One unique aspect of pop culture is celebrity, as can be seen in Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson and Bubbles, (porcelain ceramic blend, 1988): Celebrity is a fascination of the media, whether it be idolization or defilement.

Both seem to go hand in hand in the dream-world of pop culture.

Remember OJ Simpson? Monica Lewinski and Bill Clinton? Now we have the Michael Jackson child abuse allegations.

Michael Jackson is a key celebrity figure---a star of popular culture---noted for his weirdness and widely acknowledged to have been one of best song-and-dance man in decades.

The weirdness is increasingly being seen to be creepy and freaky: Michael Jackpot, a freaky clown, Wacko Jacko, living in his own fantasy world.

David Catrow

I was never a fan of his music, even when he was with the Jackson Five. The Motown dance routines, videos left me bemused, whilst the 80's pop (eg., Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad)passed me by. I never really clicked to the style of MTV culture with its false appeal to the romantic primitivism of the street, bohemia, the outcast, the bizarre and the surreal. MTV's elaborate network of fragmentary significations did not stike me as very subversive.

Jackson represents the black man who made himself, or become, white. He is seen to have erased his blackness and transfigure himself with ghostly pallor and pert features at a time when black culture is culturally privileged.

Now I'm just a pointy-headed type (a cultural critic) who should stay off the popculture turf. But we are talking about the celebrity industry with its commodities of salacious rumours and innuendo, its addiction to the false and unreal and its tradition of "yellow journalism" with its sensationalism and scandal-mongering.

From my reading of the American media about the Michael Jackson child molestation trial is that Jackson has been judged to be as guilty as hell. According to the media the case has been made beyond the shadow of a doubt.Jackson is beyond redemption. He has been publicly convicted and branded a sexual predator.

Stephane Peray, The Nation

The long drawn-out trial as a form of showbiz or circus will add to Jackson's celebrity status as the cable channels are in a feeding frenzy over this. Their style is to press every unconscious emotional button, and to manipulate every quivering emotion into outraged indignation. And they've hit gold with a narrative about an innocent child being abused by a rich freak who bought his way out of his shameful perversion the last time.

Child abuse is stamped all over this in the cable narrative. It suggests that allegations related to paedophilia and child porn have become the preferred form of celebrity-bashing for today's society.

I really have no idea what is going on in the trial with respect to the allegations. The procsecution claims that Jackson has been a pedophile Peter Pan for years.