For unexplainable reasons, my wife and I have been watching old episodes of “48 Hours” of late. You know the show, I assume: the CBS documentary/news magazine has been broadcast on the network since January 19, 1988, though in periodically mutating forms. It is currently the only remaining first-run prime time shows appearing Saturday nights on the four major U.S. broadcast TV networks, and as such illustrates what dinosaurs those networks are and where they are headed.
“48 Hours” illustrates a lot of other things too, I have discovered, many of them carrying useful, disturbing, or surprising ethical and cultural implications. Although the show’s format is sometimes chucked to cover a breaking news story, most of its astounding number of episodes are devoted to “true crime” tales, usually mysteries and recently solved cold cases.
The formula seldom varies: we get a quick description of a U.S. locale, snippets of local citizens describing it in glowing terms, then an ominous overview of the participants in the ugly event we are about to hear, almost invariably a shocking murder. Then the CBS host—here’s how old the show is: the original host was Dan Rather—is shown interviewing family members, witnesses, law enforcement officials, journalists, lawyers, jurors and other participants. The show is carefully apolitical, but it is still a fascinating series of snapshots of our society and the treatment of it by the news and entertainment media.
Among the striking impressions that emerge from the accumulated impact of “48 Hours”—
- An awful lot of murders are committed by people with no previous history of violence, and the fact that so many murder just one person and then go on to live apparently normal lives shakes my faith in the whole concept of “signature significance.”
- The average person is a lousy liar. Being a lawyer with a theater background, this comes as surprise to me: lawyers and actors tend to be very skilled liars. The ridiculous stories these perps try on interrogators when they are caught are something to behold; they would literally do better with “ahuminahuminahumina ” Ralph Kramden-style.
I was particularly impressed recently by the guy caught almost 30 years after he impulsively raped and murdered the single mother of a Little League player he was coaching. Despite the fact that the killer had to know, after police arrested him, that they had evidence proving he had been in the house where she was killed, he denied knowing his victim and ever being in the house. Then, when informed of the damning DNA evidence, he claimed that he and the woman had been engaged in a long-time secret affair, and that her death had been the result of a consensual rough sex game gone wrong. “You’re saying that the two of you enjoyed a sex game that involved wrapping a metal clothes hanger around her neck until it cut into her skin?” the police interrogator responded, showing him the poor woman’s corpse at the scene.
- Police, medical examiners and forensic experts screw up a lot, less now than in the past, but confirmation bias still plays a troubling role in criminal investigations. Over and over again, the scenario reappears in which law enforcement homes in on a favorite suspect and all of the pieces of evidence are pushed into a theory incriminating him or her like misfitting pieces into spaces in a jigsaw puzzle, often with the real villain hiding in plain sight nearby. In that episode with the coat-hanger killer, the son of the murdered mother had a team photograph of his champion Little League team framed and hanging in his living room for all the years between his mother’s murder and the killer’s capture decades later. The coach, his mother’s rapist, was standing right behind the son in the photo. The original investigators never considered the coach a suspect.
- Hindsight bias also is a regular feature of these stories. After the real killer is caught and it turns out to be someone completely shocking (as with a disturbing number of popular and revered small community clergymen who murder parishioners and sometimes bury them in their back yards), “48 Hours” frequently finds an angry relative who excoriates authorities for not seeing long before what has only become obvious recently.
- I am frequently reminded why I decided that I didn’t want to be a criminal defense attorney. The things these poor lawyers feel forced to assert or theorize in court (zealous representation!) are fit for an old Woody Allen comedy. For example, in one case police had initially ruled the death of a mother and her daughter a murder-suicide even though the weapon used was a military rifle and the alleged murderer’s “self-inflicted” wound was a bullet shot down into the top of her head. A second opinion from a new medical examiner held that such a suicide was physically impossible. After the guilty party (another daughter) was apprehended, her desperate lawyer produced an expert at trial who showed how the defendant’s sister could have fired the rifle into her own head by pulling the trigger using her toes. Reasonable doubt! (Uh, no.)
- It is depressing how many normal, small town, big city, Americans of all ages and all background speak like illiterates, even when they know their ignorance will be displayed on TV. The culprits include police. “I seen him.” “He don’t seem like a killer.” “Ain’t.” This is a feature of almost every episode. How can someone get out of the 6th grade in a competent public school system and talk like that? Do they read? Can they read? The phenomenon is an indictment—yes, another one—of our rotting educational system and a culture that tolerates ignorance.
