New York Times: Frank Rich: America Tunes In for the Money Shot
People are turned on by the Jackson story because it's about sex, specifically pedophilia, at a time when the sexual fetishization of children is not limited to whatever may or may not have happened at Mr. Jackson's ranch. If a mass audience can fixate on whether or not Britney Spears, a singer first marketed as a devoutly Baptist schoolgirl, has lost her virginity, it is no wonder that the Jackson sideshow would move to the center ring and become a main event.
So if anything of value is to come from this circus, let's drop the pretense that it is about something as lofty as the American system of justice or even the lure of fame. The public, while purporting to be outraged by the crime of child abuse, is hypocritically slobbering over every last speculative pornographic detail used to fill in the supposed contours of that abuse; cable news ratings immediately shot up by double digits. And those who are now taking to the public stage to intone gravely about pedophilia in the Jackson show are often trading in titillation themselves; you haven't lived until you've heard Larry King bandy about the word "penetration."
