The other true crime

THIS POST HAS BEEN CORRECTED & UPDATED:

I spent the morning watching the non-stop coverage of the arrest of John Mark Karr, 41, in the JonBenet Ramsey murder case. All the usual experts suspects have been trotted out to spout their opinions on this guy's motives and psychological make-up. On Fox News around noon, I heard them actually peculating speculating that the suspect's confession was bogus and that Islamic terrorists were involved. SWEAR TO GOD!

Why this story led last night's edition of CBC-TV's The National -- Radio-Canada's Telejournal has far more serious priorities -- beats me. (A commenter below correctly points out that the AIDS conference and the drowning of a little Q uebec boy were ahead of the JonBenet story on the National. My bad. What I should have written was, why this story "preceded'' others.) There's a freaking war on! In fact, there are lots of them!

Anyway, here's part of today's pulpware effort on the subject of the media coverage of the case.

Tried and convicted by the media, and aided and abetted by an incompetent police force, the Ramseys were guilty! guilty! guilty!

That despite the fact that, aside from Patsy's wish to see her daughter high-kick in her own beauty pageant footsteps, there was nothing in this family's history indicating anything untoward.

But Patsy's mania for her daughter's winning Miss This or That ribbons was enough to do the trick.

For the better part of a decade, it was impossible to escape the unrelenting coverage.

JonBenet's luridly painted little face, Grand Ole Opry-style big hair and voluminous dresses became indelible and iconic images of the 1990s.

The videos of her prancing and dancing her way across stages were played and replayed by CNN, Court TV and the then weeks-old Fox News and MSNBC.

It was the Ramseys' great misfortune that both Fox and MSNBC had been born in the wake of the last "true crime" media feeding frenzy, the mother of all cable coverage marathons, the O.J. Simpson case, and they were determined to cash in on JonBenet's murder.

What's more, primetime was still filled with trashy tabs and more than a dozen network newsmagazines.

Of course, it must not be lost on anybody that JonBenet was white, and pretty, and her parents rich.

As we have seen with other cases — for example, the 2002 Elizabeth Smart abduction, which occurred at the same time as the African American Alexis Patterson, 7, was snatched from her tenement in Milwaukee — blondes get more play.

The JonBenet case also fuelled, and was fuelled by, the then-nascent World Wide Web. Entire sites are dedicated to the murder, to advancing various theories, to examining the evidence, and, most grisly of all, to presenting the autopsy photos.

And so, it became a multi-media perfect storm of pointing fingers.

The column has itself provoked a media feeding frenzy. Ironic, no? I have so far turned down five TV interviews and three radio gigs on the matter but I will be doing 10 CBC Radio One drive home shows across Canada between 3 and 6. Listen for me in Ottawa, Calgary, Halifax, Yellowknife, Toronto, St. John's, Victoria, Winnipeg and Edmonton.

And yeah, I have a bad cold.

UPDATE: Editor & Publisher has a couple of good analyses on this.

The first is a look at how a journalism professor played a key role in the arrest. But far more interesting is this examination of how the media -- once more -- are rushing to judgement.

Is the press going overboard in its coverage of the latest twist in the JonBenet Ramsey murder case -- and suggesting, too early, that the suspect suddenly in custody, John Karr, is guilty?

The front page headline in New York's Daily News today, for example, read: "SOLVED." The lead in the main arrest story in Denver's Rocky Mountain News reads: "The decade-long search for JonBenet Ramsey's killer came to a startling end in Thailand on Wednesday."

The same paper, in a headline over an editorial, declared, "Arrest is warning against rush to judgment." It meant the wide belief that one of the girl's parents may have killed her, but the same might be said about the early media coverage of the Karr arrest.

Investigators in Thailand told the Associated Press today that Karr has made several dubious statements to them, including claims that he picked JonBenet up from school the day she was killed and that he drugged her. Actually, she was on Christmas vacation at the time, and there was no evidence of drugs in her body during the autopsy.

Much of the media has downplayed assertions by Karr's ex-wife that he was with her in Alabama at the time of the murder.

Boston University journalism professor Fred Bayles, a longtime national writer for The Associated Press and USA Today -- among other subjects, he covered the O.J. Simpson murder probe -- told E&P today: "The latest chapter in the JonBenet case offers a journalistic cautionary for both the past and the future.

