“The CBS Evening News” on Aug. 16, 1977, led with a story on the Panama Canal. Former President Gerald Ford had come out in favor of a plan, announced the week before, to give control of the canal to Panama. Former California Gov. Ronald Reagan said he was against it. Again.

Elvis Presley’s death was reported later.
There are those who contend that if Walter Cronkite had not been on vacation, CBS would have led with Elvis, as ABC and NBC did. But the fact that it was even a close call was hard to fathom Friday as news organizations continued to scramble to keep pace with new developments in Michael Jackson’s death the day before.
“Our job is not to respond to public taste,” Richard Salant, then-head of CBS News, had offered as an explanation of the Panama/Presley call, according to various accounts. “Elvis Presley was dead — so he was dead.”
The only thing more dead, even then, was that kind of thinking, which Roone Arledge, applying what he learned as head of ABC Sports to a revamp of ABC News, was quick to brand elitist.
News is a business, and no business can talk about giving people what they want and then deem that desire unworthy, if it wants to survive. Not everyone cares, obviously. But by nearly every measure, more than a few people have more than a passing interest when what might be deemed fluff intersects with hard news.
CBS would come to repeat the mantra “Remember Elvis” for years afterward, fearful of ever again seeming out of touch with what touched viewers. There was no debate at the House of Murrow when Bing Crosby died two months after Presley.
By 1980, when John Lennon was murdered, the major-media template for handling celebrity deaths — prominent coverage, specials and other remembrances — was established, straddling between tribute and exploitation, news and sensationalism. And you saw it still last week for Jackson and Farrah Fawcett.
What has changed is how, and how fast, the news is gathered and spread.
If CBS’ stubbornness fed ABC and NBC the millions interested in the King of Rock ’n’ Roll in 1977, imagine today when the audience not only has more alternatives for information sources but is better able to monitor who’s delivering what they want at any moment.
Those on Twitter on Thursday were trading links to the latest Jackson info in real time and sharing judgment on their quality. (Spurious Tweets killed actor Jeff Goldblum but later revived him and others said to have followed Jacko and Farrah on the Final Red Carpet, but still.)
Time Warner’s TMZ.com and Chicago Tribune parent Tribune Co.’s LATimes.com were out front on Jackson’s condition, and other outlets — initially able neither to ignore the dispatches nor corroborate them — had to tread carefully.
TMZ’s Time Warner cousin, CNN, seemed to hesitate as much as anyone in acknowledging TMZ’s reporting, preferring to refer to the reports of the Los Angeles Times, and even then expressing concern. “CNN is an independent news organization; corporate affiliations do not factor into our editorial decision-making,” a CNN spokeswoman said.
CBS, meanwhile, used video from the tabloid show “Inside Edition,” produced and syndicated by another wing of its parent company, in its “Evening News” report on Fawcett. Later, in its prime-time special on Jackson, it used branded content from “Entertainment Tonight” and the host of “The Insider.”
Just as viewers have more sources than before, so, too, do news outlets. One TV executive pointed to the use of YouTube video in coverage of the election in Iran, but said with increased outside options for content comes increased need to vet.
By the way, it should be said that CBS wasn’t alone in failing to connect the cultural dots on Elvis Presley’s death, although National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” didn’t make the exact same mistake. It had the Panama Canal story second, leading with a report on the problems dogging Bert Lance, President Jimmy Carter’s erstwhile head of the Office of Management and the Budget.
NPR’s report that Elvis had left the building — and the rest of this world — closed out the program that evening.
Calling it a “mistake” on the air 20 years later, host Susan Stamberg explained, “You see how culture can last long after the names of kings, queens, and OMB directors are forgotten.”