Jackson’s Slurs Go Unchallenged
Like many of the 60 million people who had nothing better to do last week than watch Diane Sawyer’s interview with America’s most adorable newlyweds, I’d just as soon forget the whole thing. But I can’t, and neither can anyone at the other end of my phone.
People are angry about this curious hour of network television, though not for the reason you’d expect.
In retrospect what’s most appalling is not that Michael Jackson wrote a song wielding the words “Jew” and “kike” as verbs, but that the best news organization in television, ABC, could be so easily enlisted in merchandising this product to a mass audience.
If Barbra Streisand had written a humanitarian song, as Jackson claims to have done, using the word “nigger,” would Sawyer have tossed her only a couple of softball questions?
If the singer defended herself by saying that some of her best friends were black - say, her maids and her cook - would Sawyer have greeted the comment with a straight face and no follow-up inquiry? That’s what Sawyer did when Jackson protested that some of his best friends were Jews, starting with his lawyers and accountants.
Those who know Jackson well in show business - and even his most prominent associates find him remote - agree with Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League that the singer’s apology for his incendiary language can be taken “at his word.”
No one seems to think Jackson is a hater, though he is routinely described as isolated and dopey - a big talent and stunted intellect surrounded by yes-men who aren’t going to question his taste in lyrics or sleepover guests.
What is harder to fathom, even in this anythinggoes age, is that Sony would let Jackson’s “Jew me, sue me” pass unremarked on the year’s most conspicuous recording, and that “Prime Time Live” would then shill for Sony.
“It shows how irresponsible people will be if you make the money large enough,” said one recording-industry executive, sounding not unlike Bob Dole.
The money is very big - for both Sony and ABC. The Japanese entertainment giant is spending $30 million just to promote “HIStory,” as the new double album is called, and is hoping for international sales approaching $1 billion.
ABC, meanwhile, was bucking for the ad dollars that come with the highest ratings - which “Prime Time Live” indeed delivered last week.
No one expects a commercial TV network to forgo the ratings race or superstar interviews. The question raised by Sawyer’s show is why it postured as news - complete with the interviewer gratuitously calling herself a “serious journalist” - when journalistic standards were so promiscuously abandoned.
“Prime Time Live” was a free ad for Jackson’s wares. It was shot on a glamorous set at the Sony film studios and featured the new album’s fourminute video and theatrical trailer; every segment was framed with musical, visual and verbal plugs for Jackson or Sony itself.
Sawyer was so far in the tank with her subject that she even dressed in a black outfit matching his for a hokey opening sequence.
In the ostensibly no-holds-barred questioning that occasionally interrupted the promotional segments, Sawyer consistently let Jackson off the hook. “You’ve been cleared of all the charges, I want to make that clear,” she said. But Thomas Sneddon, the Santa Barbara, Calif., district attorney, says his child-molestation investigation, though inactive, is “not closed” and that Jackson “has not been cleared.”
If Sawyer had done her homework, she might also have asked Jackson if his inflammatory song was a publicity stunt, designed to win more ink at a time when his commercial invulnerability is in question.
As one biographer, J. Randy Taraborrelli, documents, Jackson is a student of P.T. Barnum and a past master of PR hoaxes. Promoting his last album in 1991, the singer stirred controversy with a prime-time video featuring gratuitous violence and simulated masturbation - then immediately issued an apology uncannily similar to last week’s.
Is it possible that this time Jackson cynically seized upon anti-Semitism as an attentiongrabbing selling tool? That’s a great story, but it’ll have to be tracked down by serious journalists who are not part of Sony’s sales force.