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Bread and Media Circuses
Choosing the News |
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| By Pat Hartman |
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| Just over a year ago I became aware of Laci, Scott and Amber. Believe it or not, until the jury convicted him I’d been a Peterson Case virgin. After learning the basics my question was, what’s the big deal here? Women are murdered by their male partners every day of the week. Why was this story deemed network news-worthy? I hopped on the information highway and pursued the details. |
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For starters, they’re all white people from California, bizarre news capital of the nation. Of course. The victim disappeared on Christmas Eve, which always adds an extra dollop of pathos to the mix. Thousands of volunteers helped with the search, and a half-million dollar reward was offered. Most significant of all, Laci was pregnant. The body of her pre-born child washed up on shore, followed the next day by her own headless, legless and mostly armless corpse. |
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| And then there was the blond, Amber Frey, who let the authorities record her phone conversations with the unfaithful Mr. Peterson, but was also suspected of passing police information to him. |
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Mostly, there was the sheer tackiness of it all. Through pages and pages of archived news reports, I marveled.
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| First Scott tells Amber he’s never been married, then says his wife died the previous year, meanwhile offering a biker gang several thousand dollars to kidnap and/or kill Laci. Since she’s insured for $250,000, he can afford it. Finally he fesses up to Amber: oh, by the way, his wife is the one who’s all over the news, the one everybody’s looking for. Scott hires a lawyer, calls Amber every five minutes, and cruises to the Bay to moodily stare out over the water where the bodies will eventually surface. To assuage his loneliness he adds several Triple-X channels to his cable TV service. |
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| A search of the Peterson storage locker reveals the couple’s wedding album reposing in a wastebasket. Officially, Laci is still only missing, but Scott sells her car and puts their house on the market. |
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| Then the bodies are found and Scott, who has greatly modified his looks, is apprehended heading out for Mexico - carrying a big wad of cash, camping gear, four cell phones, other people’s IDs and credit cards, and a supply of Viagra. Amber’s friend sues People magazine because they didn’t leave her out of the photos she sold them. There are other pictures too – a portfolio of Amber nude shots that Larry Flynt takes a pass on, saying his magazine’s customers would demand their money back. Amber sues the photographer for $6 million. |
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As if the sleaze factor weren’t already off the chart, Scott, imprisoned and charged with two murders, is inundated with love letters from female nutjobs. Because Laci’s body was dismembered at the joints like poultry and the baby appears to have been strangled and cut, the defense tries to float a satanic ritual theory. Scott admits to several affairs during his marriage, providing a great defense argument: “See? He could have had Amber without the need to kill Laci. Q.E.D.”
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| The case spun off a galaxy of separate stories: conflict over media parking privileges in Modesto; the students who falsified survey results; the reliability of GPS technology. The fallout from the Peterson trial continues. By late 2005, the federal government and 30 states had passed versions of fetal protection statutes. Fetuses have gotten all the attention although many activists would like to see more done about violence against women. But the most far-reaching legal impact has been agitation to reverse Roe v. Wade, because why should a woman be allowed to abort a fetus, if a third party would be convicted of double murder for killing her while she’s carrying it? |
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| There have been endless comparisons with other cases involving missing persons who are not pregnant white women. The cost of the investigation and prosecution was most recently tabulated at over $4 million. The five finders of the bodies eventually shared a $50,000 reward. (The original $500,000 had been for Laci’s safe return.) Currently some organization appears to be offering around $350,000 for information proving that Scott didn’t kill his wife. Typically, Amber just couldn’t stay out of the news. In late 2005 it was disclosed that the poor sucker who paid child support for four years isn’t her kid’s father after all. |
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| Like any scandal worthy of the name, the Peterson case also functioned to divert our attention from Iraq, etc. Wasn’t that the ancient Roman formula for keeping the peasants docile? Give ‘em bread and media circuses… |
