SEX SEX SEX CASEY ANTHONY PIE! Oh, and some other shit down in the lower left here.
I love that they are at least embarrassed enough to explain their obsession with some random murder case.
by John Cole| 70 Comments
This post is in: Our Failed Media Experiment, Sociopaths
Comments are closed.
Yutsano
Fox News was showing the closing arguments. Live. I wanted to shoot myself, mostly because my grandfather owns the damn remote.
Alex S.
They should have put a photo of Casey Anthony below ‘Defining America’.
Halcyan
Do ya think we could shame anyone by asking, again and again, “Are you going to let these bozos tell you what to think about?” It’s a toxic circle j***. CNN (or insert other “news” outlet here) shows you what they think is important, you see it, you figure it is important, then CNN says, “See? We are giving them what they want!”
But… if we complain, we are elitist.
Hmm.
Mnemosyne
I admit, I am fascinated by the Casey Anthony trial, but I know full well that it’s not news. It’s a freak show.
Spiffy McBang
Rape != sex.
The case with the hotel maid is blown, and may well have been complete crap, but that doesn’t say anything about a separate allegation. And the cops did think something skeezy enough went down to charge him in the first place, which takes some doing; it shouldn’t shock anyone if it turns out someone else has a legitimate case despite the first one falling apart.
This is not a guilty-until-prove-innocent comment. I’m just saying this is not SEX SEX SEX. These are the kinds of allegations that actually should be investigated and not treated as tabloid fodder, even if, deep down, that’s what CNN is probably doing.
Guster
I am very proud. I’ve managed to miss Casey Anthony entirely. I don’t even know if she’s the missing white girl or the deranged girlfriend or what. Well, looking at that picture, she’s gotta be the deranged girlfriend. I’m gonna guess she chopped up at least one husband–allegedly.
eemom
imo the fixation on Casey Anthony goes beyond fail. It is some sick, sick shit, similar to but worse than the Jon Benet Ramsey case.
Sensationalizing the murder of a child?
This society deserves to die. Pronto.
MattR
I flipped by Judge Judy earlier today and she was lecturing some guy because he paused before saying that a woman was “the mother of his daughter”. Her argument was that we have words like wife or fiance so that he doesn’t have to think about it.
Guster
Spiffy McBang: I’ve never understood that. Of course rape is sex. It’s a sex _crime_. It’s not just assault.
Guster
Oh. Thanks, eemom, now I know. That’s even worse than I expected. It’s Susan Smith II?
hilts
Fuck the 24/7 cable news industrial tabloid sleaze complex designed to dumb down this country down to death.
Who cares about the cost in lives and money in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan when there’s audiotape of Casey Anthony
The Costs of War Since 2001: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan
http://costsofwar.org/sites/default/files/Costs%20of%20War%20Executive%20Summary.pdf
jinxtigr
I likewise don’t watch TV or read tabloids and likewise don’t know what this woman did, or care. Apparently the cops got her? Unless I’m on the jury I don’t need to know what happened.
Villago Delenda Est
What? No shout out for the vile promoter of this case, CNN’s own Nancy Grace?
Grace should sue the CNN website for failure to give her proper credit for her endless promotion of this particular murder case.
The Jon Benet thing was exacerbated by the fact that it happened during a slow news period, the Christmas/New Year’s holiday week. The Caylee case, OTOH, is all Nancy’s obsession.
Spiffy McBang
(possible trigger warning for those of you who care about all that)
@Guster: Just because it’s always been called a sex crime doesn’t mean that definition is correct. It certainly isn’t sex to the victim, right? It uses a sexual act to commit a crime, but that’s a lot different from sex, which by any rational measure is defined by at least a level of consent, if not enjoyment.
Also, I would point out examples like Lara Logan, who (appropriately) described what happened to her in Egypt as: “They were raping me with their hands.” Basically, rape is penetration without consent, which is what they did to her. But I think you’d be very hard pressed to call that sex, and even less so when it’s done with some kind of foreign object.
It took me a while to learn this, and finding out that I know a disturbingly high number of rape victims, but rape and sex are really two separate things.
MattR
Villago Delenda Est – At some point I read a CNN article about the current state of the case. I was quite gratified to glance at the comments and see quite a few lambasting Nancy Grace. Part of me wants to see Casey Anthony found not guilty just so I can watch Nancy Grace’s head explode. (Though of course she will just pivot and start blaming the jurors for being morons, like she did after Michael Jackson was found not guilty)
gogol's wife
And the New York Times gets to publish stories on this non-story by writing about how people stood in line to get into the trial, or how Nancy Grace has made it a 24/7 obsession of her “network,” so that even Joy Behar had to interview somebody connected with the case on her talk show. I know about it because I read the New York Times!
