The party line

Last night I said that “the U.S. media’s systematic presentation of false information exculpating Amanda Knox, and concealment of true information damaging to Amanda Knox … is shaping up as one of the major media cover-ups of all time.”

This morning I opened the New York Post to a two-page spread, copied from the December 9 Mail, that repeated, point by point, the party line I described last night. The author, Tom Rawstorne, purports to be providing the objective facts from which the reader can make his own judgment as to Knox’s guilt: “So is she guilty? Read on and decide for yourself.” In fact, the article is a standard rehash of the Friends of Amanda / U.S. mainstream media take on the case. Rawstorne stresses every piece of evidence, or every lie, such as the supposedly brutal and violent interrogation Knox was subjected to, that makes her look like the innocent victim of a railroad job, while he ignores major circumstantial and forensic evidence, such as the cleaned-up bloody footprints, such as the dishonest telephone calls made by Knox and Sollecito after the police arrived, that points to their guilt. So it’s not just the U.S. media, with their absurd claim that the prosecution of Knox is driven by anti-U.S. bias, that are covering up the truth; it’s the British press as well. A bi-national, cross-Pond disgrace.

And when we remember that most of the U.S. media outlets pushing Knox’s innocence are very liberal, since when are U.S. liberals offended by anti-Americanism? They are its fountainheads. So a need to defend an innocent American from Italian anti-Americanism is not what drives the media to exculpate Knox, what drives them is the need to take the side of a young woman who has become for them a symbol of today’s culture of sexual freedom and female empowerment. This is the same media, after all, that have made icons of Madonna and the cast of Sex and the City. The media aren’t defending America; they’re defending liberalism.

It comes down to this: if you limit yourself to mainstream liberal (and “conservative”) outlets, you will be fed, over and over, the same party line of which Friends of Amanda is the principal source. A major website standing against the party line is True Justice for Meredith Kercher.

I do not know that Knox and Sollecito are guilty. But I do know that the MSM’s “news” coverage of the case has been massively slanted in their favor. I know it, because I myself, assuming it was legitimate news, was swayed by it.

- end of initial entry -

Kevin V. writes:

I can’t tell you how happy I am that you spent more time looking into Knox than that taken in your initial position. I was going to argue with you but thought better of it, hoping that you’d take a closer look.

As to why the American sisterhood has closed ranks…. well, Amanda is one of them, isn’t she?

And that’s enough, in the same way that “O.J. is black” was enough.

Michael Jose writes:

I think what is happening with Amanda Knox is that Americans instinctively distrust judicial systems that are not part of the Anglophone tradition (i.e. the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.) because the way they structure their courts does not give the defendants exactly the protections that are given in the U.S. (although they may have protections in other ways). Therefore, we tend to think of trials of Americans as show trials because we hear that the defendant does not have recourse to some legal procedure or protection that we have the foreign country does not, and therefore assume that the system is railroading the defendant. This tendency is more pronounced now than it was in the mid-’90s, when crime was higher and people were much more bloody-minded (e.g. the Michael Fay caning case).

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 13, 2009 07:50 PM | Send