Could the media's MJ circus doom Iran?

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-06-26/will-michael-jackson-doom-iran/

Mark Sanford isn't the only person relishing the King of Pop's demise—national security experts are warning that his death could distract from Iran's increasing crackdown on democracy.

The jokes popped up almost immediately that Mark Sanford was the luckiest guy on Earth after word broke that Michael Jackson had suffered a heart attack. But the notion that Jackson's death, which preempted virtually all other news coverage on the cable networks last night, is sucking up media attention from other matters carries a dark edge to it as well. National security experts are warning that without sustained attention on Iran, its repressive tactics could grow more deadly in the coming days.

The Jackson story, paired with Farrah Fawcett's death and Sanford's own scandal, “without a doubt” poses a danger in Iran, according to Michael Rubin, an American Enterprise Institute scholar and former Bush administration official.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Rubin said the issue was already a hot topic among his colleagues in the Middle East.

“To put it this way, the gods are not in favor of hope and change,” Rubin said. “Unfortunately in Iran people are going to prison, but when a tree falls in the forest and there's no one to hear it, the pressure goes away.”

Yeah, that's my gripe - when the media switches to Anna Nicole Smith mode, real news coverage suffers, and in this case, the results may well be loss of life - the coverage of events in Iran can force the Iranian government to tone down the repression, or not, if the media refuses to cover it.

Yes, I feel bad that Michael Jackson died, but the cable news channels should have spent maybe an hour covering it, then relegated it to the entertainment gossip shows like Entertainment Tonight. But noooooo, we're going to have a full blown circus, the public's going to go "Iran who?" and Khamenei's going to take the gloves off now that the rest of the world's distracted.