General Stuck
I’d rather they showed Casey Anthony around the clock, than spend a minute on fluffing the wingnut brain fart of the day. That way, they aren’t accomplishing anything useful, but at least are not feeding the zombie wingnuts puppy blood while they lead us all down the Primrose Path.
My teevee is dead as Julius Caesar, with no signs of improvement.
Valdivia
looking at that screenshot made my head explode. this is why I try as hard as possible not to have anything to do with tv news. sometimes I can’t help it–others watching at home, but I just plug my ears and sing la la la.
JGabriel
I am relieved to say that I only first heard of Casey Anthony about 90 minutes ago in a phone call with family — who seemed unsurprised when I said, “Who?”
I feel kind of lucky today.
Apparently isolation, misery, personal epistemic closure, and completely eschewing television in favor of cyberspace has its perks!
.
arguingwithsignposts
Cole, if you really want it all in one picture, you need to have screen shots of cnn and the beeb or al jazeera right next to each other. I can’t take credit for this, saw it a few months ago on twitter.
JGabriel
Guster:
You and me both, Guster. I only hope I can forget her name again by tomorrow.
.
Comrade Luke
“Why we’re obsessed with the Casey Anthony trial”
WHO’S WE?! If you jagoffs stopped covering it no one would care. But you cover it 24/7, sensationalize the shit out of it, make it “entertainment”, and then ask why “WE” are obsessed.
jwb
@General Stuck: “My teevee is dead as Julius Caesar, with no signs of improvement.” Don’t fix it, you’re in a situation that can’t be improved.
arguingwithsignposts
@comrade luke: yep, there’s a lot of chicken and egg at work in the celeb-obsessed world of u.s. News.
Mark S.
Nancy Grace is the most hideous human on the planet, the star of a network so sleazy it makes Fox News look like something produced by Edward R. Murrow. I stand by what I said a few months ago:
Guster
Well, I’m not sure how we can say that rape uses a sexual act to commit a crime, but is not a sex crime. Maybe it’s just a semantic thing? If you define sex as consensual, then no, rape is never sex.
bkny
meanwhile, there’s an ongoing trial of one of rupert’s uk papers hacking telephones of the rich and prominent. and in an especially despicable case:
Then, with the help of its own full-time private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, the News of the World started illegally intercepting mobile phone messages. Scotland Yard is now investigating evidence that the paper hacked directly into the voicemail of the missing girl’s own phone. As her friends and parents called and left messages imploring Milly to get in touch with them, the News of the World was listening and recording their every private word.
But the journalists at the News of the World then encountered a problem. Milly’s voicemail box filled up and would accept no more messages. Apparently thirsty for more information from more voicemails, the News of the World intervened – and deleted the messages that had been left in the first few days after her disappearance. According to one source, this had a devastating effect: when her friends and family called again and discovered that her voicemail had been cleared, they concluded that this must have been done by Milly herself and, therefore, that she must still be alive. But she was not. The interference created false hope and extra agony for those who were misled by it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jul/04/milly-dowler-voicemail-hacked-news-of-world
lojasmo
Never heard of Casey Anthony before. I am dumber from having perused this thread.
doG help us all.
ETA: Rape is not a crime of sex, it is a crime of domination. Rape is NEVER sex.
Spiffy McBang
@Guster: Yeah, I maybe should have drawn a line between sex crime and sex. It’s really the SEX SEX SEX bit that’s wrong… I don’t think even the most hardened feminists would have an issue with “sex crime”.
West of the Rockies (formerly Frank W.)
I finally read Fahrenheit 451 and have come to regard almost all television as detrimental to human thought. Okay, that’s a little reductionist, I know, but after going without TV for six years (disconnecting the cable when our daughter turned 3), we brought it back in time to watch the 2010 winter Olympics, figuring she would enjoy the spectacle. She did — totally got into Lindsey Vonn and company. But now we’ve disconnected again after another year of sporadic and disappointed viewing. Don’t miss it.
I’ve trumpeted this book before here, but Dick Meyer’s Why We Hate Us speaks effectively about our all-too-soulless culture. It’s an interesting read. As a society, we truly spend so much time rolling about in the slop of other people’s misfortune. Yechhh…
Brachiator
The cops made an arrest, but it is up to the prosecution, not the cops, to make a formal charge.