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| Some stories, on the other hand, have a way of becoming non-news, their details findable only by dedicated obsessive-compulsives. |
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| Who recalls the dead woman’s name in the Phil Spector debacle? (Lana Clarkson.) Phil seems to have pretty much avoided the media spotlight, although preliminary legal proceedings offered some startling photo ops. Phil with a double chin that one wit compared to a shaved vagina (he meant shaved labia majora, but that’s another rant). Phil sporting a gigantic ‘fro in homage to the ‘do worn by OJ Simpson in The Naked Gun. Phil laying a finger aside of his nose, only it’s his middle finger and he’s not saying “Happy Christmas to all!” |
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| Even though the trial won’t start until April, Phil has earned some column inches by hiring, firing, and suing Robert Shapiro of OJ Dream Team fame. Then Leslie Abramson, who defended the Menendez boys, deferred her retirement to sign on, but quit four months later over unexplained ethical principles. Then John Gotti’s mouthpiece came on board. Women willing to testify that Spector had pointed guns at them sprouted up all over the landscape like spring daffodils. Free on a million dollars bail, Spector was sued for wrongful death by the victim’s mother. His attorney made a snide remark about the family wanting money. Well, what else are they gonna ask for - the court to order reanimation of the dead? I don’t think so. (Interesting historical footnote: while attending UCLA, Spector worked part time as a court stenographer.) |
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| Then there’s Stanley “Tookie” Williams, convicted of murdering four unarmed people with a sawed-off shotgun in 1979. One was a white youth who made funny gurgling noises while dying, as Williams is reported to have told a friend; the others were three Asians, or as he called them, “Buddhaheads.” The under-reported part of his story is that on the eve of his execution several weeks ago, the Blood gang contacted a reporter from the Black Entertainment Network to act as go-between so they could turn a bunch of guns over to the police in return for the sparing of Williams’s life. This was supposed to be significant because the Bloods are the historic rivals of the Crips, of which Williams was co-founder. |
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It didn’t work. Although assault rifles, carefully wiped down with WD-40 to remove fingerprints, were relinquished in several increments, Williams was put to death anyway. Although the story of the gun offer was picked up by network affiliates in Los Angeles, it didn’t get the media coverage that some felt it deserved - perhaps because, as one internet poster noted, if the Crips and Bloods give up killing each other, it just gives them more spare time to kill civilians and cops.
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| Supporters of Williams also accuse news media and government of making him the official scapegoat for every crime ever committed by any Crip anywhere. They point out that Williams cleaned up his act and wrote the “Tookie Speaks Out” series of children’s books warning against violence. Critics say the books actually glamorize thug life, an accusation easy to understand when they include glossaries of gangbanger lingo, just in case the kids haven’t picked it up around the hood already. Unfortunately, the Harry Potter-esque crowd did not line up at the bookstores. Rumor has it that his biggest hit, “Gangs and Violence,” sold only 330 copies. “Gangs and Wanting to Belong” sold two. |
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| Williams was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, although this is not as big a deal as it seems. Some years there are scores of nominees and the designation is said to have no official standing. But it’s a burr under a lot of people’s saddles, who don’t think a killer belongs on the list. Others point out that it wouldn’t be the first time an engineer of mass murder had been nominated for or awarded the honor: look at Arafat, Gorbachev, Perez, and Kissinger. |
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| Williams may have been a peacemonger, but he was no snitch. Apparently he refused to come across with any hardcore information on fellow gang members leading to any kind of convictions. One of his sons is in San Quentin and the other has been arrested for rape. |
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| Williams wrote an apology to the children of the world who have been affected by gang violence, but was never known to apologize to the families of his own victims. After his 1981 sentencing for the murders, he is said to have threatened the prosecution lawyers, "I'll get every one of you m-----f-----s." Well, actually in a way, he did. I bet none of them have been Nobel nominated. |
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| And of course there’s my own favorite under-reported case of justice gone wrong: Timothy Masters, who was convicted of murder more than a decade after the fact, on no better evidence than having been a 15-year old boy who drew grotesque pictures. But that’s another rant too. |
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