'X-Factor': Michael Jackson's kids are in the house

Yep, Prince, Paris and Blanket, kept essentially hidden by their father before his death, were in the audience, front and center and looking as if they'd rather be any place else...

TheGrio Staff

Dec 1, 2011

From Los Angeles Times:

It was Michael Jackson week on “The X Factor” on Wednesday night, and while host Steve Jones insisted that the evening was all about “the preshah!” it was really all about the fact that Jackson’s kids (and mom and some of his brothers) were in the house. Yep, Prince, Paris and Blanket, kept essentially hidden by their father before his death, were in the audience, front and center and looking as if they’d rather be any place else.

Could they have looked any more bored by the onstage goings-on if they had tried?

Jackson’s mom, Katherine, declared — audibly only after she was finally handed a mic — that “The X Factor” was her favorite show. But the kids looked as if they had been beamed in from another planet and had no idea precisely where they were and what they were doing here. Unfortunately for them — and for the poor contestants onstage struggling to curry favor with their father’s songs — the camera kept cutting to the unsmiling, clearly unimpressed Jackson kids, deflating whatever other enthusiasm the contestants had worked up in the crowd.

Pressed to do so by Jones, the kids did their best to make the appropriate appreciative noises, but honestly, it was a little painful. It’s hard to imagine that the fiercely protective and private (with his children) Jackson would ever have put his kids in that spot. Remember how he used to keep their faces covered when they went out with him in public?

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