Michael Jackson & the Media (Thought-provoking perspective from the U.K.)

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/michael-jackson-bad-and-very-dangerous-1731258.html

From John Niven, in the UK's "The Independent"

Then there was the playwright and singer Kwame Kwei Armah, who trotted out the old chestnut about how we must "separate the art from the artist" before going on to talk about how there was "Michael the artist and then there was Michael the celebrity with ... with all the, the attendant problems that came with it".

He went on to say, unchallenged, how there were different Michaels and that he wanted to remember "the Michael who made Thriller and Off the Wall". There were also, presumably, different Hitlers. Some people might like to remember the Hitler who reunited Germany and brought back full employment. Not the later Hitlers, with their "attendant problems". The problem is that people keep on bringing up all the bloody stuff that these other later, more troublesome, Hitlers did. You can probably make a claim for several different Peter Sutcliffes, one of whom was a model employee who was very nice to his mother. The problem is....

Another Newsnight guest called Jacqueline Springer picked up on the "different Michaels" point and ran out of the park with it. She talked about the concept of a "cookie-cutter Michael": you simply "take the bits you want and remember them". Aww diddums. Lovely. I'll take the songwriter and the dancer and just leave the paedophile thanks very much!

Finally, Kirsty Wark spoke up. Here we go, I thought. "So you wouldn't choose to remember the Michael who – say – dangled his baby off a window ledge." Wow. Nailed him there, Kirsty. Much has been made of this (of course idiotic) bit of horseplay, but, truth, you see fathers taking greater risks with their kids in London everyday as they whizz along with their children perched precariously on bicycles. Less of them, I imagine, fill kids full of booze, get them to watch online pornography and then offer to show them how to masturbate. I'd have thought the latter scenario more worthy of examination. To go back to the Nazi analogy: our Kirsty, having the chance to bring up the concentration camps, cuts in with a reference to one of the other pesky Hitlers dishonouring the Nazi/Soviet pact.

And this was Newsnight. I wanted to weep.