The Crucible: Michael Jackson and The Media

Most books 'about' Michael Jackson are not selling as much as you'd think. But there is one that is climbing very high in the Amazon charts: "Michael Jackson: Conspiracy," by Aphrodite Jones, published in 2007, and rejected by every mainstream publisher, because it was not anti-Jackson.

A friend placed it on my doorstep this week, and I will be reviewing it. Jones is a crime reporter (TV, radio, print) who covered the 2004 Jackson trial, and later regretted joining what she felt was an orchestrated media campaign to destroy him, for financial gain. In this book, Jones, according to the cover blurb, "makes amends with what is not only a detailed and accurate account of the entire trial but a scathing indictment against the media for conspiring to distort, dehumanize, and destroy the King of Pop. Jones argues convincingly that the case against Michael Jackson amounted to nothing more than a media-made, tax-paid scandal, and she makes an impassioned call to action for the public at large to think critically about, question the integrity of, and demand the truth in "the news."

(And when we've done that we'll demand that Kim Jong Il transform North Korea into a democracy modeled on Denmark.)  

I hope everybody will, as a conscientious act, buy and read the Jones book, and help push it to #1 on the Amazon list.

Media is organized crime, and it assassinates people for profit. Ishmael Reed has pointed out that it has been a media tradition since the 1830s to peddle bad stories about black people to white audiences, so that they may feel better about their whiteness. 

Today I "went to" The Daily Beast and found an interview with Jackson friend Deepak Chopra. The interview contains an elephant that is right now walking through the media room, unmentioned. He reveals that Jackson was raised as a Jehovas Witness, and was, for most of his life, not only clean from drugs, but drank only water. He began begging Chopra for pain-killing drugs after he came through the witch hunt trial in 2004. Only then.

That is to say: Jackson was killed, not as speculated, by this or that doctor (they were just enablers) but by the media, which crushed him in a Salem trial, ruined his reputation forever, drove him to financial ruin, drove him out of his own home, even out of the country, caused him to become addicted to painkillers, then cashed in on his death with stories about all the other people and forces that supposedly killed him. Note how maniacally they are focusing their coverage on family distrust of the doctor. Chopra has made it abundantly clear what it was that broke Michael Jackson. So far, exactly one of them — Aphrodite Jones — has shown enough courage to step forth and plead guilty.

And I repeat — the publishing industry is implicated too: Every major publishing house refused to "touch" a book that was fair to Jackson, that aimed to tell his side of the story. Since "blood on their hands" is one of their favorite phrases, let's use it now.

Jackson knew what was being done to him, and tried, artistically, to exorcise it. By the mid-90s, Jackson mockery was already a robust industry and tradition. His work, starting around this time, revealed his rage at the Orwellian media machine, such as in the video of the song "Tabloid Junkie," from the 1995 album HIStory where Jackson dances on a stage next to a skeleton, and walks with his head bowed past the hordes of media vultures, his posture suggesting prayer, resignation, mirth. It's a very poignant video. Media "critics" of course relegate it to Jackson's "combative," or "paranoid" or even "self-obsessed" phase. That's part of it too. You're not allowed to react when they torture you, and when you do react, they pretend your reaction is sui generis — nothing to do with their deeds. His rightful rage and despair now just more evidence of how "wacko" he was the whole time. It's gas lighting raised to the level of slow murder. The murder, when it is completed, appears to be a suicide.

On Amazon, in the review section for one of the tabloid books about MJ, I found the following excerpts of a cross examination of one of the authors of "The Man Behind The Mask" by Bob Jones and Stacey Brown. Jackson attorney Thomas Mesereau manages to press from Brown, like oil from an olive pit, the truth about a particular rumor about "licking." This is what we mean by the truth barrier:

Comments (6)

Write comment