To mark the occasion of Jacko’s indictment on child-sexual-abuse charges, we recall the chin-pulling PBS take on the Jackson aura from ten years ago:

“If either of the two [Madonna or Michael Jackson] is the logical heir to Marilyn Monroe, it is clearly Michael Jackson, who is the more bruised and authentically vulnerable of the two….Not only is he black and white, male and female, but also young and old, hip and square, the crotch-grabbing self-appointed guardian of the world’s children.”

– MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour essayist Anne Taylor Fleming, April 7, 1993.