I’m in London now and can’t get enough of the Foxy Knoxy murder trial, which is playing big in all the British papers. In any reasonable news world, none but the most virtuous should be able to get enough of Foxy Knoxy. It’s a sex murder with an especially young and comely American girl at the center of it. Tabloid shows and cable news networks have been built on much less.
And yet, in the US new media, it’s at best a ho-hummer.
So what gives? Has the US media found itself a new sense of propriety and moral center, or is it just, as in so many other instances, out of it. Too depressed about its future and uncertain of its function to follow even the scent of blood and sex?
To recap: The promiscuous girl next door goes on her junior abroad to Italy, where she has lots of sex, smokes tons of weed, meets other students and rootless young people from exotic places, has the time of her life, and then one day finds her British roommate raped and with her throat cut. The hapless and desperate Italian authorities shortly implicate the American girl, her Italian boyfriend, and an African bar owner in the murder. Then, possibly because this is Italy, they convict a more or less random passerby for the murder. At the same time, the authorities continue to insist that an orgy-gone-wrong is the motive for the murder and that Amanda Knox is the mastermind.
(AP Image)
As stories go, this one ought to be irresistible.
I’ve got two theories for why it’s gotten no traction in the US.
No. 1: This is a demonstrable effect of every US news organization pinching pennies and closing their bureaus around the world. Even Europe gets scant personal attention now—and Italy, forget it. As it happens, this story, like most other stories in their local markets, is getting lots of coverage—just not by US news operations. The US media could pinch pennies and still report this story—and so many others—if it relied on foreign news organizations. But we don’t do that. We continue to believe in some strange, parochial and prideful way, that if it isn’t reported by Americans it hasn’t really happened. US news organizations have closed their bureaus and rather assumed the news has closed with them.
No. 2: On cable TV, politics is now more important than murder. Some people might say this is good news, our civic self has transcended our prurient self. But I’d argue that interest in a good old-fashioned murder might well be healthier than the virulent animosities and pointless nattering at the heart of our political lives. Murder is truer and cleaner.
And this just in: It’s beginning to look a lot like Amanda Knox didn’t do it. That the girl next door, instead of being a crazed and deviant sex killer, might actually just be the pot-head girl next door.
As I say, I can’t get enough of the trial of Foxy Knoxy, and you shouldn’t be able to get enough either.
More of Newser founder Michael Wolff's articles and commentary can be found at VanityFair.com, where he writes a regular column. He can be emailed at michael@newser.com