- The incidence of casual slobbery is similarly depressing. I don’t get it: participants in these sordid tales. more often than not, let themselves be seen looking like vagrants, while their interviewers are in neatly pressed shirts, blazers, or business suits. Among the worst offenders are retirees and the elderly, whose attire often shouts “I don’t give a damn.” Do the show’s producers tell these people to dress like that? If so, shame on them. It creates instant class bias.
- Beginning around 20 years ago, virtually everyone interviewed on the show who wasn’t a lawyer, a scientist or an academic started using the ubiquitous, pointless “like,” as in “I was, like” and “I thought, like…” On TV. These people sound like brain-damaged teenie-boppers and Valley Girls of old, and don’t even realize that it’s not an endearing image.
- Apparently no murder victim in the United States is ever anything but a wonderful, wonderful person loved by all, or if he or she wasn’t, nobody will admit it to “48 Hours.” “She loved sunsets,” a misty-eyed friend of a murder victim told the CBS correspondents to describe the character of the woman who was “like a sister.” She loved sunsets, and she faked a pregnancy to force a guy she was obsessed with to marry her, but instead he beat her to death with a baseball bat.
- Be careful out there. What in the world can make someone get married with a big reception and party, and then have such major doubts about the marriage that she murders her new husband on their honeymoon?
- Americans are really slow to figure out the impact and implications of technology. The killers in these episodes blithely send hundreds of text messages that later incriminate them. They don’t realize that their search histories on their computers will be problematical when it includes topics like “How to dispose of a body” or “poisons that can’t be traced.” Don’t murderers watch “CSI”? Don’t they watch “48 hours”?
- We aren’t quite to the point Great Britain is with its ever-present CCTV, but we’re getting close. There is a camera on us almost every second we’re in public or just outside our homes. Good for catching murderers, but curtains for the expectation of privacy.
I have one final note, and this is puzzling: explanations would be welcome. At a time when entertainment companies are obsessed with “diversity” and “inclusion,” when it seems like every couple in a commercial is mixed race, when the casts of every movie, TV comedy and drama seem to have been put together using racial and ethnic quotas, “48 Hours” almost never features black victims or murderers. Why is that?
Ethics Alarms 
True crime shows are a guilty pleasure of mine.
I didn’t see the one with the baseball coach but was there some reason for the police to suspect him early on? I’m sure the son has many pictures of himself with another adult in the photo – that doesn’t mean said adult killed the mother.
Other things I’ve noticed about killers that don’t keep up with technology or even nosy neighbors:
– buying body disposal and murder scene clean-up items in one odd middle-of-the-night trip, using an easily traceable credit card or business loyalty card.
– wearing easily recognizable clothing or shoes. Do they not know that the type of tennis shoe a person is wearing often has unique treading on the bottom and can be determined? Oh, by the way, don’t wear the shoes you wore to the murder scene to the police station to answer a few questions!
– Changing your habits. How many times has suspicion fallen on a slob who suddenly gets an urge to deep clean his pick-up truck at 6 AM?
– DNA! DNA! DNA! They will stalk you until you throw a cigarette or a plastic straw away.
– Not grieving appropriately. Yeah, I know…everybody grieves differently, but everybody grieves. It is not normal to rush out and buy a new mattress while the neighborhood is looking for your missing wife. If you’re not sorry someone has died, you’d better at least pretend!
– My favorite: if an old girlfriend calls you up out of the blue and wants to discuss the murder, hang up! She’s working for the police and the call is being recorded.
Don’t forget the ridiculously incriminating “buying a million dollar life insurance policy with you as the beneficiary right before the insured disappears or turns up dead.”
Oh, my, yes. One of my favorite “Forensic Files” cases involves a family of hucksters who specialized in insurance fraud taking a vulnerable young woman under their wing, taking out a life insurance policy on her while making sure that it paid out double in the case of an accident and then pushing her off a cliff the next day. They showed up at the agent’s office that very day and he couldn’t believe it.
You’d have thought they would’ve given it a bit more time.
In fact, insurance companies will investigate suspicious deaths better than the police to sometimes. Call it being highly motivated. Just as bank tellers are trained to spot counterfeit money, insurance company employees are trained to see holes in a claim story.
Then there is the IRS. I love the episode in which a woman was not paying her husband’s business taxes, the IRS called and kept trying to talk to him but only getting her. Finally, after the IRS agent insisted on speaking to her husband to set an appointment to discuss this with him, she came on the line with a fake voice pretending to him. The voice was so obviously her that the agent later told the police it sounded like Kermit the Frog.
When she called and told them they couldn’t make the appointment because he was dead, that sent up a huge red flag. Don’t try to be sneaky with insurance companies or the IRS.