And do you really, really, seriously want to suggest that if the cops arrest you, you must have been doing something wrong? Really?
I haven’t been following any of the Casey Anthony case at all. A local radio station devotes time to regular segments. Whenever it comes on, I switch the dial to something else.
I have been looking at the CBC News app for more important news, coverage of Wll and Kate’s visit to Canada. Also learned that a woman in British Columbia got eaten by a bear.
More seriously, the CBC News app is well designed. By contrast, the L A Times app, like its web site, is a confusingly designed bucket of crap.
Anyway, the larger point is that with the Internets and other sources, you can get exactly the news you want. The idea that a slice of the mainstream media is “supposed” to make important stories prominent seems quaint and old fashioned.
And by the way, this isn’t just an ideological struggle. A new generation of editors believe that only old farts want hard news, while Real (Young) People want news that is hot and edgy. This is why the fall to their news and thank their deity whenever Lindsay Lohan defies a judge and goes partying.
Maude
bkny
I had been following that story. How horrible.
Loneoak
Of course the distinction between rape, sex crime, using sex as a criminal act, etc. are all semantic distinctions. What matters is that they are semantic distinctions with tremendous moral and political import. People have fought to get rape understood as something to be categorized as distinct from sex, despite mechanical and semantic similarities, because of their moral and political distinctions.
“Semantic” does not mean irrelevant; sometimes “semantic” is the most important type of distinction.
arguingwithsignposts
I am not so sure this is the case. After all, tina brown, arianna huffington, et. al. Would provide counterarguments, butnso would the countless journos who do data journalism at the nyt, wapo, propublica, etc.
Point being, it’s not age that makes the celeb gossip ferris wheel roll.
Starfish
@Spiffy McBang The SEX SEX SEX part is right. The media obsession is not with whatever the story is about. The media obsession is with SEX.
The reason it is about SEX SEX SEX is that they are posting a large picture of the victim. Usually, editorial policy of various media outlets is against identifying victims of rape, but in this case they make an exception because the victim is attractive and will get people to click on their website. Tell me that they would do this to an unattractive rape victim. I don’t think they would.
Svensker
Who is Casey Anthony?
Don’t answer. I don’t really want to know.
arguingwithsignposts
Ftfy
Mouse Tolliver
If Dems want to win the message war, they should start putting ascii art penises in all their press releases. That way they media would pay attention.
Mnemosyne
@ bkny
Jaysus. Just when I think the American press is bad, the Brits have to top themselves yet again.
And perhaps the laws are different in Britain, but couldn’t they be charged with obstruction of justice and/or destroying evidence for deleting the voicemails?
Carl Nyberg
How does one go about proving beyond a reasonable doubt that an attempted rape happened nine years ago?
Mnemosyne
@ Loneoak
IMO, just as you call a crime that was committed with a gun a “gun crime,” you would call a crime that was committed with sex a “sex crime.” The only reason to get squeamish about it is our American Victorianism that essentially considers all sex to be a crime of some kind and so has a hard time differentiating between actual sex and a sex crime.
Carl Nyberg
It does seem that the people who run much of the corporate media would rather be peddling porn, but they are too… something to ask women to show their tits on camera.
maya
It’s been 4 years, 5 months, and 4 days since Anna Nicole Smiff died. But there was nothing about her at all on the news today. Not even a rerun of the funeral, which, as I recall, bested the Walter Reed Army Medical Center debacle in media coverage. How soon we forget.
Spiffy McBang
@Brachiator:
I never said he was definitely at fault for anything. My point was that it’s very common when someone is accused of rape for the police to refrain from taking any action without being convinced there’s something for them to investigate, even if they wind up being unable to provide the prosecution with a case. That doesn’t happen too often with doe-eyed innocent boys who would never harm a hair on a woman’s head. By no account is DSK an exception to that rule, thus my comment that a separate allegation should come as no surprise.
@Starfish: That’s what I meant about CNN deep down using the allegation as tabloid material. They know how to make it look like a “serious” story, but I can’t imagine they treat it as one once you open it up and read.
Spiffy McBang
Effing WP quote… sigh.
Mr Stagger Lee
Outside of TPM, ProPublica or some of the progressive sites like AlterNet or Think Progress, I have to go to London (BBC or the Guardian) to get my information. And since Current TV is virtually outside my Cable TV world(Thank You Ready TV), The lamestream media can go Dick Cheney themselves.
James E. Powell
Although I do not know, I suspect that the fast track arrest & charge of DSK were because he is a wealthy, foreign national who was about to leave the jurisdiction.
