Casey Anthony, media frenzy and lynch mobs...

The acquittal Tuesday of 25-year-old Casey Anthony in Orlando, Florida, on charges of murdering her young daughter in June 2008, points to a fact of some social significance. While the authorities and the media in the US regard democratic norms and elementary legal safeguards as obstacles to be gotten around, the population by and large still takes these matters seriously.

The Anthony case has been at the center of the most recent American media frenzy, by now a thoroughly predictable and deplorable phenomenon. Cable television talk show hosts, such as Nancy Grace of CNN’s Headline News, did everything in their power over the course of months to blacken Anthony’s name and bring about her conviction. These are scoundrels without a shred of decency.

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Individuals who may feel helpless about the overall state of life or their own personal circumstances are encouraged to vent their frustration at officially chosen scapegoats. The American mass media, useless as it is when it comes to presenting the truth about contemporary events, is skilled at sniffing out the vulnerable, the wretched, the damaged soul whose personal misfortunes will serve for a week or a month to distract the most confused layers of the population—those layers, ironically, most similar in their social and psychological vulnerability to the chosen victim! Many of the individuals now shouting or emailing “Justice for Caylee!” are really demanding, only falsely and not understanding why they are outraged, justice for themselves. The only consequence of such a campaign is more law-and-order hysteria, new reactionary laws, and the further mystification of social reality.

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A Reuters article July 6 noted that “the entire cable landscape—and now the broadcast news networks—seem to have gotten drunk” on the Anthony trial. The cynical piece goes on, “Why does this case get such coverage? Answer: Ratings, ratings, ratings.” More concretely, the Anthony trial became “such a media circus” in the first place because of “the usually slow summer news cycle—with the Anthony Weiner scandal winding down in mid-June, the Casey Anthony trial was there to fill the void.” Full story...

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