Another feature in the MSNBC year in review section - in this one I tried to figure out what the top stories were in entertaniment and realized there were a few top stories with one thing in common: reality wouldn't leave them alone.
- 2003 was a strange, troubling, fascinating year where entertainment was unable to keep reality from scaling its walls and overrunning the grounds of its Neverland, with war, politics and scandal easily dominating peace, love and understanding. All of the most important entertainment stories of 2003 — involving Michael Jackson, Phil Spector, the Dixie Chicks, and Warren Zevon — were created as real life forced itself into areas where it was not expected, or for the most part, wanted.
Jacksonia
Michael Jackson has a compulsory, peering-through-the-fingers grip on the popular imagination, and the garish soap opera that is his life, sadly, is the biggest entertainment story of the year. The "authorized" Jackson documentary by Martin Bashir, which aired in February, convinced many viewers of the 45-year-old entertainer's unhealthy obsession with children; a few months later Jackson worried himself into an Indianapolis hospital over one lawsuit, then found himself accused by former financial advisors of being "a ticking financial time bomb waiting to explode at any moment" in yet another legal imbroglio.
But the waning King of Pop's grim year scraped bottom and the public's voyeuristic interest peaked when seven felony charges for "lewd or lascivious acts upon a child under 14," and two for "administering an intoxicating agent to a child" (reported to be wine) were filed against him by Santa Barbara County District Attorney Tom Sneddon on December 18.....
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