And while I am as skeptical as anyone of prosecutors’ claims in any case, I know that they are in a difficult position with respect to sex crimes of the he said/she said variety. They cannot simply decide not to pursue the case where the victim/witness claims she was raped. We don’t want them to exercise their independent judgment in such cases, do we?
As far as I can tell, the DA in NYC has acted responsibly in disclosing the exculpatory evidence and facilitating the defendant’s release.
Consider that if the defendant were not wealthy and if the DA were in one of our redder states, the DA might have hidden the exculpatory evidence. Years later, when it was discovered, our supreme court would hold that there was no accountability for it.
dogwood
I finally googled Casey Anthony about a week ago, when I saw something about it being the #1 story and had no idea who she was. Weird case; weird woman.
Villago Delenda Est
That’s out of bounds…it’s one step beyond the Meese doctrine, which is, if you’re indicted, you must be guilty.
Except if you’re Ed Meese.
Loneoak
@ Mnemosyne: I think you have it entirely wrong there. The fight over how to classify rape as something other than sex doesn’t come from Victorian scruples, it comes from feminist anti-rape movements. If you affirm a person’s right to have complete, absolute choice about sex, then rape is considered the opposite of sex. If you think all sex is a crime, then there could be no distinction between sex and crime.
Brachiator
@arguingwithsignposts:
That Tina Brown or Arianna Huffington are mentioned in a sentence containing the word “journalism” is a travesty of justice. A sham and a travesty. A mockery of a sham and a travesty.
By the way, I’ve been away from the boards, so I don’t know if there was any mention of this little news nugget.
Dan Ashe was confirmed as the next director of the Fish and Wildlife Service on June 30. The thing is, he had been nominated back on December 2010: “On December 3, President Obama formally nominated Ashe, who has served as the service’s deputy director for policy since 2009, to be the agency’s director. As deputy director, Ashe developed policy and guidance to support and promote program development and fulfill the service’s mission.”
Why the hold up? It’s not like this is a controversial cabinet position. Ah, yes, the dirty hands of the GOP.
Ah yes. The Republicans, once again, doing everything they can to obstruct government operations when a Democrat is in the White House.
Mnemosyne
Not to get all 1984, but if all sex is a crime, then none of it is. If it’s all a crime, then consent doesn’t enter into it at all (no pun intended) and rape doesn’t exist.
Historically, rape for women has been considered another point on the spectrum of sexual experience, not a crime in and of itself. The crime was always that you stole value from property owned by the woman’s husband or father, not that a crime had been committed against the woman herself.
The reason rape was considered “the fate worse than death” wasn’t because it was so horrible to experience. It was because, if you were raped, you were an instant social pariah. Assuming your parents even let you stay in their house — many girls were thrown out for their sluttitude in letting themselves get raped — your friends would no longer speak to you and you had zero chance of ever getting married, because you were “ruined.”
That’s where the whole “rape isn’t sex, it’s a crime” thing came from with feminists — they were battling back against the idea that being a rape victim was proof that a woman was a whore.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a feminist object to rape being called a “sex crime,” but I don’t spend a lot of time on the fringes, so it’s possible there’s someone out there who does.
Brachiator
Although a lawyer poster might be able to spell it out in more detail, I’m pretty sure that the prosecution is legally required to disclose potentially exculpatory evidence to the defense.
The prosecution cannot choose on its own to act responsibly.
This was one of the many violations that blew the Duke Lacrosse case apart. Here, the prosecutor withheld exculpatory DNA evidence, and even made the director of the DNA lab complicit in this legal and ethical violation.
By the way, this last bit underscores the fact that not even DNA evidence is 100 percent, if it is not properly vetted and subject to challenge.
ML
Mea culpa. So smitten was I by the beautiful face of that journalist that I googled her name just to look at more of her photos. That’s why idiot journalism abides, and I’m as guilty as the worst of the fools the shot-callers corral into viewing their garbage.
Cermet
I don’t have any cable or HD service so no CNN, FOX, MSNBC any such dumb ass news – DSL internet only and sites like this, NYT, and Salon. The rest is worthless.
quannlace
Closing? Today all three news channels were zeroed in on the judge’s closing arguments. The closing arguments….something that can drone on forever.
I honestly don’t get the media obsession with this case. It’s a sad fact that it’s not a unique crime for a parent to murder a child.
The nightly coverage started with the usual suspects; Nancy Grace and Dr. Drew. And then it spread to all the mainstream media. Were they feeling nostalgic for the old OJ Simpson days?
ploeg
Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention. I was looking at the pie.
