The Leader

John Mark Karr

Earlier this month a federal judge in Michigan ruled that the Bush Administration's NSA wiretapping program was unconstitutional. The plan would have allowed the National Security Agency to intercept international phone calls and e-mails of Americans with links to suspected terrorists. This was the second indictment of the Bush Administration's counter-terrorism tactics, but this was not the lead story on any of the major networks. Local and national news stations decided to boost their ratings and ran wild with a break in the 1996 JonBenet Ramsey murder investigation. The media's circus-like coverage of the possible culprit of Ramsey's murder resembled a soap opera and left everyone tuned in and wondering, who done it?

Forty one-year-old Alabama native John Mark Karr was arrested in Thailand and initially faced charges of first-degree murder, kidnapping and sexual assault. Despite many inaccuracies in Karr’s recollection of the "accidental" murder, the media quickly went wild and devoted days of coverage to the ten-year-old case. Karr claimed to have drugged and raped Ramsey although the autopsy disproved both claims. Karr also claimed to have picked Ramsey up from school on the day of the murder, however Ramsey was murdered on Christmas day when school was not in session. On Aug. 28, the charges against Karr were dropped when his DNA sample didn’t match evidence taken from the crime scene.

What is perhaps more shocking than the media's widespread and frenzied coverage is the public's intense interest. Every year numerous children are murdered or go missing, but not every child's story receives national and international news coverage. Sherrice Iverson was only seven years old when she was raped and murdered by eighteen-year-old Jeremy Strohmeyer in a casino bathroom in Nevada. Strohmeyer bragged about devirginizing, strangling, and snapping the neck of the young girl. Sherrice Iverson is not a household name like JonBenet Ramsey is. Clearly the media uses wealth, race and status to validate the legitimacy of someone's life. Hundreds of children's stories go untold because they don't fit the mold of what is assumed to be worthy.

The death of Ramsey was a perfect mix of prominence and scandal and the media used this to its advantage. When Ramsey was murdered ten years ago the unsolved mystery was whether or not John and Patsy Ramsey were responsible for murdering their precious beauty queen daughter. Local and national networks began sensationalizing the story then and they are just as guilty of it today.

Something about the Ramsey case has left the public fascinated and starving for more, and the media is primarily to blame. The amount of media attention that has been generated by the Ramsey case creates unjust expectations for other murder victims and Ramsey herself. Their habit of sensationalizing reality along with the public's overzealous attitude has obliterated the rights and integrity of a six-year-old girl who suffered more physical pain than any of us can fathom when she was left sexually assaulted and strangled in her own basement. JonBenet Ramsey was desecrated and demeaned the day she was murdered in the basement of her own home, the media shouldn't be allowed to do it to her again.

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