Maggie Rodriguez wants us to know that she's a real journalist. "If I were to program a show for my viewing pleasure, I would make it all news," she told Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post in a July 13 article. But the host of CBS's "Early Show" also insisted, "I'm not a journalistic snob."
Good thing too, because when you work for a network that dedicated 37 percent of its nightly news coverage to the death of Michael Jackson, you can't scruple at getting down with the hoi polloi.
To the contrary, Kurtz praised Rodriguez's assigned coverage of Jackson and how she "...embraced the story, interviewing, among others, the Jackson family attorney, his former publicist, the nurse who worked for Jackson in his final months and a producer who was with him the night before he died. She says she's ‘proud' of the two weeks of heavy coverage."
Perhaps Rodriguez does believe that Jackson's death is real news for 14 days. After all, someone has to report that Michael Jackson still is dead.