In fairness, as I noted earlier, some media have already begun to question Karr's confession. That's fine. Trouble is, they'll be milking this one for a long time -- and, instead of closing the books on JonBenet's murder, this arrest may have merely opened another lurid media chapter.

UPPERDATE: Media coverage covers media coverage!

On the bias

Having shot themselves in the foot, the Liberals take aim at the messengers.

And advisers accuse the media of an obvious bias in favour of Stephen Harper's Conservatives.

They say Liberal promises - such as a $4-billion plan to reduce tuition - went virtually unreported while the Conservatives scored a daily hit with their announcements.

"How many Canadians have even heard about our tuition plan?" one senior Liberal lamented.

But many within Liberal ranks feel no sympathy for those complaints, saying Martin's campaign was dysfunctional from the start.

The Jan. 30 edition of the Western Standard has a scathing piece ''The End of the Affair: How Paul Martin's Liberals lost the love of Canada's mainstream media.'' (It's not yet available online.) It is an on-the-buses-and-planes look at how the Liberal campaign collapsed, mostly because the Martinites had not developed a sound media strategy.

Many Canadians throughout the campaign - myself included - have accused the media of getting on the Harper bandwagon. To some extent that's true. The proof is, that so many conservative blogs were easy on the media.

But campaign plane-embedded reporters can only report what they see from their very restricted viewpoints. The truth is, the Cons had it together and caught some lucky breaks. The Liberals did not.

The Liberals barely had a campaign before the holidays while the Conservatives were rolling out their policy a day. They were counting on the Harpies to do a face plant like they did in 2004. Their war room was shooting blanks, if it was shooting at all. There was the beer and popcorn gaffe. The income trust scandal. The notwithstanding clause surprise. The platform leaks. The military attack ad. And last, and not least, the sponsorship mess and how the Martinites chose to deal with it. It didn't help that most of these stumbles were hooked up to legitimate policy issues - e.g. childcare - and, as a result, gained more media traction.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives had a tightly disciplined and focused team, aided and abetted by the NDP's nuclear team which kept dropping bombs on the Liberals from its war room.

All this conspired to make the media look less than balanced - a tilt exacerbated by the nearly unanimous editorial endorsements of the newspapers. And yeah, I still think CBC's Peter Mansbridge went relatively easy on Harper who, it must be said, really didn't give him much of an opening.

But bias?

Nah.

In any case, I wouldn't define the Conservatives' win as a win. Just as an un-loss. As James Bow notes:

The Conservatives have broken the previous record of infamy for being the least popular party to receive the most votes in an election: 36.3% being slightly lower than the 36.7% set by Paul Martin’s Liberals in 2004 (though still higher than the 35+% picked up by Joe Clark’s short-lived minority). Also interesting to note that the Conservatives STILL haven’t equalled the vote totals achieved when the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives were separate parties.

Please release me

It's the battle of the network news releases.

Well, not quite. Still haven't heard from CBC. But CTV put out bumph about its election night victory at the People Meter polls:

Once again, Canadians made CTV their broadcaster of choice for the historic Federal Election. Nielsen Media Research Canada confirms that CTV drew the most viewers of any network with 1.48 million viewers, 18 per cent more viewers than coverage on CBC (1.253 million viewers) and 92 per cent more viewers than Global (771,000). The numbers reflect the overall duration of all three network's prolonged coverage (292 minutes for CTV and Global; 296 minutes for CBC).

Meanwhile, as I posted in the comments last night, Global issued a release boasting that it was the first to call a Conservative government. This ''at 7:30 PM ET to Maritime audiences." This was reported today by CanWest papers, as if (a) it was newsworthy and (b) it was a good thing.

TV networks the democratic world over love the bragging rights that come with being first to call the winner on election night but still, the speed with which Global anchor Kevin Newman announced a Conservative win Monday night must have set some kind of record.

While being first in the news business is considered important by people in the news business, the swiftness of Global's declaration was a shock and, frankly, a bit deflating for those who like drama on election night to last more than 4 1/2 minutes.

Did Global's brave declaration show remarkable confidence in their new, never-before-seen Internet exit-polling tool orchestrated by pollster Darrell Bricker? Or was the result simply a no-brainer from the start?

Whatever, elections are horse races. First past the post wins.

Today another Global release claimed primacy in BC.

