Sunday, August 20, 2006
Enough with the Jon Benét Ramsey Punditry
When this case broke back in 1996, I quickly tuned out. I figured that when the police and prosecutors had enough evidence, an indictment would follow and a trial. Until then it was speculation for the sake of speculation.
Of course the media would let the story alone. We were told how the Ramsey’s had sexualized their daughter (I despise all beauty pageants, but Patsey didn’t seem to think they were sexual, just fantastical). We were told that the parents were not acting like innocent people (please, there is no one response of an “innocent” person, but lawyers historically have decided an innocent person should act and look like). I remember speculation in the local papers (being from Colorado) that John or Patsey or the step-son were going to be frog-marched off to jail any day.
Then, nothing. Years and years of mostly silence, with the odd occasional book or investigators stating their opinion (for the readers interest, retired Detective Lou Smit, from Colorado Springs, is one of the true heroes of police investigations – Google him – and he decided in 2001 after being called into the case that it was an outside intruder, so when you hear pundits saying “it had to be an inside job because of the spider webs, remember Lou knows police work, the crime scene, and he has concluded it was an intruder).
Then this week, out of no where, a suspect is named and apprehended in Thailand. Mary Lacy, who is the Boulder D.A., holds what had to be the worst press conference in the history of mankind, and the race to state final opinions was on again. This is the world of 24/7 news coverage, where it is more important to talk about things and make vast and totalizing statements rather than simply wait for the course of events to unroll.
We say this in 2001 when all the pundits, two weeks into the Afghanistan war were saying, “Clearly things aren’t going as hoped. This is a quagmire. Yada Yada Yada.” And it isn’t just one of the networks, its Fox, its CNN, it’s the joke that is MSNBC, its CourtTV. You name it, telling us what is happening in grand finalizing terms is the norm in today’s journalism.
One of my favourite examples of this was in the movie Independence Day, where the reporter waiting for the helicopters with the lights to take off, tell us, “They will be approaching what has been decided by experts to be the front.” Excuse me, just because with decide something is the front, or the back, doesn’t make it true. I love this about modern news coverage. We state it and it becomes true.
Nope folks, it is true when the facts and research show it to be true, not when you or I decide it is (this is the case for observable realities, metaphysical and supra-scientific realities do not lend themselves to such observable fact findings.
Which brings us back to the JBR case. Already the pundits are telling us Mary Lacy has no case, that Karr is innocent (see a great example of this at http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/news_columnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_86_4929054,00.html
Guess what punditry: you do not have all the facts. As of this date and time, no one does, not even the D.A. But they have a whole lot more facts than we do. But once again, in a world of real chaos that needs reporting on things that have actually happened, the news world decides that their opinions are news, and that they, with their intelligence and grasp of all things, can now say John Karr is innocent. Just as they could tell us ten years ago Patsey and John Ramsey were guilty. This isn’t just annoying, it is destructive to society. Real truth and real justice take time (just like winning real wars do). Instead, they feed and help create the immediate truth (or at least pseudo-truth) world we live in, which adds to the distrust we have of the world around us, the cynicism that is undermining our electoral system, and the impossibility of the legal system to do its job.
The answer? Simple, as soon as someone states an opinion for which they clearly do not have the requisite facts, turn them off. Go watch or listen to something with a higher degree of correctness…like the Weather Channel.
