This has been a crazy day in the world of pop culture. The morning started off with the death of Farrah Fawcett. She had been on death’s door for the past few months, so it was something expected when she died. Just to give a surreal aspect to the day, when I watched The View, which was taped, they talked about the Barbara Walters special that was coming on tonight which was going to talk about people in Farrah Fawcett’s life. The taping didn’t reflect the death, so it was still talked about in the life of Farrah.

So this was around 10:30am my time. I kept doing some little things around the house. I turned on a court show around 1:00pm and by 1:30pm, during the commercial break, word came out that Michael Jackson was in the hospital.

Well, that changed everything.

While Farrah Fawcett might have been a treasured icon, she can’t compete with the King of Pop. Also, Farrah has been recorded and documented for months about her death while Michael Jackson was a shock. I quickly went to the cable stations and it was like TV of old. I was watching TV and I was on the net trying to gather information. It was MSNBC that has the fastest information. It was them who first reported, with caution, that a web outlet pronounced Michael Jackson dead. The pretty much said they were waiting for the report from the LA Times. I went to their site but I also called a friend whose wife worked at a television station near Los Angeles. I figured if anyone was going to get the news first it would be them. Less than 20 minutes later the LA Times announced Michael Jackson was dead, though it would take another r10 minutes to confirm it because the servers to the LA Times crashed.

It has been a number of hours and the cable stations have been covering Michael Jackson’s death wall to wall. When it was Farrah Fawcett, we still got reports about health care, Iran and other news, but the death of Michael Jackson shut all that down. I just checked the Barbara Walters special which was supposed to be a about Farrah, but when I tuned in it was all about Michael.

My friend said this was bad timing for Farrah, because all these years out of the spotlight, despite what was said earlier about her, she was still regarded as a 70s icon. All of the coverage she would have received for cancer research and treatment was trumped when Michael Jackson died. I saw that NBC, which aired the video of Farrah Fawcett and her cancer treatment, didn’t replay the show tonight. It was a new, quickly put together special on Michael Jackson. Newspapers websites which had her prominent on their sites this morning now have her as a footnote, with Jackson as the main banner headline.

So it’s been a couple of hours of the news breaking about Michael Jackson’s death. Farrah seems like a distant memory because local as well as cable stations have tributes to Jackson while Farrah is barely a footnote. It must be telling that the Barbara Walters special, which was supposed to be about Farrah, became about Michael.