The media and our justice system
The recent exoneration of the Ramsey family in the 1996 slaying of Jon Benet Ramsey once again exposes the undue influence the media has in the administration of fair justice in the United States today. It will be recalled that John Ramsey found his daughter’s body in the basement of the family’s Boulder, Colorado, home on December 26, 1996. She had been strangled and beaten.
Immediately following the reporting of the case, it became a media circus and pretty much based on undue pressure, speculation and “professional” diagnosis and prognostication by the hired “experts” of the media, the incompetent district attorney of Boulder Colorado pretty much declared the Ramseys major suspects. As John Ramsey himself put it, “It’s hard for people to accept and think that someone could come into a home and murder a child from their bed and we were perhaps an answer,”. “It became an entertainment event for a lot of the media, sadly. … It boosted ratings, attracted viewers, to develop that controversy.”
This is not the first time that this has happened to an innocent family. A very recent case is the totally irresponsible and discriminatory handling of the so-called abusive tendencies of a religious sect in Texas. Based on pressure from the media and the circus atmosphere that followed, the overzealous employees of the Child Protective Services of the state of Texas traumatized over 400 children and forcibly removed them from their families on the ground that there were “teenage” and “underage” mothers in the compound housing the group. As it turned out, the courts found that these brash decisions were based on unfounded speculations, rumors and outright lies in some cases. There was no doubt that the media circus that surrounded that incident influenced the rush to judgement, name-calling, near-witchhunt and gross invasion of privacy that followed. Until the next “big” or “breaking news” story emerged.
We know about the O.J. Simpson saga, the Anna Nicole media embarrassment, and numerous other cases where the media became an instant court of justice, passing sentences of guilty, accomplice or soon to be guilty judgement on innocent people. Sure the DA of Boulder, Colorado can say she is sorry to the Ramsey family. But how does she say that to the poor Mrs. Patsy Ramsey who died with the weight of what the world thought of her (as a potential child killer) on her shoulders?
The media is supposed to be the fourth estate of the realm, the so-called last hope of the common citizen. It is an arena where we expect people to ask tough questions and make sure the real criminals are caught, not the lazy entertainment avenue it has become where every irrelevant and totally unproductive event is turned into a frenzy while the things that matter most to people only stream across the television screen or is buried in the furthest corner of a newspaper or magazine. Shame on the American media for damning a family like the Ramseys before the judicial system had the time to find them guilty or innocent.