I thought the programme itself was poorly conceived, set up and edited. If Bashir had just sat down and interviewed Jackson for a long time, a la Diana, I think we would have been able to learn more. Also, if he had done his research and been well-briefed, he could have done a lot more to excavate the truth when Jackson was coming out with nonsense such as the vitiligo story (it doesn’t make you go procelain white all over), or only having had two nose operations (yeah, right).
While there is a place for ‘filler’ images of Jackson climbing trees or shopping, these are just staged PR pieces that tell us nothing we haven’t heard a zillion times from the Jackson PR machine. I wanted Bashir to get tougher, and ask more searching questions, but he only even began to do this on the ‘sleeping with boys’ issue. Even then, his ‘confrontation’ was fairly weak, since it effectively amounted to pulling an incredulous expression and asking ‘Isn’t that a bit weird?’. Sequences such as ‘Jackson teaches Bashir to moon walk’ were just absurd, and a gross waste of the airtime available. By all means do that stuff, if it’s part of bulding rapport with the interviewee, but there’s no need to include it in the final edit.
Jackson told two incompatible stories about the mother of his third child, so we know his veracity is, um, shaky at best. I can’t believe Bashir had this golden opportunity to nail down the truth about Jackson’s weirder than weird appearance and behaviour, and blew it.
Jackson said his fans wanted to see the baby so he showed them the baby. “Yes, Mr Jackson, but it’s possible to do this without holding the baby over the edge of the balcony.” Jackson said nobody makes a fuss when white people gain a tan and look brown. “Yes Mr Jackson, but that’s part of a natural process that everyone understands, and it’s non-permanent. Whereas your own transformation suggests intentional skin-bleaching, which some commentators think shows you aren’t proud of your race. Can we get to the bottom of this?”.
Jackson claimed it’s just vitiligo. “No, Mr Jackson, that may be part of the answer, but it can’t be all of it, because vitiligo doesn’t produce a change either as comprehensive or as pure as your own apparent change”. Jackson said he had never had any plastic surgery except for two nose jobs. “Not so, Mr Jackson, because here are some clear 10x8 photos showing there have been manifest changes to your eyelids, cheeks, chin and lips over the past 20 years which experts in the field of plastic surgery tell us are strongly indicative of surgical alteration and cannot credibly be attributed to the ageing process”.
Bashir didn’t pursue any of these lines of enquiry, and took the lazy reporter’s role of “I’ll let the interviewee stand or fall through his own words”.
The tabloids this morning here in the UK have been their usual nasty, spiteful selves, wilfully mis-representing and mis-construing the whole ‘sleeps with boys’ issue and proving once again that a nation gets the press it deserves. They only print it because people buy it. More fools we for accepting such garbage as if it’s got any place in a “news” paper.
It will be interesting to read about the reactions once this gets shown in the States.