The Murder Business: How The Media Turns Crime Into Entertainment and Subverts Justice
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Excerpt from The Murder Business"Media and law enforcement work at cross-purposes. Law enforcement want to solve a case as fast as possible and put the guilty behind bars. The media want a case to drag on as long as humanly possible, and do all they can to extricate every last bit of drama, drop by bloody drop, in order to hold the attention of the millions of viewers who have gotten hooked. Law enforcement must abide by rules. The media make their own rules, and even then break them, or find ways to work loopholes into them. All that matters is ratings. If people knew how it’s done—how the media seduce, buy, bribe, and corrupt, like an inevitable, malignant cancer on a murder investigation—they might be too sickened to buy the next ticket to the carnival....The unfortunate truth is that today, each murder has many victims, and high-profile murders can hurt innocent people who get burned by the spotlight, whether or not they sought it out themselves. I learned that firsthand as a police witness in the O. J. Simpson trial, a wrenching experience that showed how the criminal justice system can be manipulated by money, power, politics, and fame. In twenty years of police work, I thought that the guilt or innocence of the suspect was all-important. Then I started covering high-profile murder cases, where ratings and profit often far outweigh the importance of facts."
Prologue ixChapter 1 American Murder Meets American Idol: The Caylee Anthony Case 1Chapter 2 Killer Cop Drew Peterson 23Chapter 3 When Crime TV Goes Too Far Melinda Duckett 49Chapter 4 Murder and the Upper Class Martha Moxley 69Chapter 5 Portrait of a Mama's Boy Scott Peterson 87Chapter 6 Death of a Troubled Princess JonBenét Ramsey 107Chapter 7 The Strange Death of a White House Counsel Vince Foster 133Chapter 8 The Case That Started It All O. J. Simpson 149Chapter 9 The Witness Everyone "Forgot" 169Index 189
