bringing gottcha media down

A story broker once loosely tied to JonBenet's case, Larry Garrison, also once associated with the families of Little Caylee, Natalee Holloway and John Mark Karr, was the opening case study in a forum about media literacy yesterday. Sponsored by the IFC in Philadelphia, the question central to an expert panelist discussion was 'what does the public need to know about how TV covers crime?--

What makes news?
By David O'Reilly
215-854-5723
doreilly@phillynews.com

"It began with a brief film clip of Garrison, a public relations man hired by the family of Casey Anthony, a Florida woman charged with the murder of her baby daughter, Caylee.

In prerecorded remarks, Garrison explained that he was hired to "keep the [Caylee Anthony] story alive" by offering himself repeatedly to TV stations, and boasted of stirring the media into "feeding frenzy" over the tragedy of this appealing - and white - child.

But an abundance of crime stories can also provoke undue anxiety in viewers, portray a city as more violent than it really is, and perpetuate ethnic stereotypes....

...TV needs pictures to tell a story....Its dependence on images and the brevity of most reports make it hard for TV to report important stories with requisite complexity...If you only have a minute, you can't tell a story.

All media messages are constructed ... and these messages "convey values and a point of view" that "shape people's understanding of reality."

Garrison, not present at the forum, was recently profiled by the IFC Media Project, a series that focuses on revealing the truth behind the news:

"...It was shocking to learn that a self-aggrandizing character like this creates the news that we all read and believe. And that’s even without mentioning the greedy monetizing of a child’s tragedy, whether just by him or even worse, the family themselves. As Garrison admits though, in his mind, the story is really about him. “The most exciting part of this is I’ve become part of the story! I love what I do,” he says proudly"...."