Celebrity Showdown: MJ vs. FF

I am one of the few people in the U.S. that does not have cable by choice. So I didn't find out about MJ until I went online many hours later and saw it on Yahoo! News. I find it disturbing that when I finally had access to a television today that so many channels are covering his death and no one is mentioning Farrah Fawcett.

Farrah was a talented woman who made sure to leave behind a legacy as well. Not only was she also an icon but she documented her three years of cancer and treatment so that the world could see what it meant to have the disease. She was brutally honest, showing herself going bald and even throwing up. She should be admired for her courage and tenacity in the face of such a scary illness and her willingess to sacrifice her privacy so others may learn more from what she was suffering. And yet she is an afterthought. A one sentence or two moment in the media while MJ gets hours and hours perhaps months of coverage. It's sad really.

Now I understand that Michael was a huge icon as well and that his music touched millions. I understand that dying so unexpectedly is shocking and sensational. I get the fact that he died leaving three children and a $400 million dollar debt is newsworthy. And that for 50 years he has been someone worth covering in the news because he was that marketable. If people didn't talk, mourn and even joke about him I would be shocked and appalled. However, what does it say about us as a society that we have no room in our hearts to also mention someone beloved by many who suffered tragically while still trying to give back?

It scares me how little we care about those who were truly good, honest people. It scares me how we enjoy freakiness and scavenge for dirt first because that interests us more. Even with MJ what they talk about most is not how he changed pop culture and how he helped to break the censoring of black artists in mainstream music. Instead people want to know what the autopsy will reveal and if he hurt children and they want to know the intimate details of his later life.

What does that say about us?