But the Simpson trial had helped to usher in the age of the 24-hour news cycle, and proved that viewers would seemingly watch anything, no matter how dull or inconclusive, so long as it related to a crime that fascinated them. The Internet, still in its infancy, gave viewers little opportunity to talk back to a media that both terrified and informed them.
#HAS THE JONBENET CASE BEEN SOLVED TV#
Simpson trial, whose unprecedented gavel-to-gavel TV coverage had been a ratings bonanza the previous year, and which had seemed like it would go on forever until it ended in Simpson’s acquittal. In 1996, Americans were still reeling from the trial of Susan Smith, a South Carolina woman who had been convicted, in July 1995, of drowning her toddler sons. She is letting us look at her.įor the past 20 years, the American public has never stopped looking at JonBenét Ramsey, and has never stopped looking for justice in her name: in primetime specials and TV movies, in best-selling true crime accounts and self-published screeds, in online communities that formed in the early days of dial-up and still thrive today, and in magazine and tabloid spreads that prompt readers to mourn, year after year, as if it were always a fresh assault on America, a CHILLING DISCOVERY, an UNTOLD STORY, the MURDER OF A LITTLE BEAUTY. She seems conscious of no desire, no distraction, that will keep her from sitting still as her image is captured. She is not caught in motion, as children so often are in photographs.
At 6 years old, she has not just been given a woman’s hairstyle or clothes or makeup, but she’s been taught a woman’s stillness. The photo that accompanies People magazine’s recent cover story on JonBenét Ramsey shows a corona of soft blond curls, a row of glistening baby teeth visible behind just-parted pink lips, and a pair of wide eyes gazing out from behind thick, dark lashes.
0 kommentar(er)
