5 million total streams.
The high viewership seemed to support the editorial decision-making of the news executives who had defended their saturation coverage of Mr. Jackson’s death.
“There is a tremendous amount of interest in this story,” said Bart Feder, the senior vice president for programming at CNN.
Mr. Jackson’s death caused the ratings for cable news channels to spike in ways they had not since the presidential election. Jackson-focused editions of the late-night ABC News program “Nightline” drew bigger audiences than its late-night comedy competition. E, the entertainment cable channel, said its daylong memorial on Tuesday was the highest-rated weekday in its history.
The exhaustive and sometimes lurid coverage after Mr. Jackson’s death prompted some news media critics to ask, rather loudly at times, whether the coverage was overblown. “All we hear about is Michael Jackson,” said Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, in a
YouTube video on Sunday. “Let’s knock out the psychobabble. He was a pervert, a child molester, he was a pedophile. And to be giving this much coverage to him, day in and day out, what does it say about us as a country?”
In a poll in late June by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, 58 percent of respondents said they were following the coverage of Mr. Jackson’s death fairly closely or very closely, making it one of the most followed stories of a celebrity’s death in at least a decade. At the same time, 64 percent of respondents said news organizations provided too much coverage of his death.
Jim Bell, the executive producer of the “Today” show, said he understood why some people were wondering whether the media coverage had been overblown, but said, “Michael Jackson is probably as big a star as we’ve ever had in this country.”
Mr. Bell and other news executives said the coverage was justified because there were many unanswered questions about Mr. Jackson’s life and death. Among the strands of coverage: the unclear circumstances regarding his death, the guardianship of his young children and the outpouring of emotion from fans.
“I think it will be reverberating for some time,” Mr. Bell said.
The TV audience for Mr. Jackson’s memorial represented about 20 percent of all American households with TV sets. According to Nielsen, 21 percent of households watched live coverage of the not-guilty verdict in Mr. Jackson’s trial on charges of sexual abuse in 2005.
Later on Tuesday, a combined total of 20 million people watched the prime-time specials about the singer on ABC,
CBS and
NBC.
Akamai, a company that handles Internet traffic for a variety of large clients, said the high levels of interest on Tuesday were eclipsed by only one other event: the inauguration of
President Obama in January.
A number of news Web sites worked with
Facebook and
Twitter to incorporate streams of personal status updates next to live video coverage of the memorial. MSNBC.com showed more than 75,000 tweets. “People want to share the moment,” said Charlie Tillinghast, the publisher of
MSNBC.com. “It’s a collective experience.”
Mr. Jackson edged Mr. Obama in at least one category. Facebook said that Mr. Jackson had about seven million fans on his official Facebook page, giving him the largest single following of any public figure on the site — including Mr. Obama, who clocks in with six million fans.
