It seemed a perfect story. A 10-year-old murder case, a child victim, a dramatic confession in a faraway land and a supposed villain who looked every inch the creepy pedophile.
No wonder the faces of John Mark Karr and JonBenet Ramsey were soon staring out of newspapers, magazines and TV screens across the country. The bloodshed in Iraq and the Middle East was bumped off the agenda as the US media produced saturation coverage of Karr's confession to killing JonBenet, solving one of the US' most notorious crimes. But there was a problem: It was not true.
Karr's exposure as a sick fantasist has prompted a bout of self-recrimination and criticism of US journalism at a time when the profession's stock is already at a pitiful low. For the Karr disaster is far from an isolated case.
The New York Times is also coming under increasing fire for its coverage of an alleged rape involving students at the prestigious Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
"The Karr and the Duke cases show a rush to judgment that has proven potentially disastrous," says Mark Feldstein, a former CNN journalist and now director of journalism at George Washington University in Washington.
These stories also come after last year's obsessive coverage of teenager Natalee Holloway, who vanished on the Caribbean island of Aruba. Several suspects and an island's way of life were raked over the media coals, but the police have yet to charge anyone with murder.
It has all focused attention on exactly what press freedom means in the US. On the one hand it can mean the right to go after the powerful and prevent the government from keeping information secret. On the other, modern media culture seems more likely to use its freedom to metaphorically lynch anyone accused of a crime.
At the center of the problem is the changing face of television news, and the growth of cable TV channels with 24 hours of screen time to fill. The result is a tendency to leap on simple, graphic stories and milk them. That in turn forces a story into newspapers and weekly magazines.
"It is amazing, but stories like JonBenet would not have been national issues before cable news. Now they get saturation coverage," Feldstein says.
The coverage of Karr's confession and extradition to the US was a case in point. For 10 days the media pored over every aspect of the case. In some ways the focus on Karr seemed a way of apologizing for the previous vilification of JonBenet's parents, who had often been accused of being the killers.
Karr's criminal past was dragged up and his trip back to the US was chronicled in such detail that Americans were told what he had eaten on the plane.
"Solved!" blared the front page of the New York Daily News. The cable channels switched to live coverage. The coverage was surreal, bizarre and a violation of most journalistic ethics taught at media schools.
In the wake of charges against Karr being dropped, the fallout has been equally vicious.
"This giant waste of time and resources occurred at the expense of real news affecting real lives: a major crisis in the Middle East and a war in Iraq that is killing an average of 100 Iraqis a day," blasted media critic Bob Geiger.
Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post's media analyst, was more forthright: "It goes down with the greatest media embarrassments in modern history."
But it is not just tabloid newspapers and cable news channels that are making mistakes. The Duke rape charges have prompted a slew of salacious and speculative stories around allegations of the rape of a black stripper at a college fraternity party held by an overwhelmingly white lacrosse team. Here, it is the New York Times that has come in for most criticism.
The paper has been accused of assuming the students' guilt, as more and more evidence emerges that the woman's allegations may be false. Last week, in a piece in the online magazine Salon, writer Stuart Taylor accused the Times of being "bent on advancing its race-sex-class ideological agenda at the cost of ruining the lives of three young men whom it has reason to know are very probably innocent."
However, most critics would put economics, not ideology, at the heart of why the media -- from supermarket tabloids to the venerable Times -- seem to produce more and more sensationalist journalism: It is simply a ploy to keep readers and make money in a tough market.
"If really serious stories full of balance made money, then newspapers would run them. Media organizations will do what they have to do to make money," Feldstein says.
But there is an upside to the relative freedom the press seems to have been abusing. American journalists have the freedom to pursue the powerful as well as the inane.
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