1. Michael Jackson Climbs a Tree: "Journalist" Martin Bashir managed to convince Michael Jackson to participate in a series of intensive interviews over the course of eight months, with an implicit understanding that these interviews would help people sympathize with the much-maligned King of Pop. The interviews eventually were edited down into the 2003 documentary Living WIth Michael Jackson, first shown on the UK's Granada television network.

Instead, Jackson was portrayed as a barely functioning, child-like lunatic, scaling trees and claiming to be Peter Pan amidst Bashir's voice-over narration, which kept coming back to Jackson's child-molestation allegations. Jackson accused Bashir of yellow journalism, and he wasn't alone; several other media sources did the same, with The New York Times labeling Bashir's tone as "callous self-interest masked as sympathy."

According to Jackson's closest associates, the interviews pushed Jackson over the edge and made him a true addict to the drugs he was already taking. Jackson released a rebuttal video showing Bashir contradicting many of the opinions he spouts in the original video, but neither Jackson nor his already-tarnished reputation ever fully recovered.

Jackson died in 2009. Bashir now works for MSNBC.