Copyright
2003 The New York Observer, L.P.
New York Observer
December
1, 2003
Tabloid-TV
Queen Broke Jacko Arrest, Beats the Networks
Joe Hagan
On
Monday, Nov. 24, exactly 153 hours after the Michael Jackson media
maelstrom swallowed the TV-watching populace whole -- threatening to
"suck all of civilization into its maw," as a New
York Times editorial
had it -- the woman who set the whole fracas into motion, Diane
Dimond,
a 51-year-old tabloid-news veteran, was sitting in the Third Avenue
offices of Court
TV,
recalling the day the story broke.
"It was like the skies
opened up and everyone and their mother wanted to talk to me,"
said Ms. Dimond, who was wearing a bright blue First Lady -- style
dress suit, her face still caked in on-air makeup after a three-hour
show.
It was Ms. Dimond whose camera crew first captured shots
of the police cars entering Mr. Jackson's Neverland estate on
Tuesday, Nov. 18, and it was she who first reported -- on Larry
King Live
-- that a warrant had been issued for Mr. Jackson's arrest.
Ms.
Dimond, a contributor to Court
TV,
told her colleagues it would be "the mug shot heard around the
world," and she was right. Consequently, Ms. Dimond's own mug
came in a close second, appearing on NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, MSNBC and
CNN, not to mention a half-dozen foreign outlets. On Monday, she
acted as a correspondent for ABC's Good
Morning America.
Ten years ago, Ms. Dimond's dogged coverage for Hard
Copy
of Mr. Jackson's first child-molestation charge earned her a certain
reputation -- as a dogged tabloid reporter. Since then, the
mainstream media has fully and completely embraced her kind of story:
the pungent, tacky, rubber-necking spectacle of celebrity under
extreme distress.
"I think it's inevitable," said
Ms. Dimond. "I think too many people wrinkle their nose at the
word 'tabloid.' It is what it is. And if people didn't respond to it,
it wouldn't exist. But it does. Their denial that they've stepped
into that realm is laughable. It's laughable. And it's not something
they should be ashamed of -- news isn't news if nobody watches. If
you get on the air and start boring people with a script that makes
them fall asleep, what good is that?"
Such was the
Jackson story's draw that it bumped coverage of the conflict in Iraq
out of the 24-hour news cycle -- ABC's Nightline
replaced
coverage of President Bush's speech in Britain for Mr. Jackson -- and
even clawed its way above the fold in The
Times
two
days in a row.
Ms. Dimond certainly got some level of
satisfaction seeing her story flood every zone imaginable. Over the
years, she said, she's been rebuffed by mainstream newsies because of
her tabloid background. A decade ago, she said, Victor Neufeld, the
longtime producer of 20/20
and now a morning producer at CBS, told her, "'You know, if you
hadn't worked on that show [Hard
Copy],
you would have won a Peabody,' and I said, 'Well, O.K., maybe.' But
from that point, 1994, I watched 20/20,
Dateline,
48 Hours
-- all of these shows -- get more and more tabloid. They won't admit
it, they wouldn't call themselves 'tabloid,' but that's exactly what
they are. I would go to do stories and knock on somebody's door, say,
'Hi, I'm Diane
Dimond,'
and they'd say, 'Oh, I can't talk to you, I promised Diane Sawyer I'd
talk to her.' I mean, that seriously was said to me.'"
Susan
Zirinsky, the executive producer of CBS's 48
Hours
-- which also covered the Michael Jackson story on Saturday, Nov. 22
-- had no comment on being labeled a tabloid show, but she did admit
that the public's appetite had changed over the years.
"I
believe that the public's interest in things has varied," she
said. "There is this incredible currency in celebrity, and
magazine shows that are interested in stories that people are
interested in are going to hit on these subjects. It's what we're
supposed to do."
Ms. Zirinsky defined "tabloid"
as a newspaper or TV show that is "likely to take things that
are not truthful and, even with the barest of sources, promote that
information." She also pointed out that The
Times
had
run with the story, too.
The executive producer of Dateline
NBC,
David Corvo, also ran with the Jackson story and credited Ms. Dimond
with breaking it in his program. He called her a "tenacious
reporter." But Mr. Corvo said his show mixed popular stories
with serious ones, which wasn't, by his definition, "tabloid."
"I'll
have to leave it to Professor Dimond to decide what a tabloid is,"
he said. "There are techniques that tabloids use, like paying
for interviews, which we don't do."
Then he added: "It
was on the front page of The
New York Times,
for crying out loud!"
Ms. Dimond said that even the
wizened news gods at 60
Minutes
were, for all intents and purposes, doing what she considered tabloid
journalism -- but, she said, unlike their counterparts at other
newsmagazines, executive producer Don Hewitt and co-editor Mike
Wallace would readily admit it.
"Mike Wallace would be
the first one to say to you, 'Yeah, I do tabloid,'" she said.
"'I package it real nice, and look at my promos: They're tabloid
through and through. They're the best in the business.'" Ms.
Dimond said she was a friend of Mr. Wallace's, having worked with his
stepson, film director Eames Yates, at Hard
Copy
in the early 1990's. Mr. Wallace was unavailable for comment, but a
60
Minutes
spokesman said, "Not only did we invent the genre, we're still
the gold standard by which other newsmagazines are measured."
Ms.
Dimond got her start in television news at WCBS Channel 2 in New York
in the mid-1980's, where she covered the "Baby M"
surrogate-mother case. She went national with Hard
Copy
in 1990, covering the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, and then hit
critical pay dirt with her coverage of the first Jackson case, which
earned her star status in the tabloid market. It also earned her the
ultimate tabloid accolade, a $100 million lawsuit by Mr. Jackson
himself in 1995 against Hard
Copy,
which aired Ms. Dimond's interview with a woman who claimed a video
existed of Mr. Jackson having sex with a 13-year-old boy. The judge
dismissed Ms. Dimond from the suit.