August 2, 2002

  • How apropos is it that Roy Ratliff, the bastard who kidnapped and raped two California teenage girls and was himself shot dead by sheriff deputies just minutes before he probably intended to kill the girls, had his hellbent mania blown by an "animal control officer" who spotted the animal's stolen vehicle and tipped off the three helicopters that established a positive aerial sighting and guided the deputies on the ground in the rescue mission??!!


    This, perhaps, will be one crime which the copycatters will mull upon to the point of inaction.


    Last night on Larry King Live , Kern County Sheriff Carl Sparks quite alarmingly observed that "There's something going on in this country right now, and we got to be on top of it...It's something that's keying these guys, you know, that have the tendency to do this type of thing. And all this publicity must be keying something in them. Oh, the media's got to report it. The media's got to report it. I'm not against the media at all. They've got a job to do. But there's something keying these guys to do this kind of stuff."


    So what is this "something" ??  If the "publicity" is complicit in such criminal motivation, shouldn't we send a message to the media to "Yes, cover the news.  But don't create a formulaic *genre* that frantically seeks out additional instances of similar stories to fuel the public into a morbid fascination frenzy."


    It seems that after youngster Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped (murdered? raped?), a spate of "young-girls-kidnapped" became the preferred genre of the news-generated nation's morbidity moment.  Granted, kidnappers/rapists will always be kidnappers/rapists and will eventually rape regardless.  But the new media in, first, creating this as a premium news niche, and then, with aging news, spawning a vacuum for the nation's morbidity moment, may, indeed, be partially inducing "I wanna be someone, too"-type copycatters who otherwise might remain latent.  If so, this is a truly disturbing instantiation of the law of supply and demand.


    Furthermore, in attempting to meet an awakened "demand", it is possible that elements of the news media become "too creative".  Indeed, it turned out that after the 911 tragedy, some of the "Arab celebrations" depicted were actually staged by free-lance elements of the media offering monetary inducements to some poor Arabs in the Middle East to "act"!  Why?  Because they knew that they could "sell" their footage.  To whom?  To the mainstream media to fulfill our "need of the moment" to witness Arabs hating "us".


    What might be done to curb the media's desire to sequentially string out a "story genre" into seeking and, possibly, partially inducing one similar episode (e.g., these kidnappings, school shootings, office rampages, racial crimes, etc.) after another to create and fulfill our morbidity moments? 


    I agree with Sheriff Carl Sparks that "Oh, the media's got to report it. The media's got to report it. I'm not against the media at all. They've got a job to do."  But damn it, they should do their job and let it go.  There's no need keeping the lawnmower running in full view on the front lawn 24x7 waiting for the grass that was just cut to regrow.  That only invites weirdos to come along in the middle of the night and dump sodded clumps of elephant grass on the lawn to see if it gets cut.

    So how about some sort of mild monetary disincentive to cover copycat crimes that stipulates that all media profits (or perhaps, just an estimated fixed sum) from the sales and coverage of "sequentially-chained or similar chronologically episodic stories" (for instance, two such prominent "headline" stories in immediate time-sequence), reverts as charity to a fund for the victims and/or their survivors?  The media could still cover them as a "public service".  But they wouldn't in so doing be fueling themselves to prolong a media-continued profit/success frenzy.  Or would this just induce the media to become more creative in seeking ever novel  headline-gripping bizareness?

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