The war in Iraq has not only been won, it has been driven off morning TV by a murder case. For weeks, we woke up to Vincent Brooks at Centcom and now we wake up to Scott Peterson at the county jail.
One media analyst dates the formal end of the war to 2 p.m. EDT April 15 when CNN broke away from a live briefing by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to go to a press conference on the autopsy of Laci Peterson.
Now the morning hosts have turned their all-encompassing attention from retired generals and their maps to grieving mothers and stricken fathers, one the parents of the victim, the other parents of the suspect. There are interviews with stolid prosecutors and sheriffs who say it would be unfair to speculate, but they're confident they have a solid case.
People get murdered every day, so there is a certain random element in which cases get taken up by the media. The Peterson case in Modesto, Calif., certainly has the requisite dramatic elements:
An appealing victim, Laci Peterson, an attractive, 27-year-old substitute teacher happily anticipating the birth of her first child.
A weasel for a suspect, Scott Peterson, who was having an affair with a masseuse whom he neglected to tell he was already married.
A long period of suspense with a gruesome resolution: Laci disappeared in December. Her body and that of the fetus washed ashore last week, three miles from where Peterson said he had been fishing the day of her disappearance.
Enough suspicious detail to fascinate the viewers who overnight have gone from armchair military tacticians to armchair homicide investigators. Shortly after his wife disappeared, Peterson put his house on the market and traded in her car. The day of his arrest, his hair had been dyed, he had grown a goatee, he was carrying $10,000 in cash and his brother's ID.
One element is missing. Peterson has been assigned a public defender, but surely a flamboyant defense attorney will emerge to take his case. Tabloid TV is standing by.
As much as social critics might say the preoccupation with the Peterson case reflects a failing of modern culture, the fact is that American readers and viewers have been fascinated by murder trials for as long as there has been a popular press.
Murder trials are a popularly accessible form of human drama, and Theodore Dreiser had that double meaning in mind when he called his novel, based on a celebrated murder case, "An American Tragedy."
Scripps Howard News Service