interview with charles thomson, final installment

For those just dropping in today, we’ve been talking with Michael Jackson expert Charles Thomson about the dark side of the blogosphere. Tune in from the beginning:

Click here if you missed part one:

Charles Thomson accepting his Guardian award.

Click here if you missed part two:

Click here if you missed part three:

Click here if you missed part four:

Click here if you missed part five:

How did you handle the whole episode? How did it make you feel? What lessons have you learned?

If I’m honest, it was truly frightening. Receiving obscene mail and threats, having my facebook spied on, being blackmailed over my sexuality – all over some unimportant comments I’d written on the internet about a popstar. It was terrifying. Being cyber-stalked and having details of your private life splashed all over the internet for purely malicious reasons is absolutely horrible. Seeing lies being published about yourself in blogs on an almost weekly basis is really frustrating, and seeing people leave comments underneath like, ‘Thanks for telling me! I’ll boycott his work now and tell my friends to do the same’ – that breaks your heart.

The ferocity and obscenity of some of the mail I received made it clear that those sending it were mentally unstable and I became very concerned that somebody was going to take it that little bit further; that somebody was going to try to track me down and do me some harm. The language in some of the mail I received was so violent that I have no doubt that if I’d bumped into the senders the street, they’d probably have tried to kill me.

I can’t say that I have any real regrets regarding the content of what I’ve written about Michael Jackson. I stand by my comments to this day, which makes an even bigger mockery of their calling me a ‘hypocrite’. I still don’t like Jackson’s later albums, I still don’t like his post-1989 tours and I still think he was responsible for a lot of his own negative media coverage.

My only regret is reacting to the bloggers in the first place. These people crave attention. The controversy made their names. Before they came after me, I’d never heard of any of them. Now everybody in the fan community knows who they are. I played right into their hands.

What lessons have I learned? I’ve learned that I need to make sure I keep my private life completely separate from my professional life and I’ve learned not to try so hard to please people. When fans started sending me friend requests on facebook I didn’t want to seem mean or superior, so I accepted them. Over the months I ended up with hundreds of fans on my personal facebook, with access to my personal photos and my conversations with personal friends.

When these bloggers came after me, it turned out I had a lot of their followers on my facebook friends list. I had to delete everybody I didn’t know from my facebook because there was no way of knowing who it was that was copying all my conversations over to blogs, message boards and so on. The exodus upset a lot of my supporters, but there was no way around it. I just shouldn’t have fans to my personal profile in the first place. I made the mistake of assuming that these people were adding me because they were fans of my work and therefore would be respectful. Many of them were – but there’s no way of knowing people’s motivations when you receive their request. I was too trusting and too worried about offending people.

 

What does this episode say about the dangers of fanaticism?

It’s hard to condemn people for their fanaticism because I don’t think it’s a choice they make. They tend to have a naturally obsessive personality so they can’t really help it.

That said, sending somebody an obscene letter or a death threat is not something you do on autopilot. You make a conscious decision to do something like that. When your fanaticism has reached a point where you’re sending people violent messages for saying they don’t like a particular album or even for saying they don’t like your idol generally, I think it’s time to take a step back and say, ‘This isn’t healthy anymore.’

Similarly, being a massive fan of somebody doesn’t give you the right to publish slanderous lies about everybody who you perceive to be their enemy. You can’t just go around accusing people of murder because you don’t like something they said about Michael Jackson three years ago, or because they happened to be on the periphery of his circle at the time when he died.

This sort of behaviour – sending people obscene mail and publishing provable lies about people all over the internet – it’s just not acceptable under any circumstances. Just because you’ve devoted your life to something, it doesn’t give you the right to threaten, abuse, bully or blackmail anybody who disagrees with you.

How will you proceed from this day forward?

I haven’t published anything about Michael Jackson since June and I don’t have any plans to publish anything Michael Jackson related at least in the next month or so. This incident with the fans has made me very wary of writing about Jackson, to be honest. It feels like you’re walking into a trap. You just can’t win with some of his fans. It feels like no matter what you do, it’s never good enough. There’s always some criticism. You didn’t write it soon enough. You weren’t nasty enough to Diane Dimond. Whatever.

My last Huffington Post piece took some serious research. I spent a month trawling through online newspaper archives, reading transcripts from TV broadcasts during the trial, finding footage and audio online and transcribing it myself, as well as re-reading the court transcripts from Jackson’s trial. The resulting article was around 5000 words long. I dedicated a month of my life to that project and I did the entire thing for absolutely no money whatsoever.

I did it because I believe the cause is important. I thought the fans would be supportive and appreciative – and many of them were. But I did get comments saying things like, ‘Too little, too late. Where were you in 2005?’ In 2005 I was training to be a journalist. I just thought, ‘Now they’re sending me abuse because of my age?’ How can you attack somebody over their age? They have no control over it.

When it wasn’t my age, it was other totally meaningless things – from not liking some of Jackson’s work or having dinner with Randy Taraborrelli to simply not being so arrogant as to assume that I know more about Michael Jackson’s drug dependencies than his own family members.

It was an extremely deflating experience. After expending so much time and energy on a completely pro bono project for no reason other than to get the truth out about Michael Jackson’s trial, rather than expressing support, some of the fans were on twitter calling me a ‘c*nt’ because I didn’t like the HIStory Tour. It made me

think, ‘What is the point? Why do I spend all my time on projects like this if I’m just going to get abuse in return?’

I’ve had emails probably reaching into the hundreds, pleading with me not to stop writing about Michael Jackson. I don’t intend to stop completely. Part of the silence has been because there’s nothing really going on at the moment to write about. Even when there is, you end up repeating yourself. You’re listing the same facts over and over again, just in response to a different people.

I have some Michael Jackson related research going on in the background. I can’t give too much away. I was annoyed, to say the least, over what happened with the FBI file so I don’t want any media trying to horn in on my research this time. I’m approaching the research from different angles and also have some exciting interviews in the works. But it takes time to do things properly. When I’m ready to publish, I will let the fans know about it.

In the meantime, I’m doing what I’ve been doing all along – a mixture of local journalism, music writing and whatever else comes my way.

 

Stay tuned and in touch with Charles Thomson:

http://www.charles-thomson.net/

Charles Thomson with music legends Fred Wesley, Mable John, Jack Ashford, and George Clinton.

Advertisement