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Posted on 10/13/2003 12:39:55 PM PDT by Caleb1411
Though still in prison, Joel Steinberg has a job lined up with a cable TV show in New York City. He qualified for this position--as field producer and perhaps as an on-camera interviewer--by committing a ghastly killing. He beat to death his illegally adopted 6-year-old daughter in 1987. The story hit the city hard. For almost a year, people placed flowers outside the brownstone where Lisa was killed. Soon they will able to watch the killer try to parlay her death into a TV career.
The recycling of perpetrators is simply part of the media game now. New York Times reporter Jayson Blair got a six-figure advance for a book on his short, disastrous career. Blair plagiarized some stories and fabricated others, but his publisher, oddly, describes him as "very honest." Stephen Glass, who wrote many attention-getting false stories for the New Republic and other magazines, got a movie sale and a big book deal for a novelized version of his hoaxes. Rolling Stone, one of the journals he defrauded, has hired him again to write. This is like a bank rehiring an embezzler.
Hollywood does it too. Roman Polanski drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl, then fled the country before sentencing. This year Academy Award voters had no compunctions about giving him the Oscar for best director. In comparison, baseball's Hall of Fame refuses to honor two great but tainted players: Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson. Is raping a child less serious than betting on baseball or throwing a World Series?
Preying on children is no big deal in the music world either. R. Kelly, the popular singer, is out on bail for 21 counts of possessing child pornography. The charges stem from a video police say shows Kelly having sex with an underage girl. It hasn't hurt his popularity. . . .
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Not all recycling works. For a while, it appeared as though the Unabomber would be positioned as a serious, though murderous, critic of American culture. But it didn't happen. Tonya Harding's boxing career is just a joke she never got. And no network has yet tried to hire Joey Buttafuoco as a correspondent. But the rapid refurbishing of appalling people is a constant threat in a culture with no higher standard than nonjudgmentalism. Whenever they can, serious people should fight this process.
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
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