By Lee A. Daniels

July 8 – Yesterday’s restrained and poignant ceremony in Los Angeles mourning Michael Jackson underscored what has been evident since he died: the chasm between the regard of him by the masses of ordinary people around the globe and the treatment of him by the media these past two decades.

Michael Jackson's daughter, Paris, at the end of the ceremony

Since the early 1990s, Michael Jackson to the mainstream media was “Jacko” – an endless source of fodder for gleeful tabloid-like speculation and psycho-babble. It was clear even then that the media was using Michael Jackson’s admittedly eccentric and sometimes questionable behavior to help meet the competitive demands of its wrenching move to a 24-hour news cycle.

Michael Jackson, however, did get the last laugh, even though he’s no longer here to enjoy it. His death ended the – might one say? – virtual boycott of his music on many radio stations. It revealed that millions here in the U.S. and all over the world had – one has to say it this way – kept faith with the emotion Michael Jackson overtly and subliminally expressed in his music and his persona. And, finally, it exposed as laughable the old sneering assertions that Jackson’s on-stage charisma and artistic genius had become dated. The continual replays during these last two weeks of snippets from the videos of “Thriller,” “Beat It,” “Billie Jean,” “Smooth Criminal,” and, most enticingly of all, from his last rehearsal for the fifty-concert tour have proved conclusively the most salient public thing about Michael Jackson: In terms of pop music performance over the last quarter-century, Michael Jackson is in the first tier all by himself. No one else even comes close.

Lee A. Daniels is Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.com and Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Find.