Media and people of the world – this image is not ok. It’s the most horrific front cover picture I’ve ever seen, and it adorns the latest issue of OK! magazine. OK! paid $500K for the  exclusive rights to what is essentially (colleagues and friends have commented the same to me…because it’s true) a picture of a dead Michael Jackson.

Even notwithstanding my post on Friday about MJ and how I have to remember that at one point in my life he was a hero to me, I think any decent thinking reader of the media can only react with disgust and abhorrence to the fact that (a) any money was paid for this picture, and (b) it adorns the front cover of the same magazine which published the ‘Memorial Issue’ of Jade Goody (with same black colouring) before Miss Goody had even passed away.

Add to this the considerarion of…well, how the hell can this be a tribute issue when the front cover is a ghoulish capture of not even the last moments of Jackson’s death, paraded before the world as some sort of journalistic scoop? It can’t. OK! may well throw their hands in the air and say, ‘The public has a right to see this’, ‘it’s newsworthy’ or ‘ we played it by the book and obtained the picture legitimately’, but I must respond to anything of this kind with the simple words, ‘Where is your decency?’

To be honest, this is about the most I can write for this particular post, because knowing that this picture is on a magazine in many, many shops close to where I’m sitting right now, I feel a little queasy, also saddened that OK! think this is a fine front cover, and – for the second time – wholly horrified by that particular magazine’s tributes.