Littwin: News as voyeurism - all in a day's work

By Mike Littwin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published August 17, 2006 at midnight

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How do you undo a public lynching?

That's a hard question. But the answer is all too easy.

You don't.

If it turns out that John Karr killed JonBenet Ramsey, he won't be the only guilty party.

The others, though, won't have to worry about punishment.

For them, it was all in a day's work, even if that day lasted for nearly a decade. And if the day's work meant accusing the Ramseys of killing and assaulting their own child, well, it was time, as Bill Owens once famously put it, to be "blunt."

Or it was time, as I once less famously put it, to turn real-life tragedy into soap opera, into an entertainment, into a Columbo episode.

The murder began as news and turned quickly into voyeurism, the normal voyage in these cases. This was a story that stayed alive only as long as there was one more opportunity to show the runway tape of the child in a sadly grotesque beauty contest. This was a story that stayed alive because of the rich parents who were obviously guilty of something - if only of bad taste, or of hiring the wrong press agent.

And there to step in to help us understand it all were the radio talk-show hosts and the cable TV hosts and the newspaper columnists and the tabloids and the amateur detectives and those professional detectives who proved to be painfully amateurish, and, of course, Bill "The Unmasked Avenger" Owens himself.

I have no idea who did it - and no theories either. I know that the conventional wisdom seemed to be changing on Patsy Ramsey and whether she was involved. And that was happening even as she lay dying.

I don't know the telling details of the case, and I don't really want to know them. What I know is this: If Boulder DA Mary Lacy sent her people to Thailand to arrest Karr and it turns out that she doesn't have a case, that would be - as KHOW radio talk show host and former prosecutor Craig Silverman termed it - a "career ending" decision.

He's right. Silverman, interestingly, apologized on the air to the Ramseys, given that the attention now has turned to Karr.

"I never accused them of being guilty," he told me later of the Ramseys, "but I was guilty of using innuendo."

His view of the case has changed in the last few years. His thinking, he says, was affected by the polygraph that the Ramseys passed and especially by the ruling by a federal judge in favor of the intruder theory.

"I think a lot of people have gotten locked into a position," he says, "even when some of the evidence changed."

You'd hope that his apology wouldn't be the last. I wonder if Bill Owens is beginning to work on his. He's in Jordan now - because the governor of Colorado is needed in Jordan - and it's going to be a long flight home.

After all, it's one thing, if you have a radio show, to fill up air time and light up the boards. And if you work for a tabloid, well, you work for a tabloid - and so you accuse the young brother of killing his sister.

Owens is another story. He rushed in front of the cameras to stop just short of accusing the Ramseys of killing their daughter. I don't know his motives, whether it was for a quick political turn or a case of Owens Boy Scoutism or whether he's planning for his own talk show in retirement.

The Boulder DA had put the Ramseys under the "umbrella of suspicion." And Owens provided the lightning and thunder. He had investigated the evidence and announced, to the surprise of the investigators, that there was "significant new evidence," and that was good enough for him to join the tabloid nation.

No matter how it turns out for Karr, Owens was guilty of terrible judgment. In a news conference, he accused the "killers" of "stonewalling." There was nothing subtle about this. That could only have meant the Ramseys. Nobody else was stonewalling. Nobody else under suspicion was a plural.

He told the killers - read the Ramseys - "that each day brings us closer to the day when you will reap what you have sown."

It was, at the time, a hugely popular thing to have said. Lynch mobs are often popular, too, and have the same respect for the concept of innocence until proof of guilt.

At the time of the murder, it seemed as if there was nothing that could be more horrible. That, it turned out, was a rush to judgment. What was more horrible was to have your child murdered and then to be accused repeatedly of doing it.

Again, I have no theory on this case. I know, though, that there will be a lot of head-shaking over the next few days about media excess. Richard Jewell's name will resurface. Self-flagellation can pay the bills, at least for a time.

And then there will be another Natalee Holloway or Chandra Levy. Another O.J. Or maybe even another JonBenet.

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