JonBenét Ramsey Murder
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Who Killed JonBenét?
UK: Channel 4 - '52 minutes
USA: Arts and Entertainment Channel - '90 minute special
Copies available at £25 plus VAT
The Media
The first of the trilogy – transmitted in the UK in 1998 – examined the way the US media had reported the killing.
From the outset the media – encouraged by local police – pursued the parents and declared them guilty. The process revealed a dangerous drift in the US toward seeing news stories as ‘commercial products’: productions to be deliberately fashioned to maximise the financial profit that may be made out of them. The days when the news divisions of the American networks were protected from such financial pressures have long gone.
In the Ramsey case the US media made virtually no attempt to check leaks from some local police officers who, convinced the parents were guilty, thought that by running a campaign of misinformation against them, they could force a confess. Yet as the documentary showed, it was possible to disprove every major fact that had been reported about the case. It showed that everything the US public had been led to believe about the parents – from the allegation that no outsider could have got in because there were no footprints in snow around the house to the accusations that John Ramsey had been involved in child pornography – were all untrue.