HEE-HEE! Shamone!

Michael Jackson on stage with guitarist Jennifer Batten, 1988

Michael Jackson: It’s Time For Outlets to Take Responsibility in Covering the Rock Star
By Charles Thomson
The Huffington Post, March 2, 2010

Last week Michael Jackson’s guitarist discredited widely reported allegations about the star’s behaviour on the road. So why is the media refusing to publish her comments? British writer Charles Thomson explores media bias against black music’s biggest star.

Aging glam-rocker Gene Simmons made international headlines last month when he claimed to know that Michael Jackson had molested children. In an interview with Classic Rock, Simmons alleged that Jackson was on tape ordering alcohol for children and that during the star’s 2005 trial a travel agent had testified to importing Brazilian boys for Jackson’s amusement. He also claimed that a musician friend had quit a Jackson tour after seeing ‘boys coming out of the hotel rooms.’

What followed was a classic example of copy and paste journalism. Within hours the story had been duplicated by hundreds of blogs, forums and news websites from Australia to India to the USA. None of them had fact-checked the story before they re-hosted it. Jackson was never on tape ordering alcohol for children. There was never any testimony during his trial about young Brazilian boys. Both of these claims were easily disproven by trial transcripts.

As a relative Jackson expert, I was also unaware of any musician ever leaving one of the singer’s tours midway through. So when I sat down a fortnight ago for an interview with Jackson’s long serving tour guitarist Jennifer Batten, I ran the story by her.

She told me that no musician had ever quit a Jackson tour. Two musicians had been fired but both were let go before the show hit the road, so they couldn’t possibly have witnessed anything going on inside hotels.

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→ Download the complete FBI files from FBI.gov ←

Michael Jackson: The Shocking Truth in the FBI Files
By Deborah Ffrench
Sawf News, January 13, 2010

The one question I hear no one asking in the press or blogland in general is why was Michael Jackson taking an extreme drug? What made a relatively fit man known for abstention from the early part of his career until the mid-1990s, end his days in a made-to-measure trauma room?

A star by the age of 10, catapulted into super-stardom after the success of his first two solo albums, his dominance in the music industry coincided with the multimedia explosion of the late 1980s. One of the first of the new breed of artists to fully explore the potential of synergistic promotion of product as a vehicle to reach new audiences, by 1991 Michael Jackson, the brand, had penetrated the consciousness of the entire developed and most of the undeveloped world.

With such unprecedented accessibility came also unprecedented pressure. Pressure to maintain and exceed his own standards, constant deconstruction by the press, and emotional isolation as the gilded chains of a life lived under the microscope bound ever tighter. There is no room here to list the enormous contribution he made to the lives of children all over the globe. His efforts are a matter of public record and the information regarding them is easily obtainable on the web.

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→ Download the complete FBI files from FBI.gov ←

FBI Files Support Jackson’s Innocence; Media Reports Otherwise
By Charles Thomson
January 2, 2010

I should begin by saying that the release of Michael Jackson’s FBI file was not motivated by any desire to damage his legacy or smear his name. Many of Jackson’s fans are understandably distrustful of the establishment which repeatedly pursued the star on trumped up charges, but the release of Jackson’s FBI file is no conspiracy. Jackson’s file was requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and I was one of those who requested it.

The FOIA allows members of the public to request classified or unattainable information held by any public body. The act is designed to uphold democracy by allowing citizens to scrutinize anything from local government budget reports to dossiers on UFO sightings. Requests can only be turned down for a handful of reasons, including privacy issues and national security.

When I requested Michael Jackson’s FBI file, I wasn’t even sure he had one. If he did, I had no idea what I would find in it. In Sammy Davis Jr’s I found nothing but countless investigations into death threats sent to the singer. In James Brown’s, however, I found an explosive re-telling of his infamous 1988 “car chase”, which showed the authorities in a very poor light and contained numerous accusations of police brutality.

The FBI released roughly 300 pages on Jackson, constituting less than half of his overall file. The reason behind the withholding of the other half is yet to be made public, but it most likely consists of information on Jackson’s dealings with still living figures of interest to the bureau—civil rights activists like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and the various Middle Eastern businessmen and royals Michael Jackson befriended.

The released half of Jackson’s FBI file supports the star’s innocence entirely. Perhaps most notably, a lengthy report shows that when Jackson’s Neverland Ranch was raided in 2003, the FBI went over every computer seized from the property with a fine tooth comb looking for any incriminating files or internet activity. Jackson’s file contained individual summaries of the FBI’s findings for each of the 16 computers. Scrawled in capital letters across each of those 16 reports— “NOTHING”.

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