First Ed McMahon cashed his final check, then God turned the Fawcett off and shortly afterward the same day, Michael Jacksons heart just beat it.
All media is a contest and thus every event has a winner and a loser.
WINNER: Ed McMahon.
He had the good sense to die when there wasn’t really any important news going on like a revolution in the middle east or whatever, so he soaked up his fair share of the obit spotlight. Where as poor Farrah got totally upstaged by the Jack attack, the lesser culturally significant McMahon received lots of replays of old footage montaged under fond memories.
LOSER: Governor Mark Sanford.
If only he had waited just one day to confess to the world that he wasn’t really hiking on an Appalachian trail, but was really digging an Argentinean hole (by which I mean “), he would have slipped under the radar in the news cycle. In fact, if he had waited that one day, his press conference where he confessed to banging a girl in south america would have literally been cut-off by all the channels covering it live and the reporters there in front of him would have all scrambled away to go cover the more important story of Jacksons passing and just ask the Governor to release a statement to be put on page C9 later on.
WINNER: Farrah Fawcett’s family
They get to mourn in peace.
LOSER: Democracy in Iran
