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The long-distance reporting about Michael Jackson’s death, and the swarm of press people soon descending from elsewhere, inevitably made for some goofy geography. The mansion Jackson rented was in Holmby Hills, but who in most of the rest of the world knows Holmby Hills?
So the exact location of the Jackson house that appeared on the TV screens and Web sites ranged and changed, almost all over the map. It was the broadcast version of rushing frantically, like Keystone Kops, from Bel-Air to Hollywood to Los Angeles to … what’s that place again? Holmby Hills?
The default assumption by some out-of-towners seemed to be that a) all rich people live in Beverly Hills, and b) Michael Jackson was rich, therefore c) Michael Jackson lived in Beverly Hills.
L.A. is so vast that even some residents admit they don’t know what city they live in. Even harder for outsiders to appreciate is just how much territory L.A. actually encompasses, from poor neighborhoods of the northeast end of the San Fernando Valley, to the harbor at San Pedro, to Holmby Hills, which is just one more neighborhood -- albeit a very rich one -- within the limits of the City of Los Angeles. Would it help to know that Walt Disney lived there? Or this hint -- the Playboy Mansion is there. But Beverly Hills, its own city, is not part of the city of L.A. Perfectly clear now?
Our elusive geography makes for some amusing mistakes. After the space shuttle landed at Edwards Air Force base in October 1994, the New York Times headline was ‘After Detour to California, Shuttle Returns to Earth.’ The newspaper’s magazine asked a month later whether the new place to rival New York’s 42nd Street as a world capital could be ‘’the intersection of the Hollywood and Santa Monica Freeways.’’ Maybe -- if that intersection existed. (The closest you could suggest to it is the East L.A. interchange, where, somewhere in the complex, the 101 Freeway slides into the Golden State/Santa Ana Freeway, the 5, as the San Bernardino Freeway takes flight to the east -- but not to the west, to Santa Monica.)
The most egregious Michael Jackson geo-error of the story: A colleague watching one of those instant canned network documentaries the night of Jackson’s death heard Neverland Ranch, in Santa Barbara County, relocated by the magic of network television to ‘’Northern California.’