if we stop watching and stop reading all this show biz foolery vanishes. big 'if' as daisy america watches, gob agape, as tv tabloids parade the latest sell-a-pretty triflings.

First of all, I did not watch the bathos-a-thon. I don't dislike Michael Jackson, but he didn't deserve half of the hooplah he got. It was obscene.

On the pimping-out of Paris Jackson, it did not take me any time at all to react to THAT. I thought that it was OBSCENE and HEARTLESS.

Who on earth would take an 11 year old child and have her make a eulogy for a dead parent? Most ADULTS can't even handle that, much less a child. Plus, they were pimping her out in front of MILLIONS of people all over the world.

I can not BELIEVE how OBSCENE that was. I immediately found it to be totally and completely DISGUSTING.

But it also may shed light on why Michael Jackson was such a neurotic wacko. With parents like that, how could anyone possibly come out sane? Grandparents who pimp out their 11 year old grandaughter without any regard whatsover to her feelings?

But I guess I'm different than the author. I was not able to stomach one minute of the bathos-a-thon.

I also find it interesting that Robert S. McNamara just died and nobody paid much attention. I guess he was not even a FRACTION as important and influential as the King of Popsickles.

Let's just hope that the MSM idiots don't keep blathering about Michael Jackson for another 2 years.

The most OBSCENE exploitation I have ever seen .... Who on earth would take an 11 year old child and have her make a eulogy for a dead parent?

Were you similarly outraged when 8-yr-old Bindi Irwin received a standing ovation after reading a tribute to her father at his memorial, a scene that was voted as television moment of the year in Australia? Was she similarly being "pimped out"?

TERRI IRWIN: "She said good-bye to her father. She did a little card. She said what she wanted to say. She had tears. She talked to me every day about her dad. She talked to her dad. And she said, "I want to be at the memorial and say something about my daddy." She wrote it herself. We sat down with a dictaphone and she talked into the dictaphone first. And then wrote it down and then I helped her on the computer to type it out so she said, "I don't want to make any mistakes."

http://www.usatoday.com/life/2006-09-26-terri-irwin-transcript_x.htm

Now tell us how obscene and heartless that was.

Salon has outscummed even TMZ, O'Reilly, Beck, Geraldo, Povich and Elliot in the Morning.

Please change the name of SALON, to TAINT SALON.

Because it Tain't Salon anymore.

BIndy was also shamelessly exploited, but presumably had a least some kind of normal childhood compared to the Jackson "acquisitions" who were used as props for MJ's PR spin machine.

The Irwin production company, its employees and the network are far more important than a child being a child so now she has her own TV show.

That is abuse, although nobody cares and she will make a lot of money and what do we value in our culture anyway, money or childhood?

One tends to believe that the mother will do the right thing, but Bindi is a celebrity with her own TV show and fan base.

We really want to see children in adult roles. Why? Probably because their are laws to protect chimps and their careers are more short-lived.

Hey, Britney Spears turned out just fine, right?

You have no idea what stage managing is. You could at least refrain from using the term incorrectly TWICE in one paragraph.

You bet the whole thing was stage managed--as is ANY complex event in which people more or less look like they know what they're doing and why.

Whether or not Paris's display of grief was coerced is another matter entirely, but it didn't look like it to me. It looked like she simply lost control.

Or, you know, it got darker as he got older. That's a rare rare occurance of course...

Not particularly. Every single man in my family for the past 3 generations was born blond and turned brunette by adolescence.

I can't believe I'm seeing this kind of thing on Salon. When did you become The Daily Mail?

Look, I'm a music journalist, and I haven't written a single thing about Jackson. Why? Because the whole thing is so ghoulish that I want no part of it.

Even if I was going to write about it, though, I wouldn't stoop to writing about the assumed motivations of his children. The children of celebrities should be off limits. It's one thing to write about adults who're in the public eye by choice, but their kids did not make that choice. They deserve to be left alone.

Even if the Jackson family are using these children to rehabilitate Michael's image, that doesn't mean that the media needs to play along with it. The proper response is to give these kids as much privacy as we can, and not to use them to make a point about their father.

Hell, because of my job I actually know of at least one case of a celebrity who the public doesn't even know has children, and though I've seen his kids myself, I would never, ever out them or publicly acknowledge their existance. Even though I personally dislike the guy. Kids are not objects to be used to hurt their parents with, they're actual people, people who're too young to deal with all this media crap.

No matter what you think of Michael Jackson it doesn't justify using his children to make whatever point about him you want to make, or to generate page hits. Write about him if you must, but leave those children alone.

Or, you know, it got darker as he got older. That's a rare rare occurrence of course...

Not particularly. Every single man in my family for the past 3 generations was born blond and turned brunette by adolescence.

I definitely need a "snark font" or something -- I was being sarcastic. Everyone in my family too.

(There is a very gifted colorist who gets a couple of hundred bucks a pop to make my hair a tenth as golden as it was when I was a girl. Peoples hair getting darker as they age is putting his kids through college.)