Following the high ratings of its 24/7 coverage of the death of Michael Jackson, CNN announced it will launch a news channel devoted entirely to the coverage of celebrity deaths. CNN anchor Anderson Cooper said the new cable channel will be known as CNN/RIP.

“Because of our coverage of Jackson’s death to the exclusion of everything else happening in the world, some people started complaining that we should change our name to the Michael Jackson Death Channel,” Cooper said. “We actually thought about doing that, but then we realized that eventually our coverage of the memorials, the autopsy, his will and everything would probably decline in a couple of years.”

Cooper said broadening its coverage of celebrity deaths will allow the network to include other celebrities that might get lost in the shuffle when someone really famous dies at the same time. Jackson died the same day as actress Farrah Fawcett and within a few days of TV sidekick Ed McMahon.

“With CNN/RIP the death of a more famous celebrity won’t necessarily eclipse the deaths of other celebrities who might be less famous but nonetheless have their own followings and that translates into viewers and advertising revenues,” Cooper said.

Celebrity death historian Sid Watterson said it’s not unusual for the death of one celebrity to eclipse that of another. He noted that Elvis Presley died three days before Groucho Marx, in August 1977, but the media practically ignored the death of Marx because it was so busy focusing on Presley.

“A lot of people say celebrities die in threes. Personally I don’t buy it, although when you have someone as famous as Elvis passing away that can shadow someone like Groucho who should’ve received a lot more coverage than he did,” Watterson said.

More recently, the death of former CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite provided a stark contrast in how the deaths of famous people are handled.

“The Chicago Tribune put a picture of Cronkite on its front page and buried a short article about him in the back. That’s an outrage considering it filled an entire paper about Jackson,” Watterson said. “I’m not saying Jackson’s death wasn’t news, but giving such scant coverage to a man like Cronkite is a pretty clear sign of a newspaper that has lost its way.”

Perhaps the thorniest issue for CNN/RIP will be determining who is, or was, a celebrity. Watterson noted that with the popularity of reality TV and the rise of people being famous just for being famous, the new channel will be under a lot of pressure from agents and media relations people trying to hawk their client’s deaths.

“Will the network act like People Magazine, where it puts someone on the cover who doesn’t seem to have ever done anything other than get themselves onto a magazine cover?” Watterson said. “There are real celebrities like Jackson who had talent and could fill a stadium, then there’s so-called celebrities who are infamous for having nice boobs and showing them off when drunk. They’d almost need a separate channel for that.”

This was written by Marcus Manfred for The Daily Blank. It is licensed under an Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. If you love it, please re-post the complete article (including this blurb) on your site. We'd be flattered.