I don’t care about Scott Peterson.
I really don’t.
I’ve tried to care, but I can’t. He could be killed. He could be sent to jail for life. He could go free, or he could be sent to Mars.
I don’t care.
Furthermore, I don’t think Lacey Peterson is the first woman to be killed by her husband. I’ll even go out on a limb and say that she probably isn’t the first pregnant woman to be killed by her husband.
Does that sound callous? Well…I don’t care, and I don’t think anyone can blame me for my apathy. If there is one thing that the popular news media seems designed to do, it is to guarantee the total disdain of the viewer. I first discovered this many years ago, when the O.J. Simpson trial was under way. At first, it was easy to see Simpson as a monster and his in-laws as victims. But this dichotomy soon degraded as I was forced to see the cast of characters paraded past me every time I turned on the television. By the end of the whole ordeal, I hated everyone involved in the case, from Simpson to Nicole Brown’s parents. They were all criminals, at that point. They had all infringed upon my life, loitering on my television screen and refusing to go away.
But the real criminal, the real mastermind pulling all the strings, was the media. The true victim was the ideal of newsworthiness.
It begins innocently enough. The news industry is a business; it mines current affairs for little gemstones that the populace will find the most alluring. What better find is there than the story of Scott and Lacey Peterson? They’re so young, so attractive, so white.
The news media tests the waters by throwing out a few news pieces about the case. They give people a little taste and wait to see if they bite. It’s an easy sell. People eat it up. It’s easy to cast the accused and the victim as the Everyman and Everywoman because so little is known about them. Plus, they’re everything that everyone wants to be – so attractive…so white.
This just makes the crime seem even more bizarre, and the national audience wants to know more. Secondary players are introduced: the friends, the in-laws, the colleagues. The light they shed on the case makes it even more tantalizing. Pretty soon, there’s late-breaking coverage. Then come the half-hour specials. Next, the Larry King interviews. The incessant coverage is enough to confound anyone.
But the gorging soon leads to overdose. People and issues that once had such clear definition lose their meaning. Victims cease to be victims and simply become streams of electrons thrust against an inch-thick piece of glass. All meaning slips away and the whole story becomes a mere play of light, like shadow puppets or a kaleidoscope. One becomes overly familiar with the characters involved and static replaces real communication. Instead of seeing the victim or the killer, one sees the guy who can’t wear his tie straight and the woman whose hair always has a funny cowlick.
Inevitably, this gives way to sheer annoyance. But at this point the story can’t be avoided. You can try to ignore it, but the media saturation is so thorough that this is nearly impossible. The result is that every time you turn on the television you’re confronted with a hell only Sartre could concoct. As much as you try to avoid confronting the object of your scorn, it’s constantly thrust in your face.
All the while, there is a little, emaciated brown person in a distant country being savagely oppressed, along with thousands of other little brown people. But that doesn’t much matter to the mainstream media because those people are brown and not particularly attractive, and this makes their plight really hard to sell to the American people. Their problems simply aren’t newsworthy, and nothing is going to convince the media otherwise. No number of 9/11s will instill in CNN or Fox News the notion that those little brown people in those distant, dirty countries are relevant to the western world.
So we are deprived of that story. The history of one half of the world – a history in which we unwittingly play a very significant part – slips slowly from under our feet into the ambiguity of the past. The greater part of the western world is left none-the-wiser, but the information vacuum must be filled.
Thus it is that we find ourselves awash in a sea of information – all of it pertaining to an insignificant WASP who killed his trophy wife.
