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Pop Culture & Current Events

Casey Anthony Who?

Who is Casey Anthony?

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So, after much curiosity after seeing this name all over the place, I decided to find out who Casey Anthony is. Allegedly, she killed her daughter and tried to cover it up. No matter what the outcome of the trial, no matter what really happened, this is a very sad trial.

That’s why the media circus surrounding the trial particularly upsets me. The sensitivity of the events. Here are some of the things that concerned me with this trial – and with another trial that happened about 15 years ago – the O.J. Simpson trial:

  1. When such a sensitive topic – infantcide, domestic violence, etc. – comes into the media, it receives a lot of attention. However, the topic, no matter how important, often fades into the background shortly after. This tends to make it a “trend” to care about issues that happen all the time for people of all backgrounds and social statuses.
  2. When these trials happen, we make the person a celebrity – for committing a crime!
  3. I really don’t understand people’s reactions to the trial. This isn’t a made for TV movie, it’s a person’s life. No matter what happened, no matter what the outcome is, this woman has to deal with it. Her mother has to deal with it, her friends have to deal with it. We can make people into monsters all we want, but when it comes down to it, lives have been completely shattered, and unfortunately these people have to return to their lives. It seems to me that it would be much more difficult to go back to life when your face is everywhere.
  4. The money that’s being made off of someone else’s suffering is disgusting. These news channels accept money from advertisers. When we watch the trial, glued to it, and the ratings go up – then so do the profits that these companies receive from advertisers. This seems wrong to me.
  5. The actual issues get trivialized by creating pop culture references. One need only think of the recent “I Googled chloroform” debacle or “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit” things…these make a mockery of the justice system, and I’m pretty sure that the people involved with the trials don’t have scripts like they do in made for tv movies. So yeah, some pretty goofy stuff is going to be said.

Please note, I’m not taking any sides here, I honestly haven’t been following the whole Casey Anthony thing at all – I just caught a glimpse of the trial on CNN the other day while checking my email in the morning. I just think that when this sort of sensationalism happens, then we miss the real point – not to point fingers or watch someone go down, but that what happened to a little girl is a very, very sad thing indeed.

Ronda Bowen

Ronda Bowen is a writer, editor, and independent scholar. She has a Master of Arts in Philosophy from Northern Illinois University and a B.A. in Philosophy, Pre-Graduate Option, Honors in the Major from California State University, Chico. When she is not working on client projects from her editorial consulting business, she is writing a novel. In her free time, she enjoys gourmet cooking, wine, martinis, copious amounts of coffee, reading, watching movies, sewing, crocheting, crafts, hanging out with her husband, and spending time with their teenage son and infant daughter.

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