Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Ramseys redeemed
The Thai police arrested a suspect for murder of JonBenet Ramsey, a case that had gone unsolved for almost ten years. John Mark Karr will be sent back to the United States this week.
Anybody under the age of 20 or so should remember that the cops cast suspicion on the Ramsey family and the media dogged them so intensively that they eventually fled Boulder to return to Atlanta. The murder of their daughter shattered their lives, and the attendant media circus made it impossible to rebuild. JonBenet's mother, Patsy, died on June 24 this year from cancer, and therefore did not live long enough for her public redemption. That must be sad for her husband and son.
I have long thought that the American obsession with crimes against cute suburban girls reflects poorly on us and inflicts a fair amount of collateral damage. As far as I'm concerned the Ramsey case confirms that opinion.
The Ramsey case, of course, is pre-blogospheric. Would the coverage of it have been any different if the blogosphere had been up and running in late 1996? On the surface, the intense publicity around last year's murder of Natalee Holloway seems to suggest that nothing has much changed. Or has it? I confess that my memory of the Ramsey coverage is down to impressions. So journalism students, here's a topic for your next paper: compare the press coverage of the Ramsey and Holloway cases to determine whether blogs intensified, moderated, or otherwise influenced news coverage. Start here.
3 Comments:
By 
luc, at
Wed Aug 16, 10:08:00 PM:
As I recall the DA in the case was kind of obsesed with proving thta the family (father) was responsible fro the murder. I would like to see again an "in-depth" interview with him asking him how he feels now. Am I too nasty ?
By Pax Federatica, at
Thu Aug 17, 12:56:00 PM:
On the surface, the intense publicity around last year's murder of Natalee Holloway seems to suggest that nothing has much changed.
So they have concluded that she was definitely murdered? That's news to me. Last time I checked (admittedly some time ago) they still hadn't even found her remains, much less determined exactly how she died.
In fact I've long suspected that if she was murdered, her body might never be found because it could easily have been disposed of at sea and ended up as shark food.
By John B. Chilton, at
Fri Aug 18, 10:42:00 AM:
TH - And now we have the spector of jumping to the conclusion that this suspect did it, and some quick backtracking as his story unravels. I think the only lesson learned here is that the media sometimes gets in a frenzy to blanket stories that feed a large portion of the public's desire for escapism "news."
