Call it the year of lame excuses

Celebrities in the wild
America’s Cabbage Patch Kid — brilliant entertainer and all-round really creepy guy Michael Jackson — was found not guilty of molesting a 13-year-old cancer survivor. “I will be acquitted and vindicated,” he’d predicted before his trial. Hey, .500’s not a bad batting average.

Robert Blake got off, too. Or, at least, so said the criminal jury. A civil jury subsequently found him liable for $30 million in damages in the murder of his wife, Bonnie Lee Bakley.

Martha Stewart was sprung from the pokey, cooled her heels under house arrest and was back and badder than ever. After all, she never had a prime-time network series of her own before she began committing felonies.

Lil’ Kim, Beanie Sigel and Cassidy. Coming this fall, on NBC: “Martha Stewart’s Posse.”

Actually, it only seemed like Variety was the new bible of the Mafia — not all the celebrity news was criminal:  

• Tom Cruise. Earth to Tom ... Earth to Tom ...
• Earth to Katie ... Earth to Katie ...
• Britney Spears released exactly zero albums, and she still managed to top Yahoo’s list of the most popular search requests of the year. Late in the year, she sued Us magazine for libel for reporting — falsely, she said — that she and her husband, Kevin Federline, had made an explicit sex tape. Just between you and us, hadn’t you always assumed Britney Spears had an explicit sex tape floating around somewhere? For that matter, what else could you call the video for “Oops, I Did It Again”?
• 50 Cent and The Game donated $253,500 to the Boys Choir of Harlem, which was threatened with eviction from the public school where it rehearses, as part of their Yo, We Don’t Really Want to Kill Each Other tour. Critics hailed “The Documentary” by The Game as the best rap album of the year, but Fitty ended up selling more records than anyone else.
• The Rolling Stones toured again. Are we sure that South Korean scientist hasn’t actually cloned new life?
• Bennifer gave way to Brangelina.
• Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey. Apparently, even sordid celebrity marriages have minor-league farm teams.
• Stella gave her groove right back as Terry McMillan dumped her husband — the inspiration for her best-selling novel — after discovering he was gay.
• Kate Moss. So that’s why she’s so skinny.
• Sean Combs admitted the obvious, confessing that all his name changes over the years — Puff Daddy, Puffy, P. Diddy and the sleek, aerodynamic Diddy — were just jokes. “You can call me anything you want, to be honest,” he said. Thanks for clearing that up.
• Charles and Camilla. Ma’am, we knew Princess Diana. Princess Diana was a friend of ours. Ma’am, you’re no Princess Diana.

Against all that, the wedding in December of Elton John and David Furnish was positively old-fashioned.

It sounded good at the time
There was good news for the administration by year’s end as Iraqis carried out a largely peaceful and broadly inclusive election on the way to establishing a new constitution.

A deadly year Seven large natural disasters killed nearly 80,000 people in 2005. This compilation does not include the Asian tsunami of Dec. 26, 2004, which was blamed for more than 231,000 deaths. — Feb. 22: A 6.4-magnitude earthquake hits Zarand, Iran. Deaths: 612 — March 28: An 8.7-magnitude earthquake strikes Indonesia. Deaths: About 1,000 — June: Floods in China. Deaths: 567 — July-August: The heaviest rainfall on record triggers floods and landslides in India. Deaths: More than 1,000 — Aug. 29: Hurricane Katrina slams into Louisiana and Mississippi. Deaths: 1,228 — Oct. 8: A 7.6-magnitude earthquake strikes northeast of Islamabad, Pakistan, and in Indian Kashmir. Deaths: 74,564 — Oct. 8: Hurricane Stan hits Guatemala and El Salvador. Deaths: About 1,000 SOURCE: MSNBC.com research, Reuters

But it was a long and deadly road to get there. The U.S. military death toll topped 2,000 — a symbolic milestone that the White House dismissed as substantively meaningless — and Bush himself put the total number of Iraqis killed at 30,000.

Quotation: “It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong,” Bush said in December, after his administration largely denied exactly that for almost three years.

Diagnosis: circulation problems
Jiggling their legs nervously, media barons watched newspaper readership figures and TV news ratings continue to fall in 2005. They wondered what was wrong.

Well, let’s see:

• More than 2,000 newspaper journalists lost their jobs in 2005, the trade publication Editor & Publisher counted, as publishers slashed their staffs in a panic over profit margins that shockingly fell to only twice the U.S. corporate average. Twenty-five percent profits just don’t go as far as they used to.
• WIBA AM and FM of Madison, Wis., sold the naming rights to their newsroom to Amcore Bank.
• Four syndicated newspaper columnists were outed as being paid shills for corporate or political interests: Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher and Michael McManus took money to promote Bush administration policies under the guise of independent commentary, and Doug Bandow was found to be on the payroll of indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
• ABC shed no tears when Ted Koppel stepped down as anchor of “Nightline.” It replaced him with a three-headed anchor team boasting a British tabloid-TV presenter.
• Without explanation, The Denver Daily News printed the following correction in July: “The Denver Daily News would like to offer a sincere apology for a typo in Wednesday’s Town Talk regarding New Jersey’s proposal to ban smoking in automobiles. It was not the author’s intention to call New Jersey ‘Jew Jersey.’”
• Kenneth Tomlinson was forced out as chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting after an internal investigation concluded that he may have broken the law by trying to force conservative-leaning programs onto the PBS schedule in violation of the CPB board’s federally mandated neutrality.
• NBC cut to tape of last year’s parade rather than report that a float had knocked over a street lamp during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York, injuring two people. Katie Couric, Matt Lauer and Al Roker — who are employees of NBC News — instead read from scripts describing what viewers were seeing in year-old footage.

And finally, on March 9, Dan Rather saddled up his pony and rode the prairies one last time as anchor of “The CBS Evening News.” Rather herded his cornball similes off into the sunset a year earlier than he’d wanted after he stepped up to the plate like a grizzled veteran cleanup hitter and took one in the ribs for his “60 Minutes II” team, which reported during the 2004 presidential campaign that Bush had pulled strings to get out of his National Guard service.

The documents the story rested on turned out most likely to have been faked. CBS blamed Rather’s producer for the sloppy work, but it was Rather’s name on the report, and he said he should have been more vigilant. So, like a salty old peglegged captain with a one-eyed parrot on his shoulder, Dan went down with the ship.

Sure, it was a badly sourced, rushed story that should never have seen the air. But it sounded good at the time.

MORE FROM 2005 YEAR IN REVIEW

2005 Year in Review Section Front

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