The Sun once again proves to be tabloid trash

[jenwren20]

i'm so unbelievably angry about this. :evil:
And i'm ESPECIALLY angry that other so-called "news" services have picked the sun's article up and ran with it, like you say souza " snowball journalism".
This is just like how the story of MJ's "death" was spread.
Also, the same way Jeff Goldblum was reported "to have died" on the news the same day before FACTS had been checked.
Really, we shouldn't expect anything less from them, which is really SAD.

I don't want to stick up for the "journalist" from the sun, but what if she really submitted one story and it got edited as something else?

[voiceforthesilent]

i'm so unbelievably angry about this. :evil:
And i'm ESPECIALLY angry that other so-called "news" services have picked the sun's article up and ran with it, like you say souza " snowball journalism".
This is just like how the story of MJ's "death" was spread.
Also, the same way Jeff Goldblum was reported "to have died" on the news the same day before FACTS had been checked.
Really, we shouldn't expect anything less from them, which is really SAD.

I don't want to stick up for the "journalist" from the sun, but what if she really submitted one story and it got edited as something else?

If she did she is welcome to respond to someone's email with that information. I don't believe she will. Maybe a good will come from this as people will view the information out of curiosity and learn the whole truth and nothing but the truth instead of the distorted truth.

[loma]

I literally punched the screen, and my mind clocked out when I saw the word
"Jacko".
But it made me laugh out loud.
This is so disgusting it's funny. Maybe it's just my sense of humor.

[SunShine]

this is how MJ feels about the way this was changed.

[AnnieIsNotOK]

Bravo to hesouttamylife and voiceforthesilent ,I love you both!!

[LovetheGlove]

I need to say that I work as a freelance writer and all the information that I collect does not end up in an article.  The writer has a specific topic that he or she writes about and they collect as much information as they can. Even within one topic, everything cannot be covered.  Often, edits are made at the last minute to keep an article at a certain word count.  It may not even be done by the author, but the editor.

They also have to decide what is going to sell-remember it's a business. The story about Dave Dave moves people and it does show MJ in a very wonderful light.  He was touched by this horrific story and befriended this boy who was betrayed by his father.

I don't read The Sun or any other tabloids so I don't know much about them specifically, but I am just giving you a writer's perspective.

Peace/Love/Hoax/Michael

LovetheGlove

[CrazyBanana]

What a load of crap!!!!
I dunno why but this reminds me of the movie his girl friday that MJ used in TII...although I dont think the journalists in the movie were like that...

[jenwren20]

guys, just to let you know i have emailed ninemsn which is a "news" site in Australia to complain about their posting and version of this story.

"Please feel free to check into stories before posting on your website as "fact" instead of ripping headlines from untrustworthy sources.
Although your track record isn't exactly great, is it?
Remember Richard Wilkin's announcement on the morning of MJ's "death" that actor Jeff Goldblum had tragically been killed in NZ???
Hmmmmmm......
If you would care to check this story further, please visit the website You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login and see the original article as it was emailed to the "journalist" at The Sun and compare to the article that actually transpired.
This kind of snowball journalism has gone on for long enough and will no longer be tolerated by the general public."

Hopefully i wont be the only one, maybe the message will get through to someone.......

[voiceforthesilent]

I need to say that I work as a freelance writer and all the information that I collect does not end up in an article.  The writer has a specific topic that he or she writes about and they collect as much information as they can. Even within one topic, everything cannot be covered.  Often, edits are made at the last minute to keep an article at a certain word count.  It may not even be done by the author, but the editor.

They also have to decide what is going to sell-remember it's a business. The story about Dave Dave moves people and it does show MJ in a very wonderful light.  He was touched by this horrific story and befriended this boy who was betrayed by his father.

I don't read The Sun or any other tabloids so I don't know much about them specifically, but I am just giving you a writer's perspective.

Peace/Love/Hoax/Michael

LovetheGlove

I can understand your point but the truth can't be ignored that this writer totally distorted the information that was given to her. She was even given the word count that was needed so it shouldn't have had to be reduced much, if any. Yes, there was a smidgen of positive but it will be overshadowed by the joke that the Sun made this story out to be. It reminds me of Kurt Warner, retired NFL quarterback. He is very religious and makes sure in every interview to thank God in a place in the interview where it cannot be edited out because he knows they will do it if given the opportunity. He doesn't give them that opportunity. Neither should these writers. They can create stories in such a way that even when edited it will be portrayed in the proper light. I appreciate that there are writers like yourself that understand what Michael is all about. L.O.V.E.

[voiceforthesilent]

guys, just to let you know i have emailed ninemsn which is a "news" site in Australia to complain about their posting and version of this story.

