Jeremy "UncleHoot" Praay wrote:
> I'm confused.
> 
> In June of 2009, Michael Jackson was a complete joke.  He was a pedophile 
> who got away with it, and everyone "knew" it.  All of his musical 
> accomplishments were largely forgotten, or swept under the rug.
> 
> Then he died.
> 
> For the next 2 months, he was on TV every single day, often MTV or VH1, but 
> nearly every day, someone was running a special about him on some channel. 
> Someone put together a movie.  You'd hear his songs being played in cars as 
> they drove by.  Suddenly, it was perfectly ok to like Michael Jackson again 
> without being laughed at.  Why?
> 
> When OJ dies, are we suddenly going to celebrate his NFL accomplishments 
> again?  This all seems wrong.  It would make more sense to either forgive 
> the person while they are alive, or to continuing laughing at them after 
> they die.  This sort of switch seems very disengenuous to me. 
> 
> 

Not really the thrust of your question, why was he LIKED again, but a 
partial answer to why was he suddenly back in the media again, I heard 
answered by a journalist.  His explanation was that in the current state 
of fractured media audiences, journalists immediately recognized that 
Jackson's death represented one of the few remaining blockbuster stories 
insofar as Jackson was a figure that everyone recognized across all 
cultural factions.  So any journalist that knew what they were doing 
descended on the story even if they had to hold their nose doing it.

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