Dyzo Bandit
HLN had it’s highest ratings EVER in June, thanks to Casey Anthony.
It sucks, sucks, SUCKS that cable news followed the audience, and this is where the audience led them. Not trying to be sarcastic or ironic- this just sucks.
Jade Jordan
Pretty smart John Cole. Start a thread, get free porn stimulation.
I’m suspicious about the DSK phone call that set him free after all this time. Seems like a little US/French horsetrading. Wouldn’t be surprised to see a few more French troops in Afghanistan soon.
I hope they don’t let a child murderer off just to get one up on Nancy Grace. Any one call kill in anger, but it takes a special person (in not a good way) to bag up the body and throw them in a pet cemetary like garbage until they rot.
Lyrebird
@Mnemosyne
Can’t say as I worry about the fringes, as you can always find someone saying extreme things there… But to me there’s no contradiction between recognizing what a precinct’s “sex crimes” unit handles and pointing out that rape isn’t sex… People disagree, but I wonder if they consider their proctologist exams (colonoscopy, whatever) sex, too. I don’t, unless there’s a very inappropriate relationship building. And since (as you clearly know) there’s been a strong tradition of not recognizing women as people with the ability to consent, I like to keep reminding folks.
FlipYrWhig
I thought the whole sex/rape/violence thing was meant to help people understand that people don’t commit rape to get off, but to exert power. (To which, even as a male feminist, I want to say, “OK, but it’s to exert power in a sexual way, which puts us right back where we started, doesn’t it?”) I’ve never before heard this twist where rape isn’t sex because “rape is the opposite of sex.” That seems to be mixing up sex and consent. But there is such thing as non-consensual sex, isn’t there? Or is non-consensual sex a paradox?
Arundel
The other night Rachel was kicking ass and taking names on the things actually going on in this country, exposing Republican malfeasance in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
At the same time, Anderson Cooper devoted fully half of his show to this Casey Anderson trial. Then threw to Piers Morgan interviewing Charlize Theron. CNN is the fucking worst. A circus of distraction.
OH, and did you hear about Howie Kurtz defending Halperin as a great journalist? Calling Morning Joe the most substantive show on cable news> ? Kind of sickening. (I realize it’s MSNBC not CNN. They’re just terrible in their own ways, but thank God for Rachel and Lawrence. CNN is just dreadful, and Anderson Cooper is vastly overrated. He seems actually quite shallow.)
Joey Maloney
Aside from the Casey Anthony, how is this different from the Balloon Juice comment threads?
Cat Lady
It’s the tallest midget. Whoop de doo.
El Cid
I was proud of myself that last week I had to ask someone talking about it what the hell this whole thing was.
I kept asking ‘what’s so special about this case which made it different from all the other horrible murders happening at the same times and all those which had been covered 24/7 not too long ago?’
When they explained the whole thing including the baby in the trunk, I had to admit that, well, that is indeed interesting.
Not worthy of a national news media explosion obsession, but pretty interesting.
Gian
just thinking. if you ran say proctor and gamble.
how would you feel, if yuou used the murder of a 2 year old to sell soap.
do you buy ads in 30 piece of silver increments?
if the shareholders demand you whack a 2 year old to sell more advertising, do you?
there’s a difference between “guy seen fleeing bathroom , with raped and dead kid inside was 6 feet tall with shaved head driving a white van, license number blah blah” and
this
from what I’ve been unable to avoid, the question for the jury is did mom kill the little girl, or was mom merely happy little girl died. as the reporting goes, mom wanted to put the little kid up for adoption, presubably to a family that wouldn’t kill her, but grandma talked her out of it.
but really, honestly, who the hell thinks the death of a two year old is something to make money off of? that’s just flat out morally wrong.
El Cid
__
If Caylee had been able to grow up, she would have wanted to live in a world in which people weren’t ashamed to make money, or to repress their power and selfishness for society’s weak and collectivist ways.
Only by disregarding all the hectoring about what “is” and “isn’t” right to do and pursuing one’s own self-desire above all can one, um, uh…
…I mean, she might have wanted a world a little like that, but not, you know, as much like that as, you know, her mother, ah, seemed to do…
Riley
The Florida “sunshine laws” have made this case facinating for me. I have never followed a murder case before, not even O.J. but something about that child’s face got to me.
Moms seem to be killing their children pretty regularly now and its tragic, not entertainment.
Villago Delenda Est
Why is this such a big deal?
Caylee was cute and blonde.
All you need to know.
Kane