Entertainment: TV: Gossip news targetting celebrities had source in hospital where Michael Jackson died

Television scooped the Jackson-decease story, beating the actual pronouncing of the death by the officiating medical doctor/s. A n+tly gossip TV program apparently had a 6-minute lead, and when TMZ.com went public with its obit announcement, their report dominated the the rest of TV, the newswire services, and the print media. (In the USA, at least.)TMZ.com is now the hottest Hollywood celebrity gossip website on the planet. So hot, in fact, that when it broke the news of Michael Jackson's death last week, its world exclusive popped up online six minutes before the singer actually died.

For its many critics this was confirmation that the website, which, amid endless surveillance videos of minor celebs parking their cars and walking to their front doors, brought you exclusives on Mel Gibson's antisemitic ravings at a traffic cop, Alec Baldwin's brutal mobile phone rant at his 11-year-old daughter and the contents of Anna Nicole Smith's bedside table the night she died (Slim Fast and chewing gum), plays fast and loose with the truth.

But for TMZ, the explanation was simple. By the time Jackson was officially declared dead, at 2.26pm Los Angeles time last Thursday, one of the site's sources within the corridors of the UCLA Medical Centre (it has a vast network that blankets the city) had already tipped it off.

Michael Jackson dead was the scoop of a lifetime for any media outlet, and the apogee of the four-year-old celebrity-obsessed site that boasts its snippets are "even more fascinating than the hype". In that time, TMZ (the name stands for thirty-mile zone, the area of central LA thickly populated with stars), which is as voyeristic as it is speedy, has become one of the world's most quoted sources of entertainment news, with rival sites, TV channels and traditional gossip columns, such as the New York Post's infamous Page Six, quoting it regularly./blockquote>Many folks are taking the singer / dancer's death hard.

Jackson's death finalizes his appetite for scandal. May he rest in peace. The surveys and evaluations of his contribution to American pop music, the rise of music videos, and the history of scandal in Hollywood will continue for a long time, as the population shakes his iconic function from its appreciation.