I’ve never met Dr. Conrad Murray, the cardiologist who administered CPR on Michael Jackson just before his death. I have no reason—other than fairness—to hold any brief for him. And yet I think his treatment in the first 10 days of the Jackson case is immensely revealing about the way TV news does business, especially cable TV news.

I have watched Jackson and Jackson aftermath coverage everywhere. It is, obviously, going to overwhelm TV today on the day of his memorial service in L.A.’s Staples Center. And it is literally true that Sunday was the first mention I heard of one of the most salient probabilities in Dr. Murray’s role. It was on prosecutrix Nancy Grace’s nightly harangue, where finally— FINALLY—Grace and her minions referred to Murray’s function in the whole affair as AEG Live’s attempt at a policy of “Cover Your Assets.”

AEG Live is the major entertainment conglomerate (it also owns the Staples Center) that was going to sponsor Jackson’s 50 Concert “Comeback Tour” in England.

Do the math: You’re a massive entertainment company. Before you go into huge business with a legendarily peculiar star/genius, you’re going to know everything possible about his health, mental and physical. If you don’t know already that he is thought to have been insanely overprescribed for years by a platoon of Dr. Feelgoods on most known continents, you discover it quickly.

Two crucial things have been widely reported as fact about Murray: that he was to be paid by AEG Live ($150,000 a month) to be Jackson’s on-call physician before and through the tour but that he hadn’t been paid yet. Jackson’s signature, it’s been reported, was also required on the contract and he hadn’t signed it yet.

It doesn’t take a genius to imagine that AEG Live wanted Murray on the case more than Jackson did. Nor do you have to be intimately acquainted with junkies, addicts and substance abusers to know that they will ingest just about anything they can get their hands on, especially if they’ve been doing so for years.

Rather than being a dangerous Dr. Feelgood himself, it seems logical he was the guy hired to clean up the damage done by countless other Dr. Feelgoods for decades and head off at the pass any further damage.

And yet everywhere Murray’s name came up, the context was suspicion. Let me freely admit here that I could be 100 percent wrong and he could yet turn up on the creepy crawly underside of the police investigation. It seems to me vastly more likely that the world’s media were simply seizing on the one medical practitioner whose name they knew and dumping suspicion and abuse on it rather than simply think the known facts all the way through.

And that’s S.O.P. for TV news in our time—prejudice before the facts come in, to feed the easiest and most inflammatory story rather than the logical one.

Similarly, remember all that initial coverage of the crash of Flight 3407 in Clarence Center? All of it blamed Buffalo “weather.”

Never mind that I, for instance, have been flying in and out of very tough Buffalo winters for 40 years. Or that my parents did the same thing with impunity in the ’40s and ’50s when one assumes planes weren’t as advanced. It had to be Buffalo weather that was somehow at fault. I watched all this in a cold, silent fury.

That’s because the very first thing I thought was that there must have been pilot error or mechanical failure. It turned out I was tragically right.

But so might anyone have been who simply dealt with the singularity of that awful crash in Buffalo history. But then why actually think things all the way through when prejudice is so easy and fills time just as well?