My favorite is when the police use the killer as their star witness to frame someone else. Its a classic and it seems to work every time.
The police need to realize that when a witness volunteer to ‘help’ you and has a vast amount of information about the crime, they might be the actual criminal.
It’s like watching a fictional TV mystery, such as “Murder, She Wrote”. The person who tries to help Jessica Fletcher the most is the killer! That and being the most famous person in the guest cast.
“It’s like watching a fictional TV mystery”
Or a Based On A True Story like OJ’s IF I DID IT: Confessions Of The Killer…?
PWS
The last point is easy. The only black lives that matter are criminals who die during an interaction with white police. Black criminals can’t be shown because that perpetuates racism. Black victims can’t be shown because they almost always are killed by black criminals. Almost all killings are intra-racial in this country. The exception is that lots of people of all races are killed by black criminals. That fact is racist, however, and therefore misinformation.
To add a bit of clarity, since I think what you’re driving at is this (but feels a bit lost by being labeled “systemic” racism): The format lends itself to a big picture look at the crimes – showing all of that would expose the lunacy of black inner city culture, at which point nobody would buy in to “math is racist” (i.e. everything is racist…); it would become clear at that point that black violence and poverty is largely self inflicted. The “liberal white guilt” cash cow would evaporate over night, and about half the political system would collapse shortly thereafter.
It’s something anybody with one eye open can see, and it’s absolutely twisted and grotesque that the media and the Democrats (but I repeat myself) perpetuate the hoax.
Black lives matter, but not for the reasons most sane people think.
I know news media make it seem like a lot of murders are committed by people with no criminal background, but that’s an artifact of the news-making process. Those cases are actually a small minority, but that makes them more interesting and thus more newsworthy. If I remember correctly off there cuff, upwards of 80% of murderers have a prior felony history, and the average number of prior arrests is around 9.
I figured as much. I also think selection bias is behind the poor dress and speech from the interviewees. They go looking for these small-town murders committed by small-town folks, in places where the locals don’t feel the need to impress anyone. It makes for relatable TV, especially if these same demographics are the ones most likely to watch these these kind of shows.
This point shouldn’t be understated. It reflects a most sinister aspect of recency and selection bias and is caused by mass media. Our poor brains are not equipped to handle the news (especially of the “if it bleeds it leads” category) outside of about a 50 mile radius–now we’re performing a mass experiment on what happens to society when you have the bad news of the whole world being pushed at you all day, every day.
The results of this experiment:
Helicopter parenting. No more free range kids because there are kidnappers and strangers in vans and poisoned Halloween candy around every corner.
Along that same vein is general alarmism. How many people think their child is at serious risk of being killed in a school shooting? Your child is more likely to die in a car accident on the way to school than from random violence at school.
And worst of all is a significant deterioration of overall mental health. Kids who think they’re going to die from a changing climate, Gen Z’ers who think that the American dream has been ruined and that baby boomers had it easy compared to them, and an overall frightening nihilism that seems ever-present in millennials and younger. More than half of my wife’s extended family has chosen to not have children, and the overall consensus is that this world is too evil, disgusting, doomed, etc., to bring children into.
These same people live lives that are unimaginably healthier, cleaner, more comfortable, safer, and generally easier than any generation before, yet they think life is hopeless.
Who woulda thunk that too much information would result in societal and individual mental deterioration instead of the opposite?
This.
Jack’s last observation explains the first. The reason the population presented on screen doesn’t statistically represent the reality of murder is precisely why It’s threatening to the concept of signature significance.
Someone maintaining a clean record doesn’t really change trust that should be afforded to them. The BTK killer, for example.
“Apparently no murder victim in the United States is ever anything but a wonderful, wonderful person loved by all” This statement applies to all sorts of victims and perpetrators. Every post facto interview of violent incidences says the same. “he was such a quiet guy.” She was a wonderful mother” . It bewildered me when I read the obituaries of the 3000 9/11 victims there wasn’t an SOB among them. Apparently, the towers were a Shangri la workplace.
Jack Marshall Wrote:
>> It is depressing how many normal, small town, big city, Americans of all ages and
>> all background speak like illiterates, even when they know their ignorance will be
>> displayed on TV. The culprits include police. “I seen him.” “He don’t seem like a killer.”
>> “Ain’t.” This is a feature of almost every episode. How can someone get out of the 6th
>> grade in a competent public school system and talk like that? Do they read? Can they
>> read? The phenomenon is an indictment—yes, another one—of our rotting
>> educational system and a culture that tolerates ignorance.”