"Please feel free to check into stories before posting on your website as "fact" instead of ripping headlines from untrustworthy sources.
Although your track record isn't exactly great, is it?
Remember Richard Wilkin's announcement on the morning of MJ's "death" that actor Jeff Goldblum had tragically been killed in NZ???
Hmmmmmm......
If you would care to check this story further, please visit the website You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login and see the original article as it was emailed to the "journalist" at The Sun and compare to the article that actually transpired.
This kind of snowball journalism has gone on for long enough and will no longer be tolerated by the general public."

Hopefully i wont be the only one, maybe the message will get through to someone.......

BRAVO!!!! Together we CAN make a difference. Do you know what else I love? I love the fact that every letter sent uses proper English, proper spelling, and proper grammar, showing them the true intelligence of readers on this site. Blessings!

[sk2001]

Omg! 1st of all hats off to mo, soauza and the Dear friends on here who gave them a piece of their mind! I'll be next as soon as I finish typing this up
you know guys I was thinking- since we all belive in truth and spreading it, maybe there is something we can do afterall. I am amazed to see the reactions of all the readers that read this article. So my idea based on this is as follows:
we are the ones who believe in investigatingthe truth and only the truth. There's no one to stop us from doing that. And we are all from different parts ofthe world, can we alL create our own magazine/ newspaper? We'll help each other out and Cover each others back.  This forum can be our round table, our editing room and we will only publish what we investigate whatever the topic may be. Many people have and will always call us crazy but I can bet you our truths and investigations will make them atleast think about it. We arethe believers coz we believe in mankind and unity and the truth. We can call it 'the trrooot will always prevail' or something lol but seriously.
What say ??

[LovetheGlove]

I can understand your point but the truth can't be ignored that this writer totally distorted the information that was given to her. She was even given the word count that was needed so it shouldn't have had to be reduced much, if any. Yes, there was a smidgen of positive but it will be overshadowed by the joke that the Sun made this story out to be. It reminds me of Kurt Warner, retired NFL quarterback. He is very religious and makes sure in every interview to thank God in a place in the interview where it cannot be edited out because he knows they will do it if given the opportunity. He doesn't give them that opportunity. Neither should these writers. They can create stories in such a way that even when edited it will be portrayed in the proper light. I appreciate that there are writers like yourself that understand what Michael is all about. L.O.V.E.

What it looks like is the writer found an interesting aspect of the hoax investigation-the Dave Dave theory. I as a writer have been writing one something and changed my angle when I found something more interesting. It's the same topic, different aspect. It is well known that articles and interviews are edited.  I don't know what her word count is, but maybe that changed.  

We also need to remember as hoaxers we are not mainstream and we will be mocked. Remember, we are very much in the minority compared to the rest of the population. Just because we as hoaxers are surrounded by other hoaxers doesn't mean that everyone else out there is just going to accept our ideas.

Peace/Love/Hoax/Michael

LovetheGlove

[Tina K.]

Mo and Souza, you did a great job. just sad how everything got twisted.... The Sun just thinks of selling papers, they don't care about the truth, very sad.

[*Mo*]

I need to say that I work as a freelance writer and all the information that I collect does not end up in an article.  The writer has a specific topic that he or she writes about and they collect as much information as they can. Even within one topic, everything cannot be covered.  Often, edits are made at the last minute to keep an article at a certain word count.  It may not even be done by the author, but the editor.

They also have to decide what is going to sell-remember it's a business. The story about Dave Dave moves people and it does show MJ in a very wonderful light.  He was touched by this horrific story and befriended this boy who was betrayed by his father.

I don't read The Sun or any other tabloids so I don't know much about them specifically, but I am just giving you a writer's perspective.

Peace/Love/Hoax/Michael

LovetheGlove

Did you read the complete email correspondence we had with Jenna Sloan?  If so, you would have read that she has quite a few questions in her first email, which we all answered.  On the 6th, she emailed us the following:

"It would be great for you to write a piece, but we'd only need around 500 words-I'd hate for you to write something lengthy and it be cut down drastically.
I can't give you copy approval of the whole piece I'm afraid-we never send out our work to anybody before it's published due to copyright restrictions in place here. However, I'll treat your piece as approved copy and I gurantee your words will not be twisted or changed.".

Then, on the 10th, she emailed this:

"Just putting my piece together and I'm not clear on something so wanted to double check with you. Do you and Mo believe that Micheal Jackson is in hiding somewhere and appearing as Dave Dave sporadically, or do you believe he's living day to day life as Dave Dave?".

Now where is the 500 words piece we wrote and sent to her, which she would treat as approved copy?  Where's all the other information she asked us for?  Instead she only focused on Dave Dave, and left out all the other information she asked for and with which we provided her.  We made an agreement in writing, which she broke, just to publish a sensationalized story of which we clearly warned her up front we would not accept.

She clearly requested for our cooperation and information under false pretenses.  She let us believe that her intentions were sincere, and she wrote to us that "this needs to be a balanced article".  Well, I'm still waiting for her "balanced article".