CanWest's Decision Canada joint national and regional election coverage was the leading broadcast in British Columbia last night as an average of 292,400 British Columbians tuned in to watch the Conservatives win the 2006 elections. Global was also the first network to call a Conservative government at 7:30 p.m. ET to audiences in the Maritimes, based on Ipsos-Reid poll results.

CTV also called today to let me know that I missed an interview with Brian Mulroney (from West Palm Beach) just after it was the first network to announce a Conservative minority government at 10 ET. That said, CTV has to be congratulated because, as one commenter on this blog noted, it was the only network that included a Blocster on its panel of opinionators. Overall, its coverage was no frills, no fuss, very fast-paced and very aggressive.

As for CBC, despite what was, to my mind anyway, far superior political analysis, it did get beat. Maybe it should forgo efforts to lure youth with George Stroumboulopolos and other gimmicks, and stick to its knitting: reporting and context. I don't think Canadians needed to hear from that collar-that-blowhards-like-a-man Don Cherry, nor did they need another promo for Rick Mercer's Tuesday Report, as great as he is. In any case, these guys were totally irrelevant as the evening wore on. It was the old political warhorses Ed Broadbent, Hugh Segal and John Manley who gave the telecast its weight.

Over on Global, Kevin Newman overtorqued the unsubstantiated suggestion that Paul Martin would not concede, practically rampaging through the studio as he tried to get support for this non-story which may have started with Mike Duffy and a BlackBerry on CTV. It's hard to confirm any of this without lining up all the telecasts, in synch, and running them at once. The show jolted out of the box with an emphasis on the Liberal scandals and lurched along from melodrama to melodrama, Fox News style, throughout the night. Or at least every time I flipped to it.

Two things about all this. I hate these releases because they take up way too much time to verify and cross-check and ensure that you're doing an apples-to-apples comparison. And to what end? To satisfy TV network egos? The numbers don't necessarily speak to the quality of coverage anyway. People flip around. They search for news and views relevant to them. They look for results.

With all the networks looking ahead to licence renewals and other regulatory manoeuvrings -- and CBC now staring into a potential Conservative abyss -- maybe they just want blurbs to stick into their CRTC presentations showing how fantastic they are.

Or maybe I am just crabby from staying up so late at this computer.

Foreign matter

CBC has a round-up of some foreign media reaction to our election results here.

In covering the Tory minority victory, the New York Times described Harper as a "free-market economist who expressed strong support for Washington at the time of the American-led invasion of Iraq."

Here's the word from the Washington Post:

Harper also is seen as ideologically closer to the Bush administration than is the Liberal Party, which balked at joining the invasion of Iraq and refused to sign on to the U.S. plan to develop an antiballistic missile system for North America. Harper has suggested he might revisit the missile defense decision and has said Canada would reject the Kyoto accord on global warming, as the Bush administration has done.

But some Canadians said they believed Harper would still try to enact a conservative social agenda.

"I would do anything to stop the Conservatives," said Phillip Clarkson, 53, a costume designer in Toronto. "I am gay. I want to be married someday. And I want there to be the opportunity to do it."

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal's right-wing Opinion Journal seems disappointed:

...Canada Isn't a Red State Yet

The surprising thing about Canada's election yesterday was the extent to which the country's ruling Liberal Party was NOT decimated. Beset by scandal and running a sloppy campaign that never saw it come out on top in any single 24-hour-news cycle, the Liberals nevertheless won 31% of the vote, only about six points behind the winning Conservative Party.

And, from the conservative blogosphere south of the border, much of which is celebrating, there's this

Ok, so maybe not a major "sweep", but a huge beginning. Dont' let US liberals or the MSM delute this story, it's huge.

You are seeing the beginning of the death of liberalism world-wide. Not a minute or century too soon.

and this

Remember those liberals who said they were going to move to Canada after President Bush was elected to serve a second term? Assuming they kept their word, where will these disgruntled liberals go now that they have a conservative government in Canada now as well as in the US?

Speaking of cross-border defectors, David Frum of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute delivers this:

Unlike Martin, Stephen Harper truly does know the difference between one's neighbour and one's nation. His foreign policy will be guided not by his feelings about America's domestic policy, as Chretien and Martin too often allowed theirs to be, but by his assessment of Canada's enduring international interests. That's the way mature countries comport themselves. After years of childish self-indulgence under two old men, this young prime minister will at last lead Canada back to the grown-ups' table. That change will be welcomed in Washington. It should be even more strongly welcomed where it matters most: in Canada.

