True Crime And Justice

Andrew Cohen's Thoughts On The Entwistle Case & Its Cousins

(CBS)  The Entwistle story has by timing and default become to 2006 what the Laci Peterson saga was to 2004 and 2005. Surely that is the only way to explain why Fox News last Thursday aired live images of a police car that was taking the suspect to the courthouse for his arraignment.

Never mind the vitally interesting and significant legal stories that abound -- from the NSA surveillance program to the Lewis Libby trial and the Enron saga now underway in Houston.

The talk shows and yappy lawyers are instead going to talk incessantly now about all of the iterations of the Entwistle case until it ends, mercifully, at some point in the next twelve months or so. Into every vacuum must flow matter; into the vacuum of modern media coverage flows this: a story that will in no way merit the attention it receives.

Why? Because there is a cottage industry in America now that drives the inexorable push that makes these sorts of local murder stories go national. The demand is there, in time (so many hours to fill) and personnel (so many talking-head lawyers to justify), and so the great conveyors of legal news now will shift into overdrive.

The more the Entwistle case gets covered, the more coverage it will justify under this twisted logic, because if you tell a story often enough - whether it is important or not - viewers become invested in it. There apparently is some unwritten law these days on cable television, the Internet, and talk radio that there always must be at least one sordid murder tale to talk about; grist for the mill. In the parlance of the day, call it "Cable Hosts Gone Wild."

But try justifying that particular application of media resources to the family of Kimberly Crespi, whose husband, David, is accused of murdering two of their children near Charlotte, North Carolina on January 20 -- the same day that the Entwistles, mother and child, were killed.

Try explaining to your neighbor why the world is supposed to care more about the Entwistles than the family of Sharon Mont, whose ex-husband, Nicholas, allegedly fatally shot her in the head that day. And try getting together the families of the five murder victims slain in and around Baltimore on January 20th and 21st to let them know why their loved ones won't be memorialized on the airwaves night in and night out. I could go on and on, forty more times -- and for every single day between January 20th and today.

None of this is intended to make light of the Entwistle murders or to diminish the scope of that tragedy. The point is that there are many other tragedies, far too many other tragedies, which do not receive blanket coverage on Larry King's show and which thus do not become national stories.

And while crime is usually random, the selection and coverage of these stories assuredly is not. If you are white and good-looking and there is a hint of salaciousness to it, your true crime saga is much more likely to attract the bloviating circus that goes from town to town, story to story, seeking to drum up hype to justify its own existence.

For every Entwistle case, every day, there are dozens of other mournful stories that you will never hear or see or read about. Think about that the next time you see the helicopter shot of the police car driving a suspect to a police station or the next time you hear a breathless host jabbering legal nonsense at a hapless guest about a story that won't make a difference in your life.

There is rarely any justice when someone is murdered -- that is the nature of crime. But there is not often enough justice in the way media organizations cover crime -- and that is the nature of a business that currently resides at the foggy intersection of news and entertainment.