[darkchild]

Mo and Souza, I think the Sun did the same thing to Charles Thomson @ the Huffington Post as well. I have bolded the information in the article.  The Sun did the same thing to him a little more than two months. See, tabloid media, your cover is finally being blown.  Thank you, Mo and Souza for standing for L.O.V.E.  You are doing the Lord's work and spreading love across the globle.  God bless everyone for your constant eagle eyes, your love, your support for our beloved MJ.  Tabloid media, MJ is an angel walking the earth in the name of love.  MJ, I love you with all my heart.
We will never stop loving you and defending you!xxxxxxx I am so sick and tired of the lies in the name of money. It hurts me very much that our angel and our hero, MJ, was tortured by the tabloid press.    

God bless all for your beautiful letters of support for MJ.  MJ, if you can read our posts, please know that we love you so much.  All we want is you back.  Know that you are loved unconditionally all your fans across the globe.  The vibe in the world is not the same without.  MJ, We love you the most, baby. xxxxxxx

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Charles Thomson
Posted: March 2, 2010 10:10 AM BIO  
Michael Jackson: It's Time For Outlets to Take Responsibility in Covering the Rock Star

 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.

When Sawf News published Batten's rebuttal I observed an all too familiar phenomenon. Although the story appeared on Google News and was picked up fairly swiftly by the Examiner, nobody else seemed willing to touch it. Whilst Simmons's speculative and ultimately baseless accusations had been reproduced the world over, Batten's expert rebuttal was being suppressed.

I soon began receiving emails from Jackson's fans telling me that they were sending the story to every celebrity news outlet they could think of, including several of those which published Simmons's initial allegations.

But more than 48 hours later, typing an exact quote from Simmons's rant into a search engine produced almost 350 webpages. The number of news outlets hosting Batten's rebuttal? Three.

This was not the first time I'd had a Jackson story suppressed. After Evan Chandler's suicide in November 2009 I was contacted by the Sun and asked to supply information about the 1993 allegations. I spent quite some time compiling my research, advising the newspaper of common myths and how to avoid them, being careful to source all of my facts from legal documents and audio/visual evidence.


When I read the finished article I was stunned to find that all of my information had been discarded and replaced with the very myths I had advised them to avoid. I alerted staff to the inaccuracies but my emails were not replied. The same inaccuracies appeared in every single article I read about the suicide.


The same bias manifested itself the following month when Jackson's FBI file was released. Across more than 300 pages of information there was not one piece of incriminating evidence -- but that's not the way the media told it.

A videotape seized at customs in West Palm Beach and analysed for child pornography was repeatedly referred to as belonging to Jackson. In actuality, files stated merely that the tape was 'connected' to Jackson and that connection appeared simply to be that somebody had written his name on the sticky label.

In another document the FBI logged a telephone call from a tipster claiming that the bureau had investigated Jackson during the 1980s for molesting two Mexican boys. The files made no other mention of the supposed investigation and the claim was ascribed no validity -- the call was merely noted. But the media persistently referred to the anonymous tipster's unsupported allegations as the FBI's own conclusions.

Jackson's FBI file overwhelmingly supported his innocence but its contents were routinely manipulated to give the opposite impression.

Many are quick to scoff when Jackson's fans speak of a media conspiracy to destroy the star's reputation and I used to scoff with them. As a member of the industry I prefer not to think of it as sinister and conspiratorial, but I find it increasingly difficult to explain away the bias with which Jackson is treated.

I wonder whether the problem is pride. When the 1993 allegations broke, the vast majority of information available was released, either officially or unofficially, by the prosecution. Jackson, meanwhile, remained characteristically silent.

Perhaps because the prosecution's version of events went almost completely unchallenged (although I imagine that drama and selling newspapers had something to do with it, too), the media primarily chose to portray Jackson as guilty.

But as the facts started to trickle out it became increasingly apparent that the case was full of holes. The allegations had been instigated not by the boy but by his father, who had demanded a scriptwriting deal from Jackson before he went to the police. He was on tape plotting to destroy Jackson's career and dismissing his son's wellbeing as 'irrelevant'. Then the boy told cops that Jackson was circumcised, but a police body search concluded that he was not.

Although Jackson's innocence looked increasingly likely, most news outlets had made their bed and to this day they seem unwilling to do anything but lie in it.

Whatever the motivation, be it pride, profit or plain old racism, the bias against Jackson is undeniable. The suppression of Batten's comments proves once more than when it comes to Jackson the media is interested not in fact or reason but negativity and sensationalism. Batten accompanied Jackson on all three of his world tours and was known for a decade as his 'right hand woman'. But Simmons -- who self-confessedly did not know Jackson -- has been given over 100 times more media coverage for his inaccurate ranting than Batten has for her firsthand experience.

It is time for outlets to assume responsibility for their own content. Websites should not re-host other publishers' stories unless they can be completely certain that the content is factual. Even if the media refuses to print the truth about Jackson, they should compromise by not printing the lies either. At least that way he can rest in peace.