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Justice by TV

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Clarissa

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Making a Murderer has set a very bad precedent of manipulating the public opinion to support murderers of women. A documentary came out recently that glorifies the vicious murderer Amanda Knox. Just like the film that manipulates facts and edits reality to present Steven Avery as innocent, the Knox documentary is shameless in its rewriting of Knox’s story. 

As we have seen in the bizarre obsession with the “real name” of Elena Ferrante, most people are incapable of noticing the difference between reality and a fictional narrative. If it’s written in a book or especially if it’s shown on TV, it’s got to be true. It doesn’t seem to occur to many viewers how easy it is to edit a story in absolutely any direction that the filmmaker wants. 

Knox is already running free and Avery has every chance of being released. Justice by TV is a very dangerous thing. 

20 responses to “Justice by TV”

  1. Shakti Avatar
    Shakti

    Actual conversations:

    68 year old man: “House of Cards really showed me how devious & evil Washington politicians are. It’s so realistic.”
    Me: “It’s a cartoon.”

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Yeah. . . I enjoyed the show until I realized people were taking it almost as a documentary. It’s creepy.

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      1. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        “people were taking it almost as a documentary”

        Back in the early 90s the same thing happened with the X-Files, I knew people who thought the show was some kind of journalism uncovering stories the main stream media and the government were covering up…..

        Inability to tell entertainment from reality has a long, rich tradition in the US.

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        1. Shakti Avatar
          Shakti

          Back in the early 90s the same thing happened with the X-Files, I knew people who thought the show was some kind of journalism uncovering stories the main stream media and the government were covering up…..

          Inability to tell entertainment from reality has a long, rich tradition in the US.

          Why are people so credulous? Is it just that they “want[ed] to believe?”

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          1. Clarissa Avatar
            Clarissa

            “Why are people so credulous? Is it just that they “want[ed] to believe?””

            • It’s a lack of Humanities education and a very low culture of readership. Nobody explained to people the difference between facts, opinions, fiction, narrative. etc.

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            1. Shakti Avatar
              Shakti

              It’s a lack of Humanities education and a very low culture of readership. Nobody explained to people the difference between facts, opinions, fiction, narrative. etc.

              I continue to be astounded. This show ran from when I was in middle school throughout high school. My brain wasn’t fully developed. I don’t recall a single moment when any of these were explained to me before high school. There was no framing device suggesting that show was factual like the true crime shows I watched as a kid (Unsolved Mysteries, America’s Most Wanted). I watched hours and hours of trashy television as a child with little supervision. I’m not sure it’s a lack of humanities education. Humanities education helps you evaluate the quality of information and whether it is factual, not whether a tv show with no framing device to suggest that it’s real is fiction. I think there’s a basic disconnect with reality going on with some people, who should know some things based on life experience.

              OT: When I visit this site there’s a pop under that asks me if I’ve registered to vote.

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          2. cliff arroyo Avatar
            cliff arroyo

            ” Is it just that they “want[ed] to believe?””

            To be perfectly clear. They didn’t think the X-Files was a documentary as such, but they thought that it was someone’s (whose? I dunno) way of letting the public know that alien abductions and the like were real and that the government was working to keep this vital knowledge from the public.

            In retrospect, for a big slice of the public, the X-Files inadvertently(?) gave credence to lots of crazy ideas that had been swimming around in the collective unconscious and helped create the conspiracy movement of the last 15 years or so.

            I don’t know if they ever got to the 12 bloodlines or monarch programming but they sound like things straight from the show.

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        2. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          “Inability to tell entertainment from reality has a long, rich tradition in the US.”

          • And it’s getting worse. Look at Trump.

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  2. Alex Avatar
    Alex

    I haven’t seen the Amanda Knox series, but I disagree on Making a Murderer. It’s a documentary, i.e. long-form investigative journalism. We need more or that sort of thing. These particular documentarians may be right or wrong in their hypothesis, but the sort of activity that they are engaging in is necessary to keep the authorities in check. If they are wrong about Steven Avery we need more journalism to counter them, not less.

    And if somebody other than Steven Avery killed that woman then the pro-woman position is that the authorities should find and punish the person who killed her, not use her murder to settle a score with Steven Avery.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      It’s not even about if they are wrong or right in the documentary. They created a completely fictional account. And many people believe it has something to do with facts.

      They didn’t investigate anything. They invented. And that’s fine as long as viewers understand that it’s as real as Gone With the Wind or War and Piece.

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      1. Alex Avatar
        Alex

        Could you point to some good summaries of the problems with Making a Murderer. They used a lot of original footage from the investigation and trial, and quoted a lot of court transcripts. The criticisms that I’ve seen have challenged specific points but not the entire structure of it. And an appellate judge at least agrees with the criticism of how Avery’s nephew was induced to confess.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          I didn’t read any texts about it. But there were tons of interviews of people featured in the documentary whose words and positions were completely perverted. For instance, the fiancee who has suffered beatings and murder threats from Avery reports that he kept saying, “I can do anything I want to you bitches [women] because of what happened to me.” There was a ton of evidence against Avery that the documentary never even mentioned because it’s inconvenient.

          The film itself is ridiculous. That all of these crowds of people, in the county, the state, at the federal level, non-governmental workers, lawyers, etc would come up with such a complex conspiracy just to “take revenge” on this fellow makes no sense. Nothing in the story as they show it makes any sense.

          Avery was unstable long before he first went to jail. Then the jail messed with his head even further.

          As for the case against the nephew, I agree that there was no evidence against him at all.

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  3. Pen Avatar
    Pen

    Knox isn’t running free because of TV journalism. On the contrary–she was vilified by the press. I followed the trial as it was happening–it was a complete farce. The investigative tactics were sloppy, and they only had circumstantial evidence. Whether or not she actually did anything, the people investigating the murder showed very clearly that they were only looking for someone to blame, and weren’t interested in finding out if the person who took the blame actually did the crime. She was released because someone finally acknowledged that the police went about their investigation the wrong way. Around the same time, courts in the same country successfully prosecuted four seismologists who failed to predict that an earthquake was going to be as bad as it turned out to be.

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    1. cliff arroyo Avatar
      cliff arroyo

      I didn’t follow the Knox trial closely myself but according to people that did (IIRC) the prosecutor got a bee in their bonnet that it had to be Knox and pursued that avenue long after it was clear that she hadn’t committed the murder and that Rudy Guede had.

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      1. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        She totally killed Meredith or had her killed. And was convicted. But then Americans got involved (including Trump, by the way) and Italians let her go because they didn’t want to spoil the relationship with the US.

        The broad is guilty as sin.

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    2. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      This is the idea that American media were pushing. Anti-Americanness, everybody hates us. But even through the completely biased American accounts it was clear that Knox is a killer. She’s only out because there was a convenient black guy to take the fall and she has an American passport.

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  4. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    I do agree that these shows are kind of a dangerous precedent. Essentially they’re just another example of people wanting their private emotions to be taken seriously in the public spehre.

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  5. el Avatar
    el

    Somebody told me Jesus had a wife after reading “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown. And I could not convince her it was fiction.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Oh God, the Da Vinci Code. I wanted to run and hide after seeing how many people were discussing it as if it were a history textbook.

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  6. Sternococktail Avatar
    Sternococktail

    OT – but I’ve lost the email adress – lots and lots of pictures etc
    http://www.berdichev.org/history.html
    http://www.berdichev.org/jewsinurss_b_5.htm
    http://www.berdichev.org/jewsinurss_b_8.htm

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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