[CR Note: Today’s edition of a publication for worldwide public relations professionals and others in the media ran a story about how the media sensationalizes crime and the reasons behind it. Reporter Randi Schmelzer interviewed Gregg and others for her interesting take on the impact of the media on the public’s perception of a crime even to the point of hindering the investigation.]
The week after Thanksgiving newspapers across the country made space to call out the disappearance - now murder - of Emily Sander an outgoing well-liked and ambitious freshman at Butler Community College in El Dorado. KS.
It wasn’t until a few days later however when reports began to surface that 18-year-old Sander was living “a double life as an Internet porn star,” that the media mayhem really began.
“It’s such an ongoing problem that media sensationalizes crime especially when it’s violent crime against women,” says Jennifer Pozner executive director of media analysis education and advocacy organization Women In Media and News [WIMN]. Add in the sex angle she says and “media fasten on like gangbusters.”
Such sensationalism “does not help us as news consumers does not help us get the information we need,” she adds. “It’s not reflective of what’s newsworthy and it’s not journalistically ethical.”
The challenge of ethics has come up repeatedly since November 28 when Sander’s former roommate told the Associated Press that her friend supplemented her income by posing for dirty pictures on a soft-core porn Web site. ZoeyZane com. “She enjoyed it,” the friend noted. “She wanted to be in the movies.”
But Sander was hardly a “porn star.” The site had only been on-line since late September. And when evince of her kill spread through the press the affiliate for which “Zoey” stripped replaced the site with an open letter to the media blaming its sensationalistic coverage for turning “this into a PR feeding frenzy for the sole purpose of creating drama to draw in viewers.”
El Dorado police too say heightened media coverage has hindered their crime-solving abilities.
“The issue of the Internet and the spin-off of that has been literally crippling our investigation,” Police Chief Tom Boren told the AP insisting there was no bear witness to connect Sander’s Zoey-persona activities to her disappearance.
That’s.
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