So far, Michael Moore has not weighed in.

Drowned out

Just out of curiosity, anybody remember this story?

AS WE REACH THE 90-DAY mark since Katrina hit, it's time we ended our national state of denial. Turns out House Speaker Dennis Hastert had it right all along, though his reasons were flawed. We should call it quits in New Orleans not because the city can't be made relatively safe from hurricanes. It can be. And not because to do so is more trouble than it's worth. It's not. But because the Bush Administration has already given New Orleans a quiet kiss of death now that the story has run its news cycle.

As far as I can tell, CNN's Anderson Cooper is one of the very few U.S. national news names to still be ceaselessly and relentlessly on the story. (Time had a special look last week.) Most everybody else seems to be allowing the Bushies to let an entire city slip away.

This appalling political and media apathy is called "Katrina Fatigue." Which is why, this time, I agree with the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz.

Is this inevitable, given today's MTV attention spans? What about all the lofty rhetoric, the presidential visits, the media hand-wringing amid the devastation of the hurricane and flooding? People are no longer drowning, but what remains of the city is slowly being strangled. Isn't that as big a story as when the levees broke?

It seems obvious to me: The images are not so dramatic. Politicians are staying mum.  And he poor people who were displaced are just being swept back in with the other skeletons in America's closet because advertisers don't like race and poverty issues to be raised between their commercials.

The Liberal Media

You know, when I wrote all those columns after Sept. 11, 2001 trashing big corporate media minions who went easy on the White House, the Pentagon and the right-wing think tank types who marched the US unto war, I was barraged with hate mail accusing me of being anti-American. (A lot of it came from Canadians, by the way.)

But I got it right. So did a whole bunch of alternative media critics and progressive bloggers, here and south of the border, few of which ever got invited on to the cable chat fests.

Now, thanks to Hurricane Katrina, some of the worst offenders in the big media press corps are starting to 'fess up to their sin of allowing the Bush administration and its neocon cabal to spread their obfuscations and prevarications in order to achieve their dubious and bloody ends.

Which they have yet to achieve, it would appear.

Anyway, Media Matters has compiled this all-too-brief but still very interesting list of major media types who now admit to letting the Bushies get away with murder.

In recent weeks, several prominent journalists have publicly acknowledged that the U.S. media accorded President Bush too much deference following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman and NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams both noted that it was only in observing government failures in the Hurricane Katrina relief effort that journalists began seriously to challenge the administration. NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell conceded that reporters have been "less challenging" since the attacks. Friedman wrote that the 9-11 attacks created in the media a "deference" towards the administration. Williams described the press corps as "settling in to too comfortable a journalistic pattern," a phenomenon he described as the "9/11 syndrome."

I find it intriguing by the way, how infrequently the erstwhile war bloggers make mention of Iraq today. I guess they are cutting and running ...

Winded

Let's see ...

According to the trenchant My Blahg, which I adore, the Iraq war is slipping from the public consciousness, no thanks to the right-wingers who no longer want to discuss it.

Gee. Wonder why.

Are these pricks so concerned about deflecting any criticism of Dear Leader that they’ll turn a blind eye to the misery his actions have caused the people of Iraq? Apparently so. Apparently protecting the image of one of their own is far more important to them than human suffering.

Even though the U.S. is now well into its third year of this debacle, and more than 5,000 Iraqis have been killed in the past few months, there's still no solution to the mess.

And yet none of the media are calling for the head of President George W. Bush.

You'd think that last week's Katrina catastrophe would have stirred American editorial boards into calling for his resignation or impeachment. But no.

Norman Solomon nails it:

By avoiding even the hint that President Bush and Vice President (Dick) Cheney should be ousted from office, major news outlets are circumscribing public discourse and limiting the prospective remedies. Meanwhile, we hear about low-level resignations, official investigations and proposals for blue-ribbon commissions.

What happened to thousands of people in the path of the hurricane was the horrific result of criminal negligence that came from the top of the U.S. government. Is it too outlandish to suggest that the news media begin to discuss what kind of punishment would truly fit the crime?

Apparently.

Press Gang

The reason that CNN has been so hard-hitting throughout this Katrina catastrophe, posits one of my more conspiracy-minded pals, is because CNN president Jonathan Klein went off on vacation (scroll to bottom), and wasn't around to make sure the reporters and anchors toadied up to the White House.

Whatever the explanation -- and I doubt it's anything more than the fact that the reporters saw the misery and devastation up close and horrifying -- it worked.

CNN was also the one network to sue for the right to take pictures of the recovery efforts. Rather than fight the legal battle, the federal government capitulated -- as well as it should have. Isn't this the country that invented freedom of the press?

CNN filed suit against Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown, arguing that the officials who announced the decision were acting on FEMA's behalf.

"For an agency to unilaterally ban all coverage of a major component of its governmental function, that is, recovery of the deceased victims of the tragedy, is unprecedented," CNN argued in its legal brief. "Instead, the agency has made a subjective, content-based determination that publicizing the operation would be 'without dignity.'"

CNN's brief argued, "It is not the place of government to replace its own internal judgment for that of a free and independent media."

Because of controversy about how FEMA and other agencies handled the disaster response, CNN lawyers argued, "it is even more vitally important for the public, Congress and the administration to have an independent view of the conduct of this important phase of the operation."

Not all news organizations challenged the official line, either legally or journalistically, quite like CNN did. FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) indicts ABC, Fox News and even the New York Times and the Washington Post in a study published here:

Amidst the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, many mainstream journalists seemed to display a skepticism towards official statements and government spinning that has been absent for much of the last five years. While a press corps that openly challenges the political elite would be a positive development, readers and viewers should question why reporters who are demonstrably angry and are covering this story aggressively have been so rarely moved by other events. What if there was widespread media outrage about White House fabrications about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction? What if reporters were similarly outraged by the destruction of Iraqi cities like Fallujah, where civilians who survived the siege had to live without power and drinking water?

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a more aggressive press corps seems to have caught the White House public relations team off-balance-- a situation the White House has not had to face very often in the last five years. Many might wonder why it took reporters so long ...

Speaking of CNN, it can't be coincidental that, of all the news networks to have seen ratings jump during the Katrina coverage, it enjoyed the biggest leap, according to the Pew Research Center for People and the Press.

As occurred after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and during the start of the war in Iraq, the proportion of Americans who cited cable news channels as a main source of news grew dramatically.

In this instance, CNN made the greatest gains. In June, 18% of Americans cited CNN as a source of most of their news about national and international issues. Following Katrina, 31% say CNN is a main source of news. The Fox News Channel and MSNBC also saw sizable, though smaller, audience gains from Katrina.

Interestingly, despite all the hype about the Internet, it was TV to which most people turned. The cybersphere actually lost ground. But, not surprisingly ...

Previous Pew surveys have shown the Fox News audience to be highly supportive of the president. This remains the case today, with Fox viewers reacting far more favorably to the president's handling of the disaster than those who cite other outlets as their major source of news on the hurricane.

In addition, a plurality of Fox News viewers (42%) say that people who took things from businesses and homes in New Orleans were mostly criminals taking advantage of the situation. The balance of opinion among those who rely on other outlets ­ CNN, network news, newspapers and the internet ­ is that people who stole were mostly ordinary people trying to survive in an emergency.

Not sure if that says more about Fox's content -- or its viewers.

Snicker.

Bushmen and barristers

Alternet has a superb deconstruction of the misinformation and disinformation about the Katrina catastrophe making the rounds, no thanks to the media.

Speaking of which, I am beginning to get concerned that they will descend into maudlin tales of heartbreak and loss, and give up on the hard-slogging of what went wrong, who is responsible and, most important, how to fix things before another disaster strikes.

Oh, and one more time, why aren't the media raising bloody hell over being barred from doing their jobs? They must have armies of fancy lawyers on big fat retainers. Where are they now? Are they only deployed to demand freedom of the press rights whenever the regulator tries to curtail their ability to air F-words and nipples?

Aired Out

I am watching CNN's Anderson Cooper again tonight. Without a doubt, his 360 has had the very best reporting on Katrina of any cable news channel. Tonight, he's got photos of the bodies in the New Orleans Convention Centre, tales of the horrors within, and evidence of rapes and murder.

His work more than makes up for all that being whipped around in other hurricanes yelling "Look out! Look out!'' as pieces of billboards fly by.