I think I've learned two things by following as much of the Michael Jackson trial as I followed. One is how unbelievably rotten the news coverage of something like this is. You may or may not agree with the verdict but clearly those jurors, like the ones in the Robert Blake case and maybe a few others, did not experience the trial that was described to us by the folks covering it. It's like the story of the blind men all trying to describe an elephant except in this case, you have blind reporters and most of them had their heads up the elephant's ass.
I was tuning in Court TV for five minutes every few hours since "Verdict Watch" commenced and I happened to be watching today when, right in the middle of a story about the prosecution of that Ku Klux Klan member in Mississippi, they cut in to say…well, not that a verdict had been reached. Court TV, with all its correspondents on the scene and all its boasts about providing the most extensive inside coverage, cut in to say that other networks were reporting there was a verdict. A few minutes later, they confirmed it, thereby announcing they'd been scooped.
That had to be embarrassing but not as embarrassing as what followed. That's when we began to get the cavalcade of predictions, almost all of which were dead wrong. I flipped around — CNN, Fox, MSNBC, back to Court TV — and I think I heard one person say Michael would be found "not guilty" on all counts, and even that wasn't so much a prediction as the pundit saying that was what should happen. The consensus was for conviction on some of the charges, usually either all the molestation counts or all the alcohol-related ones. After the jury acquitted on all ten indictments, I scanned the same channels and heard a lot of the same people say, "Well, I expected this," even though an hour earlier, their big debate had been whether Michael could be taken immediately into custody or allowed to post an Appeals Bond. Nancy Grace, the anchor on Court TV, even said of the outcome, "I'm not surprised," after earlier insisting there was no way a jury could fail to convict on some allegations of sexual misconduct.
So that's one thing I learned…not to listen to these people. The other is not so much a lesson as an observation.
A lot of people are saying, or will say, "Michael Jackson was found Not Guilty by reason of Celebrity," and that in California, you can get away with murder (or child rape) if you're famous. I don't know how much truth there is to this, but it occurs to me that there's also a downside to being a famous person who goes on trial.
Before the murders in Brentwood, O.J. Simpson was a guy who lived on his reputation and likability, essentially making a very good income as a famous, beloved football hero. After the acquittal, there was a lot of talk about how he'd build back that fame and fortune with a well-managed campaign of public appearances, book deals, interviews, etc. Anyone remember the big pay-per-view interrogation to be conducted by Larry King? The one they said was certain to net Simpson upwards of seven million clams? Never happened. The closest they came was an anemic VHS tape that sold next to nothing. (I have a copy purchased on eBay for two bucks. It's pretty awful.)
It turned out — and it must have come as a shock to Simpson — that there was no market out there for O.J. None. I remember the guy who bankrolled the tape appearing on Larry King Live, confidently projecting it would be the best-selling videotape of all time. King pointed out that something like 65% of Americans thought Simpson was guilty and might not want to give him money. The producer said, okay, fine. But if even 5% of the remaining 35% buy the tape, it'll make a fortune. Well, it didn't. Total flop. It turned out that even people who thought O.J. didn't do it — check that: people who told pollsters they thought O.J. didn't do it — wouldn't spend money on him. That's why there's been no book by Simpson, no movie (as promised) to give his side of the story, no big comeback. The public has placed him in a kind of purgatory, shunning him, yelling at him when they see him in public, and refusing to allow him to return to his former life as a much-loved star.
I am by no means suggesting that that kind of punishment is an adequate substitute for a proper guilty verdict and a sentence of many decades behinds bars. But it's also not nothing.
Simpson lost his home, his fame, his career, most of his money — all things that one assumes mattered a lot to him. Maybe he did escape long-term incarceration because he was a celebrity…but Celebrity Justice can also involve that other kind of penalty. If a plumber is accused of murder, tried and acquitted, he can go back to fixing toilets. O.J. couldn't go back to sportscasting, doing rent-a-car ads and appearing in bad movie roles.
It's not exactly the same with Michael Jackson. There are still folks out there who love him and who'll buy his albums and attend his concerts, but there aren't as many of them as there used to be and their number will go down, not up. Even if a lot of folks feel that this particular case did not merit a Guilty verdict, they've also decided that his rating on the Creepy Index has risen to a level that can no longer be overlooked because he dances well.
Since I can't do any worse than Nancy Grace did this afternoon, I'm going to make a prediction about Michael. I predict he's going to make a brief comeback — maybe a tour, maybe reuniting with his brothers — but eventually, it's all going to fizzle. The folks who believe he's innocent aren't going to support him for long, or support him with money, just as the folks who believed O.J. was framed didn't support him enough to allow for any sort of post-verdict career. Jackson may do okay in other countries, but his fans in the U.S. are just going to get tired of rationalizing the sleepovers and defending the weirdness. Eventually, he'll receive the same kind of Celebrity Justice that Simpson received…and no, it's not real justice. But it's better than nothing.