Video Evidence In The Press

In a video that was displayed as evidence for the prosecution during my Federal sentencing trial over two years ago, I told Shasta that her wish for “a million-billion dollars” was impractical and asked her why she didn't wish for me to take her home instead. We were making wishes and writing them on a piece of wood that we would then burn so that the wishes would be carried to the astral plane for consideration. Shasta and Dylan both wished for money, and then Shasta wished for jewelry and Dylan wished for a fancy car. I wished for forgiveness.

After I questioned why neither of them wished to go home Shasta quickly added, “Oh, ya! And I wish to go home too!”, at which point I said, “At least I wished for something I might get...”

In the video, also at the time it was made, it was clear that I was admonishing Shasta for her first wish (for money and jewelry), not the one (to go home) that she added after I prompted her. And yet when the media reported on this video, on two different local news stations and in the papers, they all reported falsely that my comment, “At least I wished for something I might get...” was directed towards Shasta's third wish, “to go home”.

The intention of this misinformation by the press was obvious. It was to make me seem as cold-blooded and cruel as they could, even though in the video I was being fatherly and kind at the time, and the children were both clearly under no duress. I'm not denying the cruelty of what I did to these children. I'm simply observing that in this particular video no cruelty was evident. Several people who watched this video said that if they didn't know the children had been kidnapped they would have thought it was a video of an ordinary family camping trip. And yet the news media chose to portray a fabricated misconstruction of the events depicted in the video.

And, what's even more interesting is that not just one media outlet chose to run this misinformation. As far as I could tell, they all did! (At least the four sources that I saw for myself – two TV news broadcasts and two newspapers, one local, and one from Spokane). And it wasn't as if all these news sources themselves had the same source. There were several reporters in the courtroom from different agencies. And yet they all reported the same misinformation about this video!

Why? The paranois me wants to scream, “conspiracy!” But the more practical me realizes that the truth is probably even scarier than that. The technical term, I have since learned, for this kind of media distortion is called, “framing”. The idea is to portray the information in “packages” that the viewers expect. How information is packaged (or framed) for viewing is a part of the consumer culture. It allows information to be distributed in a convenient form. If something doesn't “fit” inside the “frame”, such as a serial killer behaving as a compassionate person, then the extraneous information is “shaped” to fit, as it was in the case of my comment in the evidence video.

I site only one specific example of media framing in this blog post. But every story you see, in fact, ever piece of information you see in the media, is framed one way or another. This framing distorts public perception so severely that it allows serious misperceptions to be regularily propagated. Society in general takes certain “frameworks” for granted, such as “sex offenders are less human” or “terrorist are irrational fanatics”, in spite of clear evidence that indicates otherwise. These false presumptions lead to distorted decisions that end up causing a lot of people to suffer unnecessarily. They also – coincidentally I'm sure – produce a greater need for authority, in order to maintain social order.

Of course there are numerous well reputed books written on this topic (e.g. Using Murder: The Social Construction os Serial Homicide, see “Booklist” linkon the upper right of this page), so there is no need for me to expound on it here. I just wanted to shed a little light on it in the context of my own experience; which is what this blog is about. In my case alone I have seen so much distortion of information that I do not consider my “public image” to have anything to do with me at all. Joseph E. Duncan III is a media monster, not a person at all, and certainly not me! My hope is that this blog will help anyone interested in the real person behind the name to see that I am no more, and no less, than a human being. Yes, I have done extraordinarily terrible things. But, nothing I have ever done, dispite how my actions have been packaged and sold by the media, has ever been outside the range of human behavior; not even close.

I'm not saying what I did is somehow acceptable; it is not. But it is human, and the more we deny this (the more we “buy” what the popular media is selling) the more we allow this kind of destructive behavior to continue, and of course, the more we need “authorities” to “protect” us (which is another false framework sold to us by the media because they profit tremendously from it).