Death to Peterson
Posted on:: December 14th, 2004
There are something like 15,000 murders every year in the United States. Why is this the one that is headline news for months? I just don’t understand it.
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There are something like 15,000 murders every year in the United States. Why is this the one that is headline news for months? I just don’t understand it.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
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I understand your query. I think it was the sentimentality of a missing young heavily pregnant woman on xmas eve that first triggered the interest. Then the story snowballed especially when Amber Frey came out. It slowly evolved into an interesting drama for these reasons. Also Scott attracted attention with his TV interviews, Laci’s family losing contact with Scott at his insistence, the affair and then the bodies being found (especially the body of the fetus) – it became a very emotional case. Let me add it has become a huge story in the UK and Australia.
Hope this somehow comes close to answering the question for both of us!
I agree with Kylie. The story sells. Seemingly Normal, nice looking guy kills beautiful pregenant wife. It feels like it can happen anywhere, it can even be the nice couple on the corner. The wackier ones are short-lived in the media, because there is no connection point for the audience. There was a case in Northern Califoria where the father was crazy and killed the entire family. I forgot the name and it hasn’t really be revisited in the news since. But the connection point to “normal” people was missing. He was a nut and could be spotted for a nut from a mile away.
I think the biggest part of this story is the fact that new legislation was enacted in the names of the two victims.
http://www.voterpunch.org/category.jsp?chamber=House&issue=F1&year=2004&num=31
Granting rights to the fetus was and continues to be a controversial issue.
Did anyone notice that Jay Leno’s first two jokes last night were about Peterson’s death sentence? What does this say about either a) this case or b) Leno?
I’m horrified at the fact that our media panders to our desire for raw sensationalism to this extent rather than reporting on the infinite number of more useful and important things they could be telling us. How does this affect me? Inform my decisions as a citizen? It doesn’t.
One also wonders whether this circus would have been quite so large if the players weren’t beautiful and white and suburban. Depressing.
One truly newsworthy aspect of the story, however, is the fetus-is-a-person law, as has been mentioned above.
at the dayjob i catch occasional glimpses of current tv soap opera. same material.
at the dayjob, last summer, some of my coworkers did much switching between peterson, soap opera and tv “judges”, seeming to give them all equal weight.
for whatever reason the story, early, reached critical mass on tv, then became just another “reality” series.
fans i’ve questioned about it don’t seem to care about, or even know about, the resultant law. all they know and care about (from early on) is “he’s guilty!”
Caught my first coverage of this trial last night in a motel room with a commercial TV. Certainly I’ve been aware of it, but last night was my first exposure to any of the thousands and thousands of hours of coverage given to this circus during one of the most trying periods in our democracy’s shortening life. I’m proud to say too, that after the first thirty or forty minutes of the OJ Simpson freeway crawl, I watched none of that circus either, not even the verdict. Certainly this is about what “sells,” but it is also about what saturates otherwise influential bandwidth.
Is the market to blame, or some corruption of the market, or some combination? The state of journalism in the US is one powerful argument against the free-market thugs and for a mixed economy that supports the public’s interest with public funds. Yes, that would smack of socialism. Mmmm, es schmeckt mir gut.
p.s. According to the radio on my interminable drive home today, this fetus was eight month’s old, so the “fetus as a person” aspect seems trivial. But it gives us something to flap our gums about while tinhat tyrants dispense “medals of freedom” for success in a war we will certainly lose after impoverishing and destroying the American middle class. I could be wrong. But I doubt it.
Reading Kylie’s comment above, I see that the answer lies in the Rupert Murdoch empire and its dominance of sensational news market trends. How else explain the interest of the Aussies and the Brits?
Ditto what Frank said. Murdoch is good at waving the red cape of sensationalism at the public to distract them from the banderilleros about to stab them.
Yes that was flippant. Seriously, I don’t think there’s a sound, logical answer to this question. I’ve been wondering the same since I was first exposed to this case while visiting family in the States.
good topic
Great topic. I’m not really that interested in the Scott Peterson verdict, but I’ll tell you want I am interested in… piling on that loser Kobe Bryant for (a) being a thug, (b) having no sense of humor and having a wife with no sense of humor, and (c) not being half the basketball player he thinks he is let alone as good as say, Allen Iverson. Anyway, you know what we Americans do not like? We do not like to be lied to. When we perceive liars, we pile on, joke, and watch them get what’s coming to them. And now to make this relevant… This is precisely what made the election this year so compelling. A little less than half the people thought Bush was a liar, and a little more than half thought he wasn’t. Similar thoughts for John Kerry and his Viet Nam record. But individually, a pretty universal American thing is that we don’t tolerate being lied to, and collectively, when the lie is not open to debate, we are pretty ruthless.
I strongly believe that in all probability Scott murdered his wife and son. But, I still haven’t seen evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that proves he did murder them. I haven’t even heard any prosecution evidence proving how Lacy and Connor were slain.
How can you prove somebody is a murderer when you can’t even prove how they died? I think this Peterson Jury was tainted. Also, the seating of alternate jurors without requiring deliberation to begin over seems fishy. The way the whole case was handled should be of concern to the free and just.
The case of Laci Peterson (which I grew friggin sick of, mostly because of the media’s non-stop coverage of it) was big for these reasons:
1. Laci was the “perfect” pretty, young WHITE woman who lived in the most “perfect” house in the most “perfect” town and drove the most “perfect” landrover. She was married to a “perfect” man who had a “perfect” job and the two of them were a “perfect” couple. Seems pretty obvious to me.
2. The right-to-lifers used Laci as a political pawn for their rabid agenda. Right after Scott was arrested (or even BEFORE Laci and her fetus’s bodies washed ashore) they did everything in their power to label a fetus (not just a third-trimester fetus, but even, let’s say, a five-week old fetus) as “human”. What a better thing to do with your life then to capitalize on someone’s private tragedy!
3. Amber Frey. God, how I want to smack that trailer-trash redneck in the face. As soon as she made her big announcement to the Modesto PD the case received 24-hour coverage by Faux News and CNN.
That’s pretty much all I can think of. Just the fact that ANY of the people involved in that case (Scott, Laci, Amber, Scott and Laci’s parents, etc.) are famous is just ridiculous. Doesn’t the news media have more important things to worry about, like war and genocide in other nations? I guess not.