Where to begin?
1. The shows are addictive. Why? There is a lot of serious writing on this.
* Part of it it may be that the crime is a disturbance in the normal order–it introduces tension which is resolved when the crime is solved.
* The formulaic nature makes the shows easy to follow. Opening. Theme music. Ominous music when the suspect’s photo appears on the screen. Often the narrators have a nice voice and soothing delivery, even though the subject itself is disturbing. Suspense–and usually the culprit is apprehended at the end of the show. The tension is then resolved.
* Some of us may be looking for “lessons learned.” or at least being able to say to ourselves, “At least I haven’t made *that* mistake.”
2. On The Language.
The great H. L. Mencken wrote a three volume treatise on the American language, which is still joy to browse. He was a descriptivist, not so much a prescriptivist–I think. He would not be surprised by any of the usages Jack is objecting to.
David Crystal wrote a book on the non-standard English variants of the UK. Crystal, if I recall correctly, resented the hegemony of Oxbridge and Received Pronunciation as promoted by formal education and the BBC, etc.
“No Englishman can open his mouth without making another Englishman hate him.” This was said maybe by Crystal, or by Anthony Burgess, or maybe someone else. It all blurs together. Probably it was said by by someone whose family didn’t speak Received Pronunciation Oxbridge English at home. Someone from Manchester or Newcastle…
Part of the language issue Jack mentions is that many of people seen on these shows tend to habitually speak in the vernacular, and in a casual register. They don’t habitually speak standard formal English because they don’t have to, and nobody is expecting them to, and their day-to-day companions don’t speak that way, and that’s ok. Quite possibly, many of us might be resented if we improved the average quality of our speech.
Much of the issue is “register” or “sociolinguistic register.” Wikipedia has details. S.v. register (sociolinguistics).
Probably the people seen on the show are speaking in a casual register, and Jack is expecting them to “bring their A game” and upgrade their speech to a formal register. It might be good for their status in the eyes of viewing public, and the courts and jury, but perhaps that never really occurs to them.
= – = – =
Jack might not care, but I think “ain’t” is a perfectly good word, especially as a contraction for “I am not.” Aditionallly, it adds emphasis–“He ain’t gonna do it” is perhaps more forceful than “He’s not going to do it. Roy Blunt, Jr. makes such a claim in his book _Alphabet juice_.
= – = – = – =
There is an important analytical distinction between being illiterate and not being able to speak formal English on the fly. Probably they are correlated–the more time someone reads, the more likely he will be able to speak formal English on the fly. You can tell the people who write _The Onion_ are seasoned consumers of journalism, and probably journalists. They write the way journalists write, with journalistic cadence and phrasing, etc.
It’s probably the case that most adults don’t read as much as one single book (of a serious nature) every year after they leave formal education. Even seasoned professionals are often deluged with non-book material, technical manuals, legal contracts, professional journals, newsletters, work mails, etc., and don’t read a book. I believe Jacques Barzun has made this point. Somewhere in _Begin here_, published maybe in 1992.
I am led to understand by survey data that the average American adult reads at the 7th grade level.
Charles W. Abbott
Rochester NY
“Apparently no murder victim in the United States is ever anything but a wonderful, wonderful person loved by all, or if he or she wasn’t, nobody will admit it to “48 Hours.” “She loved sunsets,” a misty-eyed friend of a murder victim told the CBS correspondents to describe the character of the woman who was “like a sister.” She loved sunsets, and she faked a pregnancy to force a guy she was obsessed with to marry her, but instead he beat her to death with a baseball bat.”
I just heard someone use the term “empathy pie”. That we’ve been trained since birth to believe that in any given bad episode that there is only a finite amount of responsibility to spread around. If Bad Actor A murders someone – the murder is so heinous of an act we write off the other person the victim as having no moral agency in the event. We never ask ourselves if they might have some ounce of responsibility for their circumstance.
We’re predisposed to think that wait, you just hinted that Victim B might have a small role to play in their fate…then you are reducing the moral value of murder!!! You can’t do that!
But responsibility isn’t finite. The murderer’s murdering is still 100% as bad of a murder even if the victim’s own unethical conduct “pushed” the murderer over the line. But it can probably be accurately surmised, that if the victim hadn’t been doing their unethical conduct (albeit less unethical than murder) the victim would still be alive today.
The victim bears no responsibility for the murder…but they are certainly responsible for whatever unethical conduct they were engaging in leading to the murder.
To use your example as a hypothetical.
Nope…as soon as some horrible act is committed, all associated actions during the event are made to pale in comparison.