Providing a full account

It was frankly painful as a Black man to watch the Michael Jackson tribute service on the various broadcast networks and cable channels Tuesday and to see few people who looked like me who could explain what was happening and provide a framework beyond the historical.

Though the service was non-denominational, what America and the world essentially got Tuesday was a peek inside the Black church. They got to see how we worship and how we send our departed onto the next spiritual realm.

Yet, until ABC's Robin Roberts, one of network television's few prominent African-American faces, declared at the end of the telecast that we had been to church, we got no sense of that from the nearly three hour broadcast.

ABC was hardly the only offender; CBS dumped out of the telecast at 3:50 p.m., after Michael's daughter Paris offered a moving tribute to her daddy, but before the pastor could provide the closing prayer. What was the rush?

Even worse was the absence of context, which led to errors of omission and commission. ABC's Martin Bashir, who owes his meteoric rise to an extensive 2003 interview with Jackson, told Charles Gibson that he and Jackson had spoken extensively about the reporter's ability to play the signature bass line of "Billie Jean."

Just after the first musical number of the tribute, a duet of "I'll Be There," with Mariah Carey and Trey Lorenz, Bashir observed that while Carey and Lorenz had to split the lead, Jackson had done the song solo, a monstrous error that completed ignored Jermaine Jackson, who was sitting in the front row of the Staples Center.

Any casual observer, much less devoted fans, knew of the mistake, yet Bashir was never corrected. Ask yourself how quickly Gibson or Bashir would have backtracked if they had committed a similar error on a Bruce Springsteen or Paul McCartney song.

Why didn't anyone speak to the incongruity of Motown founder Berry Gordy declaring Jackson to be like a son, when he wouldn't let Michael and his brothers keep their name, the Jackson Five, when they left the label? For that matter, where was the person to ask why Gordy didn't let the boys write their own songs and play their own instruments while they were with Motown?

Perhaps anchors and producers who remembered that Michael Jackson didn't fall off the face of the earth between the time he was an adorable moppet and when "Thriller" shook the world by its collective collar, might have been able to tell a complete narrative.

I used to think that a conspicuous African-American presence on stories that involved or were centered in and around the Black community did more harm than good. Now, I'm not so sure. I just wish I got the feeling that more people who make those decisions gave a damn.