Tabloid America: Crimes of the Press: An EJE Original

Edward Jay Epstein, who has established new standards of investigative press criticism in his books News From Nowhere, Between Fact and Fiction and Myths of the Media, now turns to the tabloidization of the mainstream media in America. In Tabloid America: The Crimes of the Press he describes the tacit partnership between media and perpetrators in four media-proclaimed “crimes of the century”: The Lindbergh Kidnapping (in which the Hearst newspapers actually paid for the defense), The Manson Murders, the Kidnapping of Patty Hearst, and the O.J. Simpson bloodbath. Each crime involves a celebrity. The celebrity provides the media with the means, opportunity, and motive to launch the wholesale invasion of privacy that fascinates the public. An EJE Original.