Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Casey Anthony: Radioactive

Tonight, I started searching ABC news clips because although I should have been studying for my finals, and I found not only a way to avoid them, but also the latest video on Casey Anthony.
For those of you who are not familiar, Casey Anthony is a 22 year old woman who was accused of murdering her three year old daughter, Caylee in 2008, but despite the evidence proving her guilty, the Florida jury found her not guilty, and the case caused public outrage. 
However, she has been on probation for a few misdemeanors for several months, and has been serving those months in an undisclosed location. Casey has also been making "video diaries" on her computer, and the alleged "personal diaries were recently leaked. 

Although the leaked video of Casey Anthony was interesting in and of itself, what really struck me was the way ABC news framed the story. In the ABC news video, legal analyst Dan Abrams describes Casey Anthony as "radioactive". In saying this, Dan suggests Casey is unstable and dangerous. Although I do agree with what the analysts had to say about Casey, it seems as though every news story choose to frame her as a self absorbed, malicious human being. 

Maybe Casey is a crazy psychopath, but that's not the fact I'm interested in. The real question I have is if the media should be able to construct a news story with a bias. This is similar to how some history teachers feel history should be through cold hard facts whereas others believe analyzing history helps to better understand it. Does the presentation of media cause the same